The Hurting Among Us — A Call to Gospel Intimacy

Since the beginning of my journey through marital separation and eventual divorce I‘ve taken up the hobby of nighttime and landscape photography, and so while at a recent men’s retreat I took the opportunity to take some photos of the lake with the lights of the campground dancing on its surface. I’ve found a lot of hidden value and joy in capturing things we don’t often take the time to see with our own eyes. There’s a patience needed, not only to find the right composition and lighting, but there is often literally long spaces of time that you must allow for in order to let enough light into the camera to expose the detail that you want to capture, and multiple exposures on top of that.

I had spent about two hours taking multiple long-exposure photos, and while it was late, I noticed there were still people in the lunch hall, so as not to disturb the men from my church who I was staying with, I decided to set up my laptop and camera in the lunch hall to go ahead and edit my photos before I turned in for the evening. I was just about finished editing when I couldn’t help but overhear a conversation that was happening just a room over. A gentleman, who’s name I later came to know as Marcel, was speaking with some of the other young men from his church. He, like myself, had gone through a difficult divorce, only he was a couple of years removed from it and had begun solidifying his life beyond the end of his marriage.

Now, forgive me — it’s not that I often try to magpie or eavesdrop on private conversations, but I cued in on the word divorce and for some reason I was locked in and I couldn’t help but hear this man tell his story. I will spare the details because that’s private and frankly doesn’t matter, because what struck me wasn’t the circumstances of his divorce, but rather, the nature of the response from these men who were supposed to be his church family. I’ll never forget those words:

“I didn’t even know you were divorced.”

“You guys seemed fine, so I just assumed everything was okay.”

I was furious. Not necessarily at the men for making the assumption that their brother in Christ was okay, but rather for the culture of Church we have in America where we don’t even know each other well enough to know what’s going on — that somehow something as damaging and traumatic as divorce could slip through our community’s fingers, and that we could fail to love someone deep enough to be able to even make the assumption that “everything was okay.”

In that moment, not only did I feel a deep pity for Marcel, but I also felt a brotherhood with him. We had both gone through one of the deepest hurts in our lives, and we were both experiencing an extremely uncomfortable truth — that the Church, not any church in particular, but the Church catholic, does not know how to love divorced people. And it isn’t even just divorce or martial issues — it’s everything, and that isn’t because the Church doesn’t know how to love, but because our culture doesn’t foster a place for intimate brokenness and healing between honest and vulnerable human beings. I’m just going to name it: We don’t do intimacy or intentionality well.

One of the greatest gifts of that retreat was the three or four hours that Marcel and I got to spend with each other, uncovering our common pain and obstacles, and sharing with each other the love of Jesus that had been sustaining us both into the unknown future that is being a divorced Christian man. In that time I found a kinship with a man whom I otherwise would never have known, and now I care deeply for his heart and his continual progress toward healing and intimacy with the Lord.

Here’s the raw, honest, unbridled truth: If we don’t enter into the hurt of our own gospel community, if we’re not intentionally seeking out our brothers and sisters often to know them, to pray for them, to love them, then we are failing. If we aren’t, we have to ask — are we really disciple of Jesus?

Jesus said to the twelve, “They will know you are my disciples by the love you have for one another.” Love is costly. It’s often back breaking. It often hurts. It’s often raw and uncomfortable. Love cuts through the bullshit and immerses itself in the pain of others. We have to create space for vulnerability and honesty within our churches — because in that is healing; in that is a real, tangible encountering with the crucified Son of God as we bear the burdens of our family.

How are we going to begin to live this out in our communities? How are we going to stop letting the hurting among us to slip between our fingers? We have to, or the Church exists for nothing.

I love you guys. Thank you for reading.