hope for the broken home

I am a gardener, after my mother’s example.

I remember the simple script, hung by a nail next to the sugar canister: “Bloom where you are planted” -  a red geranium sketched in the bottom left corner. It hung in the five-bedroom house, the one with the father who went to work and the mother who made a home and the children who arrived to her greeting after school. It hung also in the two-bedroom house, the one with the mother who went to work and the children whose keys unlocked a silent kitchen and the father who came on Saturdays.

Both houses were mine. When I was nine years old, my parents’ divorce was final, and our family, like so many others, was left to make sense of the aftermath.

The conference ends and a woman approaches me at the podium. She is on the verge of tears.  She has approached me before – no, not her, but ten others with the same question brimming in the corners of their eyes. I have spoken for almost an hour, but she remembers one passing detail: “You come from a broken home. Thank you for saying it.”

“Broken home” - the term is hers, not mine. A single mother, worried that her children will be consumed by the devastation of her failed marriage, that their trajectory is faithlessness, bitterness and sorrow. She sees me and wants to know: how did you bloom?

What formula I can offer? The fracturing of a marriage can look many ways. There are no hard and fast rules for how to cobble together hope. I can only tell my story, one shaped by three gifts my parents gave.

The first, of course, was a great deal of prayer. On my behalf, across many years.

The second was a great deal of selflessness on the part of both of my parents, and my stepmother as well. All three of my parents gave me permission to love and cherish all three of my parents. They treated one another with mutual respect, both in their words and actions. I was not asked to choose one parent over another. When a marriage fails, the resulting web of relationships is not always made up of honorable people. By the grace of God, mine was. I knew they had deep hurt toward each other, that thirty five years later they still do. But I knew they placed my relationship needs above their own hurt.

The third gift, astonishingly, was a high view of marriage. Who would believe it? But no one in my family would say that divorce is a simple solution to a difficult marriage. It never gets easy, never stops aching, never slips completely into past-tense. It is a measure of absolute last resort. Rather than teach me to hold my marriage lightly, my parents taught me to hold it in high regard, to enter into it with care, to guard it with determination.

An incomplete account, of limited help, but my story nonetheless. I feel deep gratitude toward my parents, somehow able to recognize that just because their marriage was a failure didn’t mean that their divorce had to be. Finding their family planted in rocky soil, they determined, as far as it was possible with them, to help us bloom.

I have been blessed with three devoted parents, but I believe - and have witnessed - that even one devoted parent can foster blooms in the desert. Do I come from a broken home? I do. And so do all of us, I suppose. I have known more love and respect, more kindness, more selfless pursuit of relationship in my “broken home” than many know in their traditional families. Take heart in this, mother in the aftermath – a failed marriage does not doom you to a failed family. No malediction guides your course. Surely the grace of God is for homes both broken and intact. Surely, if any of us blooms, we do so by that grace alone.

I am a gardener, after my mother’s example. And my step-mother’s as well, truth be told. I carry a sentimental attachment to a particular flower, tracing back to my childhood, to a sign on a nail next to a canister of sugar. My yard spills over with geraniums. The Victorians assigned a meaning to that blossom - though other flowers symbolize peace or healing, the geranium symbolizes folly.

A fitting emblem for this child of divorce, this child of God. For it is folly to believe that something whole can come from something broken. Yet God chooses what is foolish in this world to shame the wise. He chooses the weak, the low, the despised. He chooses the broken. And these, against all logic, he redeems. Mother of a “broken home”, lift up your eyes. Find hope in the folly of the gospel - it is for you. Ask the Father to give all that is needful, all that is good.

I pray hope and wholeness bud beneath His care. I pray you and those you cherish bloom.

the church needs men and women to be friends

Recently a friend started a discussion thread by asking the question, “Can men and women be friends?” She was asking, essentially, if sexual attraction is a deal-breaker when it comes to male-female friendships. Immediately the thread filled with horror stories about male-female relationships that started as friendships and ended as train wrecks.

I know these stories as well. I’ve had a front row seat to several of them - in the workplace, in the neighborhood, in churches - so I’m not insensitive to the cautionary tale they have to tell. They remind me, though, of the labor-and-delivery stories I heard when I was pregnant with my first child. As soon as the bump became visible, women began freely volunteering their uterovaginal horror stories, everyone from friends to total strangers in the grocery store. I’m sure these stories were true, but do you know what stories I never heard? The positive ones. My perception of the risk became skewed by my fear. Four positive delivery experiences later I viewed those stories differently.

red flags and risk

Part of the problem with asking the question, “Can men and women be friends?” is nailing down which men and which women (married? single?) and what kind of friendship is in view. The question often leads us to assume intimate friendship is what is being suggested – hanging out alone together, sharing your deepest hopes and fears. And no, that’s not a good idea. If you’re single it leads to a lot of weirdness about where the relationship is headed, and if you’re married, you should reserve intimate friendship for your spouse. But we need not rule out male-female friendship built on mutual respect and affinity, cultivated within appropriate boundaries. If we do, we set a course charted by fear rather than by trust.

Sexual attraction is a valid red flag to raise when we consider male-female friendships, and it should never be dismissed lightly. But it does not justify declaring all such friendships impossible. All relationships involve risk of hurt, loss or sin, but we still enter into them because we believe what will be gained is greater than what we might risk. 

Marriage is risky – your spouse might prove unfaithful or cruel.

Parenthood is risky – your child might grow up to hate you or harm others.

Same-gender friendship is risky – your friend might betray you or let you down.

Work relationships are risky – your subordinate might embezzle from the company.

Business relationships are risky – your auto mechanic might overcharge you.

Church relationships are risky – your pastor might turn out to be an abuser, or just a jerk.

Yet we still enter into these relationships. We do not remove them wholesale from the list of possibilities because they involve risk. We enter in because we believe the rewards of the relationship outweigh the risk. We decide to go with trust instead of fear.

serving side by side

Like labor and delivery stories, the lust and infidelity stories of men and women who crossed a friendship boundary play and replay in our consciousness. But we seldom hear repeated the stories of male-female friendships that worked. I don’t think that’s because they don’t exist. In the church, even telling someone that you have a friend of the other gender can raise eyebrows. We have grown positively phobic about friendship between men and women, and this is bad for the church. It implies that we can only see each other as potential sex partners rather than as people. But the consequences of this phobic thinking are the most tragic part: When we fear each other we will avoid interacting with one another. Discussions that desperately need the perspectives of both men and women cease to occur. (Hint: most discussions desperately need the perspectives of both men and women, particularly in the church.)

Yet almost no one in the church is bold enough to say these friendships matter. We fear the age-old problem of "If I say X, will I unintentionally encourage Y?" So in the church we rarely tell divorced parents that they can still be good parents because we're afraid we'll encourage divorce. We rarely tell young people that loss of sexual purity is something that can be overcome because we're afraid we'll encourage promiscuity. We rarely tell moms who work outside the home we value them because we're afraid we’ll communicate we don’t value the home. And so on. We are so concerned that people will misunderstand what we mean by “appropriate male-female friendships” that we do not speak of them at all.  Just as divorced parents and young people and working moms pay a price for our fearful silence, there is a price for our fearful silence on male-female friendships as well: The church is robbed of the beauty of men and women serving side by side as they were intended.

not can but must

What bothers me most about the question, “Can men and women be friends?” is that even if I answer it in the affirmative I have not done justice to the issue. Yes, they can be friends, but more than that, they must be friends. Appropriate forms of friendship – those in which we see each other as people rather than potential sex partners – must exist between men and women, especially in the church. How else can we truly refer to each other as brothers and sisters in Christ? Jesus extended deep, personal friendship to both men and women. We are not him, so following his example requires wisdom and discernment about our own propensity to sin as well as that of others. But his example is worth following, brothers and sisters, even if it involves risk.

"For whoever does the will of God, he is my brother and sister and mother." - Mark 3:35