By Olivia Paul
This is my second divorce.
This December will mark one year, and I am still learning how to say that out loud without feeling like I need to explain everything that came before it or everything that happened after. Two marriages, with a child born out of wedlock in between. It is not the path I imagined for myself, and there are parts of it I am still learning how to accept.
But God kept being graceful.
If you are my coworker, my pastor, my friend, or my family and you did not know, you may need a moment to process that. I understand. I have needed many moments myself. I know the silence that sometimes comes after telling someone you have been divorced twice, and I have learned that it is not always a cruel silence. Sometimes it comes from people who genuinely love you and simply do not know what to say. But when you already carry shame about your own story, even an innocent silence can become much louder in your head.
In Haiti, where I come from, you do not always say these things out loud. You carry them. You fold them up small, put them somewhere deep inside, and keep moving because the community is watching, the church is watching, and somewhere in your mind, God is watching too.
Two divorces can start to feel like more than something that happened to you. They can start to feel like something that says who you are. You failed once, and then you failed again. Maybe something is wrong with you. Maybe you just cannot keep a man.
Someone actually said that to me once.
I wish I could say those words did not affect me, but they did, partly because shame has a way of taking someone else’s words and turning them into questions you begin asking yourself.
There was another comment that stayed with me too. I have a master’s degree in conflict transformation, and when I once told someone what I had studied, he questioned what it meant if I could not transform the conflict in my own relationship.
I do not think he knew what that question would touch in me because, in some ways, I was already asking myself the same thing. What did it say about me that I had spent years studying conflict and reconciliation, yet my own marriage still ended? How could I talk about conflict transformation when my own life did not seem to reflect what I knew?
For months, I was ashamed to talk about my master’s degree. Something I had worked hard for and had once been proud to accomplish became another place where I felt exposed. I imagined people asking the question before they ever did: If you know so much about conflict, why couldn’t you transform your own?
Eventually, that question became bigger than my education. If I understood love, why couldn’t I make love work? If I believed in forgiveness, had I not forgiven enough? If I believed in reconciliation, why couldn’t I reconcile this? And if I believed that God could restore broken things, what did it say about my faith that my marriage still ended?
For a long time, I think I misunderstood something about love. I believed love meant holding on, trying harder, giving more, forgiving, praying, having difficult conversations, and doing everything you could to keep what mattered to you together.
I still believe love can mean all of those things. There are times when love asks us to stay, to fight for one another, to be patient, to forgive, and to try again. What I am learning is that love does not mean only those things, and perhaps it cannot always be measured by how long we are willing to hold on.
There are parts of my marriage and divorce that I will not tell because they do not belong only to me. There are people I love whose stories are connected to mine, and I want to be careful with what I share. What I can tell you is what happened inside me.
I had to face the reality that sometimes every choice in front of you hurts. Sometimes there is no decision that feels good or looks the way you once thought love was supposed to look. Sometimes you can love people deeply and still find yourself having to make a choice you never imagined you would have to make.
That was difficult for me to accept because, for a long time, I wondered whether choosing differently meant I had not loved enough. Maybe I should have tried one more time. Maybe I should have prayed more or held on longer. Maybe if my faith had been stronger, the ending would have been different.
I had prayed. I had tried. I had loved. I had also made a choice I never imagined I would have to make, and I did not know how to hold all of those truths at the same time.
The first time my marriage ended, I grieved a man. The second time, I grieved myself. I grieved the woman I thought I had finally become, the faith I thought had made me stronger, and the life I thought I had finally learned how to build.
Somewhere in that grief, something changed in the way I approached God.
I could not pray the way I used to. It was not because I had stopped believing in God; I still believed. I knew what I had been taught about His grace, His mercy, His forgiveness, and His love. I just did not know how to come to Him anymore.
I had prayed about my life and my marriage. I had believed that I was stronger and wiser than I had been the first time around, and yet I found myself in a place I never imagined I would see twice. There were days when I tried to pray and could not find the words, and other days when I wondered whether the few words I managed to say reached the ceiling.
I felt ashamed before people, but if I am truthful, I also felt ashamed before God. I did not stop believing in Him; I became ashamed to come before Him.
Somewhere in all of that, I started to believe that maybe I had divorced God too.
Not literally. I knew God was still God. I knew the things I had been taught about Him, but there is a difference between knowing something about God and being able to believe it for yourself when you are sitting in the middle of something you wish were not part of your story.
I think I had come to believe that God belonged to the version of me who had it together: the woman who had learned from her mistakes, whose testimony made sense, who could stand in church without wondering what people knew about her, and who could talk about faith, love, conflict, and reconciliation without wondering whether someone was looking at her life and thinking, But what about you?
I knew what to do with that woman. I did not know what to do with the woman who had been divorced twice, who had studied conflict transformation but could not transform the ending of her own marriage, who believed in restoration but was still getting divorced, and who loved God but sometimes could not bring herself to pray.
For a while, I wondered whether God knew what to do with her either.
It has taken me time to realize how much I was putting words in God’s mouth. I was taking the silence of people and assuming God was silent too. I was taking my disappointment in myself and calling it His disappointment. I was looking at the number of times I had failed and assuming He must be doing the same.
But God does not do that math.
He is not the God of my marriages. He is the God of me.
His relationship with me did not begin when I got married, and it did not end when my marriage did. That covenant was written before I ever said “I do.” It has no court date, and it does not expire because a marriage did. It does not require me to have gotten everything right.
I am still learning what that means.
Every time I share my story, I cry, but afterward I usually feel a little lighter. Maybe sharing is one way of putting down a weight I did not realize I was still carrying. I also know that vulnerability does not always receive kindness, and I have experienced what it feels like to share something tender and have someone use it against you.
When I started Wrecked Not Forsaken, some people questioned why I was sharing so much. Someone told me, Ou bay BonDye ti rès la. Ou kouri pale pou moun ka gen pitye pou ou.
You are giving God your leftovers. You are talking about your pain so people will feel sorry for you.
I sat with those words longer than I should have, maybe because they touched something I had already wondered about myself. Maybe I should be quieter. Maybe I should wait until everything looks better before I talk about it. Maybe testimony is supposed to come after the story has been cleaned up, when you can look back and explain exactly what God was doing.
But that is not where I am. I am still living this, and I am not writing as someone who has figured everything out. Sometimes I am writing because I need to hear these words myself.
I need to remember that the silence of people is not the silence of God, and that when I cannot pray, God has not disappeared. When I am ashamed of my story, that does not mean He is ashamed of me. When I struggle to recognize myself, He has not forgotten who I am.
For a long time, I thought I needed to find my way back to God. I thought I had divorced Him because I could no longer approach Him the way I used to, and I mistook the distance I felt for distance He had created.
Maybe what I am learning is that God was never the one who moved.
I am still finding God in this version of my life, and I am still learning how to come to Him as this version of myself: a woman who has been divorced twice, who does not have a neat explanation for everything, who still believes in love even though she understands it differently now, and who still believes in reconciliation without believing that every relationship must end in reconciliation for love, prayer, or effort to have been real.
Maybe you have something in your story that does that to you too. Something you do not like saying out loud because you are afraid it will change how people see you. Something that has made you question what you thought you knew, or made you wonder whether the person you have become is still someone God wants.
I cannot tell you that I have all the answers because I don’t. What I can tell you is that I am beginning to understand that the silence of people is not the silence of God, and the shame I carried was never His voice.
For a long time, I thought I divorced God.
I am beginning to understand that He never left.