Her eyes were desperate and so was her voice when she looked at me and said, "But God has a plan, right? I need you to tell me that God has a plan," and stood there and waited for an answer. I’m friends with her husband and, by extension, with her; had been in their wedding back in April, and here she was standing there telling me that the marriage was over. They’d quarreled and she’d kicked him out and he’d gone and then things had gotten ugly. She’d filed for divorce. They were done. And the tone with which she described it all to me was devoid of emotion and passion in a way that could almost only mean that it really was finally over. There was no anger, no malice, no desire for vengeance. Only weariness and resignation.
Truth to tell, we’d all been skeptical regarding their chances for success when they married. They had a long and violent history of fights and breaking and making up and I don’t think anyone but the two of them was convinced that marrying was a solution, but there we were, just this spring, in a beautiful church building, dressed very nicely, fighting the urge to take bets on how long it would last, and reminding one another that love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
Bears...believes...hopes...
endures. And because I love them, I wanted to believe on that beautiful April afternoon that they’d be okay. That they’d make it. That they’d bear and believe and hope and endure – that they’d love. That the deep pain we’d seen them inflict on each other over and over for so long – that indeed we’d felt with them to a greater degree than you’d expect – would all be over. Would be past. Would somehow be washed away in the making of vows and the exchanging of rings. In the lighting of a candle.
I wanted to believe that the way I wanted to be able to tell her, these four months later, that God had some kind of plan for her life. That all of this was a part of Something and that it’d all work itself out. That God was Doing something with purpose in all of this mess. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t because I’m not at all convinced that it works that way. Maybe God has a plan for each of us and maybe he doesn’t. Maybe he has a plan for some of us and not for others. I don’t know. Maybe it’s all one Big Plan and we’re too individualistic about the whole thing. Or maybe some of us just knot ourselves into little balls of selfishness and meanness and can’t conceive that the Big Plan looks a lot more like bearing and believing and hoping and enduring than anything else.
But it wasn’t the time to tell her that either, standing there last week. For one thing, that’s a long conversation that she’s got no foundation for and a retail home improvement chain while one of us is on the clock isn’t the place. But for another thing, it would have crushed her to hear it. I’ve never seen such desperation before. This was clearly all she was hanging on to – "I need you to tell me that God has a plan" – and while I did have time to rip it from her, I didn’t have time to replace it with anything, so I said the only thing I could come up with.
"I hope so."
