Pulling yourself up by the bootstraps and fighting your way to a successful life after divorce is admirable but it can harden your heart. I trusted my head to make decisions and my heart was only used deeply for the love I have for my daughters. One evening, I finally agreed to go to dinner with a man who bugged my sister for a year to give him my number. All I knew about him was that he plays guitar and he’s a Christian. One of my sister’s friends refers to him as Jesus Tim to differentiate him from another Tim. During our meal, I felt a strong familiarity with this stranger even though our conversation revealed only a sliver of common ground on which to build a relationship of any kind, never mind a romantic one. His family is from Tennessee and mine from New York City. He is a Southern Baptist, I was an atheist raised in the Episcopal church tradition. I worked as an IT Project Manager; he was a machinist by trade. He and his son are third degree blackbelts, and I and my daughters are nerds from the school music wing. There was just something about Tim that drew me in.
We married on a Friday evening, in a hotel conference room surrounded by thirty friends and family. I agreed to attend church with him because I respected his faith, but I warned Tim not to try to “save me” because I didn’t need saving. He needed to respect my beliefs just as much as I respected his. After our first marriage counseling session with Pastor Harold, I was kept “after school” for an additional 45 minute one-on-one session while Tim was free to attend praise team practice. Pastor, who I nicknamed “Scary Harry”, was polite when I told him that I didn’t believe in God or the Bible, nor did I believe that Jesus was the Son of God. He squinted his eyes in thought, sizing me up, and looking for the best approach to reach my lost soul. “You like books, don’t you?” Books, books, YES, I loved books; finally, a comfortable subject on which to float down the rapids and navigate our awkward exchange.
With my assigned reading in hand, I peeled out of the parking lot and made a B-line for the convenience store to buy a pack of cigarettes despite having given up that nasty habit long ago. Not wanting to stink up my minivan mom-mobile, I paced back and forth in the cold night, analyzing and decompressing from the civilized intellectual boxing match. “Who does he think he is? I am an intelligent successful woman!” I declared shaking my cigarette fist into the black sky being careful not to get my fox cuffed full length wool coat singed. How did I get myself into this situation? How much do I love Tim to continue to put myself through this? The steam from my hot breath mixed with the smoke from my lungs. I looked out into the black sky again, squinting my eyes in thought, sizing up Tim’s God, and I laid down the gauntlet. “Alright God, if you are out there, I am going to give you one last chance to make yourself known to me!” and with that, I threw out the rest of my Marlboro lights, and drove away with great determination and anger for having to rethink my convictions about science being the only knowable, concrete truth.
