Five Positive and Spiritual Lessons I Learned From My Divorce

 I have to say that having the wife of your youth tell you to leave and not to come back is a very hard thing to hear. I don't really think I fully understood the nursery rhyme Humpty Dumpty until that tragic day and the years that followed. But this article is about the positive things I learned.

Lesson one - I learned to love myself

I learned that a half a person and a half a person cannot combine and make two people, they only make what is called a co-dependent relationship. A person that feels that they are unworthy of love suddenly finding someone that loves them, is not good fortune. In many instances its simply a recipe for tragedy.

After my wife left me and the years that followed, I went through a process of healing and addressing the pain in my heart and came to a place where I learned to love myself. One way to find this love that God allowed was that I found out what I was good at. One day I wrote a poem and then it seemed good and I wrote another and then within a year I had hundreds and then within two years I had written a novel.

After a couple of novels and two movie screenplays I was confident that I was a gifted communicator and able to get my heart down on a page both in fiction and non fiction.

Lesson two - I learned to forgive

The years that passed after the marriage breakdown was hard for me as my former wife fought with me over custody and made it difficult to see my son on a few occasions. This culminated after a number of years when she told me that I could not see my son any more. She had recently re- married a lovely guy and they felt there was no need for me to be in my son's life any more

This hurt me very deeply as I loved my eight year old boy Brandyn. Today it's been seven years since I have seen my son and I miss him very much. I respect my former wife and her husband's decision and have not been in contact all this time.

This pain ate at me for a number of years and I came to a point where I simply had to let go of all the pain and forgive. I started a process of remembering all the bad things that my wife had done to me and asking God to help me forgive my wife. Through the years I have applied this process to other relationships I have had also.

Today I am happy to say I love my wife more today than I loved her at any time while we were married. Today I love myself and I pray quite regularly for her marriage, her own inner healing and for that family to be blessed.

Lesson three - I developed a better relationship with Jesus Christ

For those of you who are not of the Christian faith I don't mean to offend you, but I encourage you to read and I will try not to preach at you but simply continue sharing my story.

Up until the time my wife told me to leave, Jesus had always been important to me but he was always an optional extra in life and not my life's central focus or desire. When the love of my life left me, my best friend, I was lost at sea and I was `best spiritual awakening movies

 and there did seem to be nothing to live for.

It's as though Jesus came to me in that moment one day on a mountain top as the sun was setting and asked me to get serious with Him. I was so very sad, very suicidal and I had no other reason to live. Jesus encouraged me by speaking into my mind and gave me a purpose to do some research into Him and His life and get to know Him the best that I could.

Without a lady in my life, Jesus has been a whole lot more important to me than perhaps the average Christian guy and He has been very faithful to me, kind to me and gentle. He is a good teacher, He is patient with my sins and my faults and He gives me purpose and inspiration.

I cannot ever express fully enough the great service my wife did for me on that day by telling me to leave her. I cannot express how happy I am that she had the courage to give marriage a second go and close the door for me and her re-uniting as this pain has made my faith very strong.

Lesson four - I came to understand how Jesus feels about His church

In the Bible God speaks though human writers and compares Jesus' relationship with His church as a bride and a groom. Jesus was single on earth and never married so that He could in fact take the place of being the groom to all the people that placed their faith in Him and chose Him to run their life.

So many Christians live a life where Jesus has become an optional extra like He was in my life. It's as if they take other lovers and Jesus is left to weep and wish that they would simply have a more devoted relationship with Him. My wife left me for another man because I wasn't fulfilling her heart's desire well enough broke my heart and over the years I have come to have empathy with Jesus Christ where we relegate Him to second or third place in our life.