What about your divorce(s)?

In my estimation, there are two compound questions here.

One, am I biblically divorced and free to remarry…and does anything here disqualify me from ministry? Two, is the person I marry biblically divorced and free to remarry?

To be fair, I’m shortening this a bit. I’ll blend both the story and the theology.

My first wife and I were not Christian when we married. On the contrary, I was a long-haired, pot-smoking musician who married someone with whom I had a one-night stand (and less than two months later, an abortion). Along the way (after she had an affair with the guy who was the best man at my wedding), I gave my life to Christ. 20 years and three children later, she decided she was done.

I was quite imperfect, of course. Along the way I processed all of this — pre-divorce (and there’s more to the story, during the divorce, and after the divorce — with a dear friend who’s also one of the references you’ll meet. At the time he was the head elder at a large Baptist church where we lived…and he was my accountability partner of many years. In other words, he knew — and still knows — the deepest levels of my failures and abilities.

In all of this, I realized that my temptation would be to self-justify and eisegete. So together we worked through — over months and years — whether or not I was a) biblically divorced and able to remarry and b) disqualified from ministry.

While I’ll happily share, I’ll spare you the theological argumentation. The “moment” came, tearfully, at a Denny’s breakfast a couple years later when he looked me in the eye and said, “You are not disqualified, you were abandoned.”

Fast forward many years.

Dating as a 50-something Christian is quite different. But the short version includes a way I learned to begin dates: to figure out if she’s biblically divorced and able to be remarried.

Along the way I meet, query, and marry, Kristine Szabo.

Besides early questions determining whether or not she was biblically divorced and in the clear to remarry, I asked another key question:

Are you willing to go wherever the Lord calls us?

I trust you can imagine how rare it is for a mid-;ive someone to say, “Yes, anywhere.”

She, even more than me, is a world traveler. In other words, she understands what it means to not be in the Pacific Northwest that we’ve both long called home.

But the heart of the issue is the issue of the heart. She, like I, will go to serve who and where the Lord calls us to serve.