You read a lot about divorce and splitting up in the papers, see battles on the news, listen to stories from your friends and neighbors, but how often do you hear about restored marriages?
Go to a bookstore. You will find thousands of books about divorce (almost 50,000 on Amazon), moving on after divorce, coping with divorce, helping your kids cope with divorce, financial aspects of divorce, "Divorce for Dummies," even divorce kits! But try to find resources for reconciliaion! I once visited a large office of social workers and saw a poster listing more than thirty organizations offering support groups to single moms, divorced moms, transitional moms, and the like. At the time I remember wondering why there were no groups for dads listed. Re-examining the poster reveals that also missing are support groups for couples who want to reconcile. The message is clear.
You can probably recite the divorce rate for your state, county, or country: “One out of every two” rolls off the tongue even though there is very little truth to that statistic, but do you have any idea what a vast number of couples get back together?
The media glorifies divorce, devoting hour after hour to reporting about the separations and divorces of those who should be role models for us and our children, and column inch after column inch of reporting on divorce stories, but when was the last time you heard them mention a marriage being healed?
You would almost think that it doesn’t happen, and there are many who wish you to believe just that, to force you to give up hope, to make you accept as inevitable what even God says he hates: “I hate divorce,” says the LORD... (Malachi 2:16). The Bible tells us much about what God loves, but one of the few things that God makes it very clear that He hates is divorce!
These are the stories you won’t hear about on the news, or in the newspapers. These are the stories with happy endings. These are the stories of couples who reconciled after a divorce or separation. For every story here, there are thousands of other similar restored marriages, and even more waiting to happen.