Last week - as we studied the middle section of Mark’s Gospel at our end-of-the-year summer confernce for CSULA - I taught the section in Mark 10:1-16 about divorce. In preping the passage, I did some research about divorce in the U.S. (see below).

But one stat hit closer to home than the rest - the 75-85% of parents of special needs children that divorce - took on a whole new dimension while at Catalina with my students.

(Don’t worry, this isn’t an awkward backdoor way to announce anything about my marriage. Nothing has changed for Veronica & I in terms of our marriage. We’re still married, in love and intent on nurturing that.)

But at Catalina, there was also a camp of junior-high students with the Long Beach Marine Institute’s Science Camp were there - including a 15 year old boy in a wheelchair. I noticed that he had signs of cerebral palsy - plastic ankle braces, midly twisted arms and hands, some facial distortion - so I politely started a conversation with his father, mentioning Isabel and our process with her.

Quickly, he opened up about the challenges that cerebral palsy had meant for his son. This included 13 surgeries - the most recent being a spinal fusion, not potty-training until age 10, a shunt for hydrocephalus, a stomach tube for eating that he’d had until he was 11 or 12 - all stemming from the boy being the surviving twin from a grossly premature birth.

But it was the father’s story that was more sad. He spoke bitterly of how his marriage of 25 year was “totally destroyed because of “this,” how “this” had destroyed his business, destroyed him financially, etc, etc. (Sadly, he spoke quite freely in his son’s hearing).

Leaving my conversation with this father, I was even more sober to the weight of the statistics. Not hopeless, nor discouraged, but not very inspired either. Even as we studied the section from Mark later in the week, sobriety was more the my posture. Later, though, as I reflected on my conversation with this father and on the text from Mark, realized it is not a right sobriety about avoiding divorce that keeps a marriage going, but rather it is the picture of marriage that Jesus lays out that offers hope and inspiration:

“From the beginning of creation, ‘God made them male and female.’ 7′Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, 8 and they shall become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two but one flesh. 9 What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.”

Now that is good news - of two unique individuals (and the great and the ugly that we all are) being joined together in unity. Even before we discovered Isa’s brain injury and the subsequent diagnosis, Veronica and I have had a phrase that we remind each other of when things aren’t working out how we’d planned, desired, or ever thought: “As long as we are together…” things will work out. In simple terms, I think that is the hope from Jesus - to Vero & I, to other’s married with special needs children, to any marriages, to the unmarried - for marriage. Just plain good news.
Some of the “bad news” stats that stood out to me:

• Since 1960, the proportion of children who do not live with their own two parents has risen sharply—from 19.4% to 42.3% in the 1990’s. This change has been caused, first, by large increases in divorce, and more recently, by a big jump in single mothers and cohabiting couples who have children but don’t marry.

• The number of divorced people in the population more than quadrupled from 4.3 million in 1970 to 18.3 million in 1996, according to the Census Bureau.

• There is a higher risk of divorce – 40% to 85% – between couples cohabiting before marriage than couples waiting until after marriage to share a home together.

• The divorce rate among born-again Christians (27%) is actually higher than the rate for non-Christians (23%). Asked if the people had been divorced before or after they became Christians, 87% said “after.”

All very humbling (especially the last one.)

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