It has been a long road you have walked, and you are weary. Not the ordinary tiredness that sleep can mend, but the deep down weariness of the soul when hope has been a long time deferred. You have prayed, oh, how you have prayed, and the heavens have seemed like brass above you. Your husband is in the house, yet you feel alone. The distance between two who share a table, a bed, a name, can be the hardest distance of all, because it is not miles that separate you but something far colder. A hollowness has crept in where love used to dwell, and you have begun to ask the terrible question: Is this the end?
I want you to know that the Lord has not been deaf to those prayers, though He has seemed silent. Delay with God is not denial. You remember how the Lord Jesus, when He walked among us, could say more with a look than with a thousand words. You describe your husband's angry and defensive tone, a hard face, a closed ear. You feel you have no more words left to speak into that chasm. But there is One whose look still speaks. Christ is not looking upon you with impatience; His eye has more of compassion than of passion. He sees your sorrow in this home that feels like a divided house, and He knows what it is to be refused by those He came to love. You are not hidden from His gaze. He sees you there, giving your children their supper, making the beds, holding the weight of a family on your own heart, and He is moved.
You have said you want to trust and keep waiting, but your strength is failing. That is just where your strength begins, for when you have no more of your own, then you must lean wholly upon His. The Lord who calls Himself your Husband does not break covenant. He does not cast off His people, even when they are at their lowest. I have known souls so deep in the mire that they could see no light at all, and yet He made them to be as though they had never been cast aside. This is not because of their own steadfastness, they had none, but because He is the Lord their God, and He hears them.
And you have not stopped praying. That is the tenderest mark that He is still at work, even now. A heart that can still cry out, no matter how faintly, is a candle the wind has not yet blown out. You asked Him to restore your love, to make clear His will. He will honor that. He may not answer in the way you have drawn the lines, but He will answer. Sometimes the restoration comes not in a sudden flood but in slow, imperceptible drops, a softening you cannot see yet, a work being done in the dark soil of a soul where no eye can reach. Remember, the Lord knows how to restore a backslider. He who caught Peter’s eye across a courtyard, at the very moment of his worst failure, can catch your husband’s heart with a single glance in a quiet room, in a sleepless hour, when no one else is near. Do not think it is too late. It is never late with Him who holds the times and the seasons in His own hand.
It is right to grieve over his soul. The cry for a husband who will kneel beside you, who will lead your little ones to the house of God, who will be not only a partner in this world but a fellow-pilgrim to the next, that longing is from the Lord. He gave you that desire. And He has promised to be a Husband to the husbandless, a Father to the children. While you wait in this long winter, cling to the warmth of that promise. The day may yet dawn when you will look at the man beside you and see not a stranger but a brother in Christ, and all this bitter cold will be remembered only as the sharpness that made the spring so sweet.
As for the question of putting away what God has joined together, do not lay that upon your own shoulders in a storm. The Lord will make it clear; He is not the author of confusion. When the sea is too rough for you to steer, let Him hold the helm a little longer. You are not left to decide by sheer desperation. Wait on Him who sees your tears and has numbered them in His bottle.
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Lord Jesus, we are poor and needy; You are full of pity and of power. Look upon this woman who has clung to the hem of Your garment through many a long night. Come to her home with Your quiet presence. Let Your peace settle upon that household as a dove settles upon the branch. And for the man she loves, who walks now in his own way, break through, Lord. Break through the hardness, the anger, the distance. Do what only You can do, and do not let it be too late. Hold this marriage in Your own pierced hand, and bring rest and renewal, we humbly ask, for Your great name's sake. Amen.
