Considering Separation

When you reach the point of considering separation, you've already been months, maybe years, in the desert. The fight is no longer an event; it's a climate. Hope has grown tired. Words have worn out their effect. The option of divorce starts to present itself not as tragedy but as relief.

And at that exact point, God speaks through Malachi with an intensity that rarely appears in Scripture: 'I hate divorce' (in older translations) or 'the man who hates and divorces does violence' (in NIV's rendering). It is the same word He uses for idolatry (Jeremiah 44:4), for oppression of the orphan (Isaiah 1:14-17), for shedding of blood (Proverbs 6:17). God places divorce in the list of things that destroy the moral order of the universe He made.

This is not divine indifference to marital suffering. God knows perfectly what happens between walls—He sees the cruel words, the punishing silences, the months without tenderness, the wounded children. What He hates is not that you suffer; He hates that the proposed solution is to break what He joined. There are other exits. There is mutual repentance. There is restoration. There is miracle. But those paths require something you no longer want to offer: total humiliation.

Phase 1 of this 40-day plan is biblically about fasting and prayer. Not yet the conversation with your spouse. The conversation with God. Because when a heart reaches this point, it no longer hears human arguments. It needs to be broken by God Himself. 'A broken and contrite heart, God will not despise' (Psalm 51:17).

Biblical fasting is not hunger strike nor spiritual diet. It is voluntarily giving up something needed in order to gain focus and dependency. It can be food, social media, distractions. The important thing is that every time the body asks for that something, the spirit redirects the desire to God: 'You are my food. You are my joy. You are my first spouse.'

Ten days of fasting and intense prayer will change something. I don't promise what. Maybe your heart. Maybe your spouse's. Maybe the circumstances. But something moves in the spiritual realm when a spouse humbles themselves like this. 'Come near to God, and He will come near to you. Humble yourselves before the Lord, and He will lift you up' (James 4:8-10).