Quiet Lessons of Abandonment

Abandonment doesn’t just break your heart — it teaches you. It teaches you to stop needing, stop asking, and stop trusting even your own voice.

I learned that lesson the hard way.

My husband of sixteen years didn’t just leave — he planned it. While I was away, he moved out with our children, who were only 13 and 15 at the time. He emptied our bank account and left me with only the small amount of money that was in an account tied to my college loan and stipend — the only account with my name on it. I came home to an empty house, an empty marriage, and a reality I never saw coming. In what felt like one split second, I was stripped of everything associated with being a wife and a mother.

What followed felt like abandonment layered upon abandonment. I believed I had heard the Lord say my marriage would glorify Him. Scripture told me God hates divorce. The church reinforced that truth — but when I needed help, support, presence, there was silence. No one came. No one stayed. Somewhere in the collision between promise and loss, I concluded that God had abandoned me too. Or that I had misunderstood Him entirely.

Years later, while reading the Bible, a memory surfaced — not because the words described my life exactly, but because they carried the same weight. Sometimes Scripture doesn’t explain our story; it brings it into the light. It awakens what has been buried. It reveals what the Lord desires to cleanse, mend, and heal.

I began to understand that God had never turned away. He had been with me all along — quietly, patiently — like Jesus walking with the men on the road to Emmaus, present before He was recognized. Healing didn’t come all at once. It came slowly, through unexpected kindness, through people who showed up when I had stopped asking, through a growing awareness that I was not abandoned by Him.

I picture it now like a mother tending the wounds of her child — gently cleaning what is infected, touching what is tender, not rushing the process, but staying close until healing begins.

My prayer for you today is that the eyes of your heart would open — not to explanations, but to see the Father Himself — and that you would receive His love right where you are.

“The Lord is close to all whose hearts are crushed by pain, and he is always ready to restore the repentant one.”

— Psalm 34:18 (The Passion Translation)