I was watching American Idol last night and .........

Last night my wife and I were watching American Idol. Kelly Clarkson finished the show with a raw performance of a song she wrote called " Piece by Piece." It left most people in the audience in tears. I recently watched a movie about the life of Amy Winehouse. She says in the movie that the thing that changed everything in her life and sent her down a path of destruction was her father walking out on them when she was nine years old. Kelly's song relates to the same thing only she was six.

Two years ago I walked past a neighbors house. They had two children, two beautiful girls aged seven and five. Their father was leaving and I could hear the girls wailing, not sure I will ever forget that. He had met a younger woman. I ran into the neighbor a few weeks later just sitting in her car at a trail near our house, sitting weeping in her car, broken. She allowed me to pray with her and we both wept before the throne. The damage of divorce is untold and it ripples through the fabric of our lives and society. Well does the Bible say that God hates divorce. The pain and the agony and the lives ruined by it are inestimable.

Listen fathers, dont you ever walk away from your children. You might not be the best father in the world or things might not be perfect in your world but dont you walk away. You might not have all that you want in this life but does that give you the right to take away from a child everything that they have? We have one life to live and we only have so much to give, give it and give it sacrificially. God will help you do it. Walk away and the leaves will simply fall from the tree and be scattered by the wind.

Kelly Clarkson's performance ..... https://youtu.be/9FHYBQxURQo

Hi MJ,

What a tremendous testimony the Lord has in your marriage sister,its a triumphant trophy to the power of God to hold lives and sustain lives that should never make it.

I have a very similar testimony. My own wives father left them when she was seven, sent them away to Scotland, her mother was Scottish and her father American. Right up until they got on the plane they thought he would come and get them, he never did. Her mother was a broken woman and turned to alcohol and other men. One violent bad boyfriend after another until she was knocked down a flight of steps by one of them and suffered an anurism. She survived in a terrible state for two years and then died. My wife thought that surely her father would come and rescue them, but no. She was only 13. We were pregnant at 16 and married just after our 17th birthdays and living in the Salvation Army's home for battered women.

No one gave our marriage any chance and circumstances only lessened those odds. We lost our first child, my drinking and drugs and other women should have been the nail in the coffin of our marriage but God had another plan. I found the Lord at the age of 26 and my wife and I just celebrated our 34th wedding anniversary on the 7th of Feb. So many times either of us could have walked away. Yet God preserved us and to Him be the glory for in our own flesh our marriage would have floundered very early on.

Her older and younger brothers have had many troubles in their lives, one is very successful and driven but cold, the other is an alcoholic. These are the undoubted results of the supreme act of selfishness and desire to gratify ones own desires. Our heavenly Father is of course the answer to every child, young or adult, who has been abandoned by their own Fathers. He is indeed a Father to the Fatherless. It is my Father God who has restored my own brokenness and rearranged hopelessly crossed wires that had been programmed for destruction. He has made beauty from the ashes of our lives. He has restored that which the locusts had devoured. He has brought healing to a crushed heart and He has set this captive free. The glorious Gospel that the Lord Jesus stood up an announced in the temple, He had come to heal the broken-hearted, praise God............bro Frank

Thank you for that, Frank.

That blessed me very much (your words).

I am glad that you were blessed Julias, it is a subject that touches so many lives.............bro Frank

Thank you so much for baring your heart, crusader. God truly loves us very much. He is the God of redemption and restoration. Standing with you for restoration of your marriage. If you get a chance, read some of these restored marriage testimonies. I hope you are encouraged by them.

https://www.rejoiceministries.org/resources/testimonies/restored-marriage-testimonies/

A Standers Affirmation
https://www.rejoiceministries.org/resources/standers-affirmation/

Thank you Karl for your open and honest testimony. Your story is a good cautionary tale that testifies to the real danger and consequences of following the flesh. King David himself suffered much for his own indulgence and of course so many others suffered too. His child died, his lovers husband murdered, God's testimony in David suffers and so on. Yet this broken and contrite heart was his saving grace and what the Lord loved about him. When he was confronted by the man of God about his wickedness, he did not hate or despise the messenger or held any kind of ongoing bitterness towards him, he simply repented and cries out that against the Lord alone he had sinned. David's focus was on his own sin and what he had done to the Lord and in that he finds complete restoration, praise God..............bro Frank