I guess it's only apropos that someone writing prayers that heal divorce should find herself surrounded by people going through divorce. Last fall, it seemed all the men in my life divorced.

After ten years of tumultuous marriage, my handyman filed for divorce and all hell broke loose. His wife rammed his car, stole the title to his truck, trashed the house, changed the locks, and refused to sign the closing papers. One day I asked him how the divorce was going and he snapped, "I don't want to talk about it. I wasted ten years of my life with that woman! I will not say her name again!" Oh.

The gregarious Lebanese man at my local produce stand — a mecca for real tomatoes, unwaxed cucumbers, authentic pita bread, and sinful imported olives — glared at me when I asked after his wife. "I wasted my life with that woman, she is out! Out! Out of my life! She does not exist for me!" Oh.

A few days later, my computer guru said that he'd wasted almost forty years married to someone he couldn't make happy and he was filing for divorce.

I know this pattern: Hear it once, it's interesting; hear it twice, it's getting to be a theme; hear it three times, it's time to seek divine guidance about it in my sacred journal.

This word "wasted" resonated with me. I had said it a few hundred times myself. All the women I queried said they, too, had expressed this feeling. In fact many of them, when asked, blurted out with gusto, "I wasted my youth with that SOB!" People might use different colorful monikers, but everyone used the verb "wasted." I decided I needed to look up wasted.

Waste covers a lot of ground in the dictionary. It's a verb, a noun, and an adjective. It means: "a broad and empty expanse." Now that's an interesting idea: My life with my spouse was a broad and empty expanse. Well, yes, I could say that, and perhaps you could, too, but when I see that image in my mind, I see more than nothingness; I see potential. "A broad and empty expanse." Do you see that too? Open space? Lots of it? That certainly shifts the meaning of wasted. Perhaps what I wasted wasn't years but potential. Oh dear.

Wasted also means: "to damage or destroy gradually and progressively." Yep, that's what we wasters did. We gradually damaged and destroyed our joy and happiness staying in an unhappy relationship. But the problem with this definition is that the subject of the sentence is you and me. The waster is us. We did the wasting, not the other guy. Oh dear.

How about this meaning: "to cause to shrink in physical bulk or strength." Think about that. By making the choice to stay in unfulfilling relationships, we allowed ourselves to get smaller. I can definitely relate to that definition of waste. I let my personal power get weaker and weaker, as I gave in, over and over, to someone else's desires or tantrums. That image made me think of the odd saying related in each of the synoptic gospels:

"No one lights a lamp to cover it with a bowl or to put it under a bed. No, it is put on a lamp-stand so that people may see the light when they come in" (Luke 8:16).

I always wondered what Jesus was trying to say. It seemed so obvious — silly almost. Of course you don't put a lamp under a bowl or under the bed. But, with this definition of wasted, I began to understand this verse. It means that I put myself under the bed, under the bowl — under — where me, the real me, the whole me, couldn't be seen. I shut my own self down. I hid my own light. Oh dear.

What about you? Do you feel you have wasted the prime of your life in an unhappy or unfulfilling marriage or relationship? What are you going to do about this feeling? The anger and pain aren't going to disappear just because you don't speak your spouse's name. And, if you don't deal with the feelings, they will gnaw away at you for months, even years. Do you want to be one of those shriveled souls, who show up at family gatherings ten years after the divorce, still hissing, "I wasted twenty years with that man. I should never have married him. He ruined my life." Why, everyone in your family will be just dying to invite you to the next event, don't you think?

We've got to deal with this idea of wasting our lives. We've got to shift our thinking from frittering away our light to living in a broad and empty expanse. What idea will help you get your life back in the direction you want it to grow? Discuss the alternatives with God in your sacred journal or meditation time. Start with the dictionary and study every definition of "wasted." Then talk it over with the Creator. How, dear God, can I shift this feeling that I "wasted" my life? Help me, dear God, to reframe my thinking and get my light back out from under the bowl and into the room where everyone — especially myself — can see it.

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Janet Conner, S.E. (Spiritual Explorer), is an expert on the power of practical spirituality to heal your broken heart and transform your world. She is the cartographer of the map of spiritual healing and author of the seven travel guides in the Spiritual Geography series. In addition to divine dialogue, she welcomes human conversation at {email janetconner@tampabay.rr.com}janetconner@tampabay.rr.com{/email}. © copyright 2006 by Janet Conner

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