It is what it is.
I hear this phrase often from divorced people. On the surface, this little phrase indicates that a person is "over" his or her divorce, that he or she has accepted it and is ready to move on. It's often said with a shrug, as if the end of a marriage were really no big deal.
It is what it is.
But I beg to differ. The death of a marriage is a very big deal. It is the ripping apart of something God joined together (Mark 10:9). It is the desecration of a sacred portrayal of the relationship between Christ and the Church (Ephesians 5:32). It is something that God hates and an act of violence (Malachi 2:16) and usually involves other sins that contributed to the divorce.
It is what it is.
What it is does not deserve to be accepted with a shrug and a trite phrase. Divorce should be mourned for the death, for the tearing apart, for the desecration that it is. It should be mourned because it is the choice of a man and/or woman to willingly, knowingly choose to do something that God, who is love, hates. Divorce should be mourned as any act of violence is mourned, with compassion for the victims, who are often innocent children left to suffer the sins of their fathers and mothers. It should be mourned because sin has piled on sin and more sin on top of that, until the marriage was crushed beneath the weight of it and destroyed.
It is what it is.
How often do we as divorced people stop to think about what it is? How much time do we take to mourn, to allow God to break our hearts over our divorces? How often do we reject the world's attitude that a divorce is some sort of liberation and should be celebrated? I am not suggesting that we should wallow in our circumstances. But I am suggesting this: we should not casually brush off the death of our marriages with a trite phrase. When we do so, I question whether this really indicates that we are over it. I suspect that sometimes it means that we just don't want to deal with it anymore.
It is what it is.
Once we have considered carefully what it is, have recognized it for the tragedy that it is, then and only then are we ready to move on. And somehow, after accepting it for what it is, I wonder if we will be so quick to shrug and say
It is what it is.
