What the Annulment Taught Me About Grace That No Sermon Ever Did

Based on Romans 8:28 — “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.”

I did not see it coming.

Not the notice. Not the court date. Not the clean, legal finality of a marriage I had believed was God-ordained being dissolved in a document I signed alone.

My first wife and I had grown in opposite directions. She was running hard after wealth and business success. I was running hard after God and the church. The friction between those two trajectories had been grinding for years before it finally snapped.

When she left, I was devastated. When the annulment papers arrived, I was numb. And in the silence that followed—the kind of silence you can only find at the bottom of something—I started asking the question that every person in pain eventually asks:

God, where are You in this?

Romans 8:28 is one of those verses that gets quoted so frequently it almost loses its edges. We say it at funerals. We stitch it on pillows. We post it under sunsets on social media. In doing so, we’ve domesticated one of the most audacious claims in all of Scripture: that God is actively, purposefully, sovereignly working all things together for good.

Not some things. Not the pleasant things. Not the things that make sense from where you’re standing.

All things.

Including the court document. Including the empty side of the bed. Including the shame you carry into the next Sunday service when everyone knows your marriage fell apart.

But I want to be honest: that verse did not comfort me immediately. For a season, it made things worse. Because if God was working all things together for good, why did this happen? And what kind of good could possibly come from this particular wreckage?

Not a Promise About Outcomes

What I’ve learned since is that Romans 8:28 is not primarily a promise about outcomes. It is a promise about God’s nature.

It doesn’t say all things are good. It says God works them together for good. The operative word is works—in Greek, synergei, the root of our word synergy. God is perpetually, actively, collaboratively working—taking the broken pieces of your story and weaving them into something that serves His purpose and your formation.

The promise is not that pain won’t hurt. The promise is that pain won’t be wasted.

Graham Cooke writes, “God never wastes a wound. Every place of pain in your life is a place where He intends to make you more like Jesus—more compassionate, more humble, more dependent on grace than you would have been if things had gone smoothly” (A Divine Confrontation, p. 91).

I have tested that claim against my own story. It holds.

When Competence Collides with Collapse

The annulment did something to me that years of church leadership had not managed to do.

It broke open my self-sufficiency.

Up to that point, I was—without fully realizing it—a man who handled his spiritual life with considerable competence. I studied well. I led well. I taught well. I had frameworks and tools and theological categories for almost everything. I was, in the language of ministry, together.

And then I wasn’t.

In the not-togetherness—in the rawness and grief and disorientation of having my life dismantled—I encountered a grace I had preached about but never actually needed in that way before. The grace that doesn’t wait for you to clean yourself up. The grace that meets you in the court parking lot with tears on your face and no theological explanation in your pocket.

Bob Hamp writes, “The greatest breakthroughs in transformation often come not when we are strong and competent but when we are weak and undone—because it is in those moments that we finally stop trusting our own resources and start trusting His” (Think Differently, Live Differently, p. 167).

The annulment was one of those moments. And I am a different man because of it.

When Wounds Carry Messages

John Eldredge talks about the way God uses the “arrows”—the wounds life fires at us—to expose the false agreements we’ve made about ourselves and about Him.

An arrow is not just an event. It’s a wound that carries a message—a lie about your identity that lodges deep and shapes your behavior from the inside out. Lies like: I am not enough. I am too much. I am fundamentally flawed. Love is conditional and temporary.

The annulment fired several arrows. And I won’t pretend they didn’t land. They did. For a season, I believed things about myself—about my worth, my calling, my future—that were simply not true. But they felt true. And the feelings were loud enough to drown out the truth for a while (Waking the Dead, p. 118).

This is why healing is not just emotional work. It is theological work.

You cannot simply feel your way out of a false belief. You have to encounter the truth—the living, personal truth of who God says you are—and let it systematically displace the lie.

That process took time. It took honest prayer. It took the kind of community where I could say the ugly, doubtful, grieving things out loud and have people stay in the room. It took Frank Viola’s reminder that the Christ who was crucified is the same Christ who was raised—and that resurrection, by definition, comes after death, not instead of it (From Eternity to Here, p. 198).

When Grace Has a Face

And then God sent Lois.

I don’t say that lightly or sentimentally. I say it with the full weight of someone who had stopped expecting good things and was genuinely surprised when one arrived.

When I met her online and discovered she was reading the same books, following the same thought leaders, burning with the same questions about organic church and genuine discipleship, I didn’t just feel romantic interest. I felt the particular, unmistakable warmth of divine orchestration. The sense that Someone had been arranging this long before either of us knew the other existed.

Romans 8:28 shifted from a verse I quoted to a testimony I carried.

God had not abandoned me in the wreckage of my first marriage. He had been working—patiently, purposefully, synergistically—using the pain and the breaking open to form exactly the kind of man who would be ready for the partnership He had in mind.

Raw Material in the Hands of God

Here is what I want you to hear, wherever you are in your own story:

The thing you are currently walking through—the thing that makes you wonder if God is paying attention—is not outside His awareness. It is not a detour from your story. In the hands of a God who specializes in resurrection, it is raw material.

Not all pain is discipline. Not all loss is punishment. Sometimes God allows the dismantling of what we have built so that He can build something better in its place—something we never would have chosen ourselves, because we didn’t know it was possible.

The Lifechoicely inside-out framework takes this seriously. Transformation is not a straight, upward line. It moves through seasons of breaking and rebuilding, of unlearning and relearning, of dying to old identities and rising into new ones. The process is messy. But it is not random. And it is not unattended.

Paul’s confidence in Romans 8:28 is not the confidence of someone who has never suffered. He wrote those words after beatings, shipwrecks, betrayal, rejection—and from within the confines of prison. His confidence was not in favorable circumstances. It was in the unchanging, unrelenting, creative purpose of a God who refuses to let anything—including your worst season—go to waste.

Takeaway Lesson

God doesn’t just redeem your future—He redeems your past. Every wound, every loss, every season of dismantling is raw material in the hands of a God who works all things together for good. Nothing in your story is wasted.

Prayer Prompt: Bring one painful chapter of your story to God today — not to explain it or fix it, but to place it in His hands. Ask Him: “What are You building in me through this?” Then sit quietly and listen.

— Ed Baulete Lifechoicely.com