Divorce devastated Juan Garcia. Surviving it made him a better person.
The vehicle for his survival: the Divorce Recovery Workshop offered by Richmond’s First Baptist Church. Juan, an accountant, heard about the workshop after his marriage ended 18 years ago. His Catholic parish in Richmond offered nothing similar; he felt alone in the world. So he signed up—and found a healing community.
“Without the program, I never would have been able to cope with everything I was going through at that time,” Juan says. “This might be the only place where somebody dealing with divorce is going to be heard without being interrupted, without being judged, without being told everything is going to be OK when it isn’t.”
Divorce is the death of a relationship and an identity. What follows is a grieving process that never completely ends. To overcome it, you need to rebuild your life, to stop blaming yourself or your spouse, to forgive, and much more. Juan began to work through those challenges in the Divorce Recovery Workshop.
It helped him so much that he returns every year—now as a facilitator and co-leader of the workshop.
“The main goal of the facilitator is to create a safe environment for everybody to be able to participate and share their personal situations, to be able to grieve,” Juan explains. A volunteer soccer coach, he uses a sports analogy to describe the process:
“We lost the ‘first half.’ So we’re there with the coaches, who are helping us understand how we can get back into life, what is going to be our new role. We need to change our strategy in life, to redefine who we are now. And that change hurts, but it has to happen because otherwise we are not going to be able to win the second half.”
What is “winning”? To live with joy, Juan says, whether a new relationship comes your way or not. He had never regularly served others before his divorce. But he got involved in helping people facing housing insecurity through the Caritas ministry at his church, through prison ministry—and by helping others recover from divorce.
“I have never felt so much joy to give,” he says. “This is how I can continue the second half of my life, not being that person looking for someone to make me happy. Because what is the purpose of life?”
Sounds like a great way to approach living. And you never know what blessings might come back to you. Juan, 63, got married May 31.
The fall session of the Divorce Recovery Workshop starts September 20. For more information, click HERE or call 804-358-5458, ext. 118.
