The Heart of Rachael

"The Heart of Rachael" by Kathleen Thompson Norris

This book is about a woman who finds herself married for all the wrong reasons. She has stuck it out for 7 years and decides to get a divorce. She then falls in love again and realizes that marriage is what you put into it and it is never easy. She ends up risking it all to save her second marriage and comes to terms with her part for the first marriage failing. It took a few chapters to get into this book but once it got going it was good. "She had not expected to be happy in this house, she had expected to be rich and envied, and secure, and she was all of these things. That they were not worth attaining, no one knew better than Rachael now." Rachael married for all these things and came to find out the hard way how much they were really worth, nothing at all. "We are not perfect ourselves,' said the clergyman benevolently, 'yet we expect perfection in others. Before we will even change our own lives we look around and see what other people are doing." Isn't this so true? So easy to judge others rather than look at what we might change in ourselves. "But she said to herself that she knew now the worst evil of divorce. She knew that it coarsened whomever it touched, that it irresistibly degraded, that it lowered all the human standard of goodness and endurance, and self-sacrifice. However justified, it was an evil; however properly consummated, it soiled the little group it affected." I can't think of a better way to describe divorce or its affects. "It's the one vow we take with God as witness; and no blessing ever follows a broken vow!" "It cannot be reconciled to law; it defies law. Right on the face of it, it is breaking a contract. Are any other contracts to be broken with public approval?" I thought it was an interesting explanation of divorce and how are society does it so easily. "Life is mistakes, after all, and paying for them, and doing better next time." Yes, there are consequences for our mistakes but there is always a next time to do better. "The wonder of marriage came to her, the miracle of love rooted too deep for disturbance, of love fed on faults as well as virtues; so light a tie in the beginning, so powerful a bond as the years go by." I remember thinking I couldn't love Matthew more than when I did on the day we married but as you go through life together, all the ups and downs, good things and disappointments the bond grows deeper and the love stronger.