Even spouses united in Christ have those times when we think, why does he/she have to be like this? (Elizabeth Newenhuyse)

“Love” as human beings view it can hold such unrealistic ideals—especially in our world today. Too often it’s viewed through “rose colored glasses” with a Cinderella ending attached to it, that after the wedding, “they all lived happily ever after.” That sounds good on paper but in the view of reality and the view of eternity it just isn’t so. The apostle Paul warned “those who marry” that they “will face many troubles in this life.” As he said “I want to spare you this.”

That doesn’t mean we aren’t to marry; it just means we need to realize that you trade one set of “troubles” for another. And we’d best face this realistically or we’ll more readily try to flee from that which brings us more troubles than we may want to handle. The cliché, “The grass is always greener on the other side” is especially applicable when it comes to love and marriage.

Don’t get us wrong, we’re strong advocates of marriage. But we’re also advocates of the necessity of “counting the costs” ahead of wedding (See Luke 14: 28 for an illustration of this principle). And we’re advocates of the continual on-going necessity of pro-actively strengthening the marital relationship afterwards.

Marriage is designed to reflect the love of Christ to a world that needs to see this picture so they’ll reach out for all that God has for them. And if we allow our marriages to become weakened and non-reflective of the love of God, we’re missing the main point of why God designed marriage in the first place. It’s not about what can we get out of marriage, but “what does God get out of it?”

Are others drawn to God as they see us in our everyday lives? Is the love of God evident in and through how we interact with each other? If not-today is a good day to start that journey back to making your marital relationship strong in the love of the Lord. It’s a continual work in progress and we need to press on as does every other married couple.

We came across a magazine article in the November/December 2002 issue of the Moody magazine (which is no longer being published) which we’d like to share with you. We really appreciated what the author had to say. We’ll only be able to share portions of this article with you. Read what is what Elizabeth Cody Newenhuyse had to share. She wrote:

After nearly 25 years as husband and wife, for better and sometimes for worse, we’re learning that, as I told a friend recently, our marriage “is what it is.” We may not do everything by the book. (My husband) Fritz can get crabby, I can be annoyingly self-righteous. We get confused about each other’s love languages. We stumble over those Mars-and-Venus communication patterns.

But 25 years of a sometime-challenging union, has taught us to do the big work of marriage: commitment, kindness, confession, watching our mental lives (see 2 Corinthians 10:5), and “having the same mind that was in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 2).

And so do friends of ours I’ll call Jim and Joan. They’re somewhat unusual, at least according to the template promoted by some Christian marriage literature. Joan does all the driving and household repair stuff. She even barbecues. Jim, a Christian scholar, is brilliant—a national magazine one described him as a “polymath,” which means ’someone who knows everything.

They’ve had more than their fair share of heartaches. Yet I hardly know a couple who seem more in love, who still walk holding hands, who truly seem cleaved to one another. They have a depth and passion and complexity that models marriage as God intended it.

My generation entered adulthood seeking meaning and happiness from love, work, friends, houses, and stuff. We didn’t want our marriages to be dull, motivated by economic necessity, staying together for the sake of appearances (the way we perceived our parents’ relationships). Our marriages would be vital, interesting, absorbing, and always passionate. We would always look good for each other. Sometimes, we succeeded. But sometimes, our marriages collapsed under the weight of our own well-meant expectations.

And so to today: young people, many bearing the scars of growing up in broken homes, long for one partner who will be a ’soul mate.’ So they wait for That One Perfect Person to stride into Starbucks. And they wait and wait.

I applaud their desire for a strong and lasting marriage. But I’m not sure about this soul mate business. I fear their bright illusions will dissolve into dust the first time they have an argument about money or when she loses her job or he gets sick or either of them decides he or she wants to go to a different church.

Even we spouses who are united in Christ have evenings when we just don’t have much to say to each other-those times when we think, “Why does he have to be like this?” Soul mates always instinctively understand each other. Real marriage partners don’t. But real marriage partners try. And this is where we expect too little of marriage. Because a marriage wholly yielded to Christ can astonish us. Or, more precisely, God’s work in that marriage can astonish.

A recurrent theme of Scripture shows a person or event displaying the work and power of God (Exodus 9:16, God’s call to Moses; John 9:3, Jesus’ healing of the man born blind; Romans 9:17, God’s saving mercy). Could it be that one reason God created marriage was because it’s an ideal canvas for Him to display His work through a man and a woman?

Walter Wangerin has written eloquently about this in his book, As for Me and My House. He tells of having grievously offended his wife, Thanne, through a series of hurts that heaped up over time, culminating in an evening game of Risk played with friends: “I leaned back and spread myself on my chair, feeling this to be a very good party. I made jokes. But I made them at Thanne’s expense, oblivious to their effect on her. And she saw how much my very being belittled her. If she was dying, her husband wasn’t altogether blameless. He was killing her by small degrees and scorn.”

Thanne withdraws emotionally, and Walt resigns himself to living without love in a house of chilly silences. “Thanne couldn’t forgive me,” he writes. ‘This is a plain fact. I had broken her. How could a broken person be at the same time whole enough to forgive? No: Thanne was created finite, and couldn’t forgive me.” “But Jesus could.”

One day Thanne came into his study, not angry. And she said, “Wally, will you hug me?” “Dear Lord Jesus,” Wangerin reflects, “where did this come from, this sudden, unnatural, undeserved willingness to let me touch her, hug her, love her? Not from me! I was her ruination. Not from her, because I had killed that part of her. From you! This is God’s handiwork written large.”

So what do we expect from marriage? From ourselves in the marriage? Fallibility. The need to forgive way beyond 70 times 7. Periods when we realize we don’t like the person we’re living with very much. Soul mate? Him? Yet this is the person God has entrusted to us.

I’ve sometimes looked at Fritz wearing a garage-sale sweatshirt and thought, well, whether he’s the ‘one right person’ for me or not (a concept more romantic than scriptural), God loves him very much and thought enough of me to put Fritz into my care. Perhaps we need to ask God what He expects. Somehow, I don’t think His answers will surprise us.

One of the things the author had to say was, “After 20-plus years, I finally understand that it’s not the ‘perfect’ marriages that show God’s power. It’s the ones that are real.” How rich that truth is! We pray all of us will strive to be this for the sake of the kingdom of God and those around us and our spouse beside us.

God Bless!
Steve and Cindy Wright

 Print This Page (printer-friendly)