On March 18th Cindy and I (Steve) celebrated 30 years of marriage. Wow! That’s 10,950 days; 262,800 hours or 15,768,000 minutes (just in case you wanted to know) of sharing my life with the same woman. Truthfully, not all of that time could be classified as “wedded bliss.” And I admit that was mostly my fault.

Let me give you a perspective as I look back from my perspective. Now, I’ve always believed what Dr. Kevin Leman told me: I “married up” when I married Cindy. Sadly, and not to my credit, I haven’t always acted like I’ve “believed” that. For too many years I took Cindy for granted; made unfair assumptions and had unreal expectations about what I thought my wife should be like. To make matters worse, there was no way Cindy could ever live up to most of my “expectations” because my marriage communication skills were on par with a 1942 Buick. (Men, if you need an explanation, email me.)

I can’t tell you how fortunate and how blessed I am that Cindy never gave up on me, or our marriage, nor did God give up trying to get through to me. What made the difference?

(1) A wife who faithfully prayed and

(2) A revelation from God (thanks to Promise Keepers) that I was cheating my wife—and me—by not looking at my role of husband through God’s eyes.

It’s not easy to undo 20 years of habits as a “passive observer” type of husband and move into the Biblical model of being willing to “give up my life” for my wife (Ephesians 5). The hard part of fulfilling that mandate meant I had to be willing to set aside my will, my desires, my wants—or, in other words—stop focusing on ME and put Cindy’s needs, wants and desires ahead of mine.

It took time, and a lot of effort on my part to learn and apply Biblical principles like honoring my wife; and practical principles like, learning and speaking my wife’s primary “Love Language” (Acts of Service). It meant learning when to talk—but more importantly—when to listen.

In short, these past 30 years of marriage have been a real education and growing experience for me. But, the payoff is that I’m now married to my best friend—whom I’m madly and passionately in love with. I don’t consider the fact that we’ve been married 30 years as a “milestone”, per se, but rather that after 30 years of marriage I find myself more in love with Cindy every day and my desire is to work every day to improve on what we already have.

Cindy will now share some of her “reflections” and then I’ll close with something Philip Yancey wrote some time ago:

Cindy: I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s not what you’ve lived through that’s as important as what you’ve “learned through.” And these past 30 years of marriage to Steve has been a time of “living through” and “learning through” more than I could have ever have imagined possible when we walked down the aisle together so long ago. Neither one of us had even a clue on that day all that we would be saying “I do” to. We’ve weathered some tremendous storms— and I’m so grateful that we never gave up on each other. But we came close to it quite a few times. What a loss that would have been!

In looking back I can see that taking the word “divorce” out of our vocabulary was one of the smartest things we ever did. As long as we entertained that option, we never could be really serious about weathering through what we needed to in order to get to this now most wonderful stage of marriage.

In her book, The Divorce Remedy, the author Michele Weiner-Davis talks of the 5 stages of marriage. She describes stage 5 as a time of being “together at last.” Steve and I can see that we’ve reached that stage and what Michele says about it is so true.

She says,

It’s really a tragedy that half of all couples who wed never get to stage 5, when all the pain and hard work of the earlier stages really begins to pay off. Since you’re no longer in a struggle to define who you are and what the marriage should be, there’s peace and harmony. Even if you’ve always loved your spouse, you start to notice how much you really like him or her again.

And then the strangest thing starts to happen. You realize that the alien who abducted your spouse in stage 2 (the stage she labels as, “what was I thinking when I married this person who’s so different than I thought”) has been kind enough to return him or her to you. You’re pleased to discover that the qualities you saw in your partner so very long ago never really vanished. They were camouflaged.

This renews your feelings of connection. By the time you reach stage 5, you have a shared history. And although you’d both agree that marriage hasn’t been easy, but you can feel proud that you’ve weathered the storms.

Those words hold so true for Steve and me. The fact that we’re still together is only by the grace of God—literally. We both know beyond a shadow of a doubt that our marriage would have added an additional number to the ever-growing divorce statistics in our world today.

Steve claims that he was mostly to blame for our stormy times, but I know that I contributed more than my share to those rocky years because I came into our marriage so “needy” and dragging with me so much emotional baggage. It’s nothing short of a miracle that we’re still together and still love and even like each other despite the damage I inflicted into our relationship.

In a review for the book, The Five Love Needs of Men and Women by Dr. Gary and Barb Rosberg, it was said that Christians don’t understand as they enter into marriage what the permanence of marriage is all about.

Young marrieds need to capture a vision of what it means to grow older with someone. Romance is only the beginning of a relationship. It moves from romance into companionship, where you “gut out” the development of your relationship. Many couples think that something mystical is just supposed to happen. And then ten years later they may be virtual strangers because they haven’t done anything to maintain or develop intimacy.

That is SO true in our marriage! We didn’t have a clue as to the commitment we were making. We didn’t know how much damage our immature attitudes toward each other would sabotage any love that we thought we had for each other when the stage of having to “gut it out” hit us. But there’s something we did have… we both eventually committed our lives to Jesus Christ making Him Savior AND Lord of our lives. And He became our “saving grace.”

What I’ve seen through the years is that as you love the Lord, He helps you to love each other if you allow Him to. Through every storm we walked through, we always came back in humility to each other because the Lord spoke truth to us individually, and we knew we couldn’t say we loved God and yet hold onto bitterness toward each other. The Lord has always brought us right back into learning how to sacrificially love and honor each other. We can’t thank Him enough for that!

Another thing Steve and I have had going for us throughout the years is a commitment to grow together as husband and wife. As it says in Matthew 19:6 “what God has joined together, let man not separate.” We’ve worked hard at keeping our marital relationship alive and growing toward each other— choosing to think “together” despite all that could slide us apart from one another.

It’s taken continual work and commitment not to allow ourselves to grow apart and separate what God has joined together. But I can sure testify that it’s definitely been worth it all. I love Steve more than l could ever have imagined possible. It’s not that we have a “perfect marriage.”

We still have our selfish moments when we tug and pull at one another. But our love and commitment to each other and to our Lord is so deep and rich, it goes beyond description. I wish every married couple could know that love. It’s absolutely more wonderful than words could ever describe.

That’s a huge reason Steve and I are committed to mentor and help other married couples. We want to help others get to the place where the love of Christ is so rich in their lives it spills over and blesses others, which means God is glorified through this. Truly, “To God be the glory!”

To conclude our reflections this week we’d like to share a portion of a letter that author, Philip Yancey, wrote to his wife on their 25th anniversary. It appeared in Christianity Today in 1996. It read:

Before marriage, each of us, by instinct, strives to be what the other wants. The young woman desires to look sexy, and takes up interest in sports. The young man notices plants and flowers, and works at asking questions instead of just answering mono-syllabically. After marriage the process slows and somewhat reverses. Each insists on his or her rights. Each resists bending to the others will.

After years, though, the process may subtly begin to reverse again. I sense a new willingness to bend back toward what the other wants—maturely, this time, not out of a desire to ‘catch’ a mate, but out of a desire to please a mate who has shared a quarter-century of life. I grieve for couples who give up before reaching this stage.

Time has crept up on us, as it always does, yet this middle age isn’t so bad. We have less to prove to the world and each other. We’ve surveyed what we want in life,and part of the conclusion we’ve reached is this: we want each other. The view from the mountaintop looks good—very good.

Well, those are our reflections as we look back on our 30 years of marriage. Our prayer this week is that we’ll all take time to “reflect” on where we’ve been in our marriages; ask God to show us what we need to do to have a marriage the way He wants it to be, and then rejoice in what God has done to bring us together as husband and wife to share this time together.

Our love and prayers are continually with you.
Steve and Cindy Wright