Each marriage is different

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These words from Gary Thomas were part of my devotions this morning:

“Different From the Rest”

Let me put a saying by nineteenth-century churchman Horace Bushnell in the language of marriage: “No married couple is ever called to be another. God has as many plans for married couples as He has couples; and, therefore, He never requires them to measure their life by any other couple.”

You comprise one-half of a unique couple. No other couple has your gifts, your weaknesses, your history, your dynamics, your children, your calling. There is great freedom in accepting our couple identity as it is: we might be strong in this area, weak in that, vulnerable here, impenetrable there, excelling in this, often failing in that, but we are a unique couple called forth by God to fulfill our unique purpose in this world.

God has established your home and your marriage, and that’s the life He wants you to live. Never look to other couples to measure your worth; look to God to fulfill your call. Don’t compare yourself with other couples to measure your happiness; compare your obedience with God’s design on your life to measure your faithfulness.

Become comfortable with your story, your identity as a couple. Relish it. Never compare it. Just be faithful to the unique vision God has given to the unique you (and that’s a plural you). God doesn’t need another couple just like one He already made. He is so much more creative than that. Rather, He wants to release and bless the unique couple that is you.

This goes along with my last post. It is encouraging and freeing not to feel the need to hold my marriage up to a standard set by anyone else, not to hold it up for comparison to other marriages, not to hold it up to what is written in marriage books. The “rules” some people apply to marriages (tasks must be arbitrarily divided along gender lines; communication must follow this format and these guidelines; wives need x,y,z while husbands need a,b,c; a good marriage requires this or that; etc.) do not apply to me — only God’s rules and standards, clearly stated in His Word apply. I can and should look to Him, to my husband, and to myself for the practical outworkings in my life and in my marriage.

That is not to say that others have nothing to offer. There is good advice out there, and it would be foolish to disregard it all. But it’s also foolish to try to shoehorn my marriage and myself into something my husband and I were never intended to fit.

Marriage requires our best. But it should not require us to become someone we are not. It’s a wonderful thing when we can accept ourselves for who we are, our spouses for who they are, and our marriages for what they are — and encourage that all live up to their full unique identities.

I was wrong about date nights

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It’s not that I was entirely wrong. I still don’t believe that couples need to leave their kids with babysitters once a week, lest their marriages be doomed. Nor do I think we should be trying to recapture the early, pre-marriage days of our relationship, when we were not only younger but far more immature and selfish, didn’t know each other as well, and hopefully — if we followed Biblical morality — weren’t having sex. Why go backwards?

However, there are some things I was seriously wrong about, and those are things that the best of the “date night” advocates are trying to get at. I’m addressing this to the wives, because…well, because I am one.

1. Intimacy is important, and it doesn’t just happen. You need to make room for it. By this, I mean real intimacy; I’m not just using the word as a code or euphemism for sex. It takes time, and a willingness to be open and vulnerable with each other, to build and maintain the level of intimacy that should be found in a truly healthy marriage. Otherwise it’s too easy to become harried co-parents passing each other like two ships in the night, whose conversations are mostly about babies and business.

2. Husbands aren’t just being immature and selfish, or child-haters, if they miss the “fun” person we used to be, or that they hoped we’d be, when we married. Unless you married a really irresponsible jerk, he doesn’t want to quit his job, sell the kids to the gypsies, and run off with you on some crazy adventure. But he might want you to play with him — however that might like look for the both of you — and to be his recreational companion once in a while. He might want to know that he can still make you laugh, that your life is not all drudgery and duty, and that there is still a fun sparkle in your eyes especially for him to enjoy. He might just want to see you happy, and to know it’s because of him.

3. Some husbands get lonely, and rely on our friendship more than we realize. This can be confusing if your husband’s friendship style is waaaaay different than yours. I was shocked to read a study showing that the majority of happily married men considered their wives their best friends, while the wives usually considered someone else their best friends. As a stay-at-home, homeschooling mom whose husband was usually busily involved in his business and in church ministry plus meeting weekly with a prayer partner for most of our marriage, it was easy for me to think my husband’s life was filled with people and rich relationships while I was isolated and starved for adult conversation. Yes, my husband was surrounded by people all day, but that did not meet his deeper needs for relationship. We would have both done things differently if we had realized that.

4. Marriage should be our priority human relationship. After all, we took vows with this dude. That doesn’t mean we sacrifice our children on the altar of marriage. We don’t have to do silly, rude things like couch time to let everyone know they are second, third, or fourth fiddle to us. It doesn’t mean we should spend more time with our husbands than our children, or that we can’t have a girls’ night out, or that we must not ever do anything without our husbands. Marriage should never be an idol. Neither should any husband. But it’s an extremely important relationship, not just because of the vows, but because it’s supposed to be a living analogy of Christ and the Church. So we better treat our marriage with respect (and the same goes for the children produced by it).

5. Marriage books are full of nonsense. But I already knew that. Of course, they are not all 100% rubbish, but we would do well to remember a few important things: a) most, if not all, of them were written by people who have never met you or your husband; b) most, if not all, of them are written by people you would never, ever want to be married to; c) authors of marriage books have their own issues and baggage just like everyone else; d) the more authoritative and dogmatic the author, the quicker you should toss his/her book on the scrap heap; e) too many marriage books are written by middle or upper class Americans who assume we all have enough discretionary income to spend on babysitters, romantic dinners, fancy lingerie, hotel weekends, and vacations without the kids; f) just as God created us all different and doesn’t want us all to look and act exactly alike, He doesn’t want all marriages to look and act exactly alike; g) marriage is first and foremost about becoming one — not erasing anyone, but becoming a whole that is greater than the individual parts — so don’t take anyone seriously who starts telling you marriage is like the military, or like a business, or like a sports team, or like any other wacky thing God never intended it to be.

6. You are neither a sinner nor a failure if you need time to relax and rejuvenate. Even Jesus withdrew for times with His Father. We need intimacy with our Heavenly Father. We need intimacy with our husbands, however that may look in each of our marriages. And we need a certain amount of intimacy with good friends. Those things are important and valuable…and we don’t need to pretend we are supermoms who are above human needs and desires. We need each other…and our husbands need us.

7. Marriages have seasons, and what works in one may not work in another. We need to cut ourselves some slack. Alone time with our husbands will not be our major priority when we have a newborn, nor should it. Going broke hiring babysitters, or stressing out over what mayhem the kids are engaging in without us, is not a marriage-building exercise, no matter what anyone tries to tell you.

8. We need to do what works for us. Even though I rejected the notion that my marriage would shrivel up and die if I didn’t jump through all the stressful, exhausting hoops a weekly date night would have required when the kids were little, I still thought we needed a weekly something. So I tried date nights at home and a bunch of other ideas I found in books or online, and they all went over like a lead balloon. In my misguided zeal, I forgot to do the most important thing. It never dawned on me to say to my husband, “Honey, I want us to have the best marriage possible, and to become closer to each other. What kind of things do you think would nurture and strengthen our marriage? And what kind of things would you enjoy doing together?”

I’m starting another blog…

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…and I’m calling it “Adventures in prayer”.

Adventures in prayer? What kind of wackadoodle name is that for a blog? And why start a new blog when this one is so sporadic? Will it replace this one?

The idea has been percolating for perhaps a week now, and today I finally decided to implement it. Two different blogs make sense, even though there may be some overlap in readership…assuming I get some readers for the new one! The content will be different; the focus different; and the types of people drawn to either blog may eventually end up being fairly different as well. We’ll see.

As for the title…I’m reminded of, as a small child, sitting through prayer meeting after prayer meeting in our tiny church, my older brother and I the only children forced to attend. The prayers droned on seemingly forever as we sat around the table in a Sunday School room. My head was bowed with the hopes that no one would notice the scandalous truth — I didn’t keep my eyes shut the entire time. In fact, I would scrutinize the table top, memorizing every blemish, every scratch, every pencil mark, every gouge, every name or set of initials carved in with ballpoint pen. We complained about this torment once. At least, I recall only the one complaint.

“It’s so boring! No other children have to attend!” we protested.

My mother was quick to reply, “Prayer is not boring! That’s because God is not boring. People might be boring, but God is never boring.” This was followed by a speech, actually more of a sermonette, designed to inspire us to repent over our prayerlessness and have more of a love and zeal for God.

I wish I could say that I took this speech of my mother’s to heart and that, as a small child in early elementary school, I embarked on a lifelong prayer adventure, eventually becoming a spiritual giant. As anyone who has read a post or two here already knows, such did not happen.

Certainly, since that day, my attitude about prayer meetings has changed. I’ve learned the truth of my mother’s words. I’ve experienced some truly non-boring — even exciting! — times of prayer with others. But I’ve always been somewhat of a late bloomer, so it’s now, almost half a century later, that I am finally truly beginning to experience what a real adventure prayer can be.

That’s what my new blog will be about. It’s about one woman learning how to pray…how to really pray — the sorts of prayers that change me, and change others, and hopefully change my world.

If that topic interests you, I’d love you to follow my new blog, and comment extensively!

Oh, that John Piper…

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Sorry if you are a fan of his, but I have to take issue with something he recently tweeted:

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A friend on Facebook alerted me to it, and linked to the following discussion of the tweet. I felt compelled to weigh in with two comments:

The topic of rape, in my opinion, does not lend itself well to sound bites and tweets. I have no idea if this tweet of John Piper had any sort of context or if it just appeared willy-nilly out of thin air — but that is the very problem of Twitter in general. John Piper spends far more time there than I do, and one would think a pastor/teacher of his reputation would know better than that. Well, I keep thinking that and getting disappointed, and maybe someday I’ll wake up, smell the coffee, and simply say, whether it’s him or others of his ilk, “That wasn’t surprising—he often says things like that. That’s just the way he is.”

In the meantime, since I am not fully conversant with Piper-speak, only tending to run across him when he’s spread some other doozy all over the Internet, I am left trying to stay charitable while puzzling out his meaning. It seems to me as if he is saying, with the words “united in sin” and “two distinct forms”, that rape is the male version and seduction the female version of the same sin. Perhaps he refuses to believe that women can rape since there is no such thing recorded in Scripture. But the Bible does describe men seducing women AND it makes a clear distinction between rape and seduction.

I am tempted to say something disparaging about celebrity preachers and their lack of scholarship. (I’m a preacher’s kid whose father set the bar very high in that regard, and it has taken me years to stop getting dismayed and annoyed that few people take Scripture as seriously as he does.) But instead, I think I’ll make this observation: when it comes to the topic of rape, most men simply don’t get it.

The blog author had used a definition of the word “seduce” that referred to coffee, which inspired me to add the following:

An addendum: Coffee is extremely seductive to me. When I am at my weakest, it sometimes seeks me out, like a smooth-talking cad, luring me in sensuously, promising me unspeakable pleasures and delight. Were coffee-drinking a sin, I could try to avoid its siren calls and delicious scent. If forced to be around it, I could pray for strength to avoid its enticements. I could apply the Biblical admonitions regarding how to resist temptation. It would be silly for me to frequent coffee houses and surround myself with cups of coffee.

The Bible contains advice on how to avoid falling for seducers. That’s because, no matter how overwhelming seduction might feel, we always make a choice to allow ourselves to be seduced. We don’t say no. Instead, we say yes. The Bible does not tell us how to avoid falling for rapists. There is a definite distinction.

I drink coffee willingly. Yes, I was enticed, but I am not a victim of coffee. Coffee has never forced itself on me against my will.

For a seduction to succeed, it requires two willing participants, both of whom have sinned. Rape, by definition, has only one willing participant (unless there is more than one rapist) and he is the only one who has sinned.

Very different sins.

If John Piper is a man of integrity with a high view of Scripture, we can expect, very soon, a profound apology and correction.

Call me cynical, but I’m not holding my breath. John Piper has deleted his tweet, although as of yet without explanation, so perhaps I should try to be satisfied with that.