Our reconnaisance of the weaponry poised against the fort of ministry marriage is now finished. Together, we have held a flashlight to as many mortars and grenades as we could find. We have seen what they can do in the lives of others no less worthy than ourselves.
We have also found that there is no all-purpose invention for defense. Counseling helps sometimes, but not always. Prayer has rescued more than one couple in trouble, but others have seemed unable to break through to God on their knees. Planning, careful scheduling, systems: these all have their place—and their limitations. Openness and honesty are musts in a marriage, but not even they are the whole answer.
We are cast rather into the need for eternal vigilance, responding with variable tactics to the great variety of enemies. Many of our foes are in fact quiet; they do not announce their coming with the shrill whine of a missile. They work unnoticed as long as they can.
All of us believe the proper things about Christian marriage. We teach the biblical concepts in premarital counseling and on couples’ retreats. But when it comes to our own daily living in the castle of marriage, our doctrine is simply a platform alongside the bulwark. It elevates us into superior position. What we do upon the platform is still up to us.
All of the ministry couples whose experiences have been told in this book would endorse the orthodox precepts. But that did not prevent them from coming under attack.
Action based on truth is what it takes to hold the fort. The action will no doubt require all the energy we have. It will press us to our limits. It will force us to concentrate when we would rather daydream. It will require us to listen carefully when we would rather sleep.
And the times will come when we have tried our best … and our partner lets us down. At such moments, the advice of Elisabeth Elliot to her daughter is good to remember:
Who is it you marry? You marry a sinner. There’s nobody else to marry. That ought to be obvious enough but when you love a man as you love yours it’s easy to forget. You forget it for a while, and then when something happens that ought to remind you, you find yourself wondering what’s the matter, how could this happen, where did things go wrong? They went wrong back in the Garden of Eden. Settle it once for all, your husband is a son of Adam. Acceptance of him—of all of him—includes acceptance of his being a sinner. He is a fallen creature in need of the same kind of redemption all the rest of us are in need of, and liable to all the temptations which are “common to man.”
…You will find yourself disarmed utterly, and your accusing spirit transformed into loving forgiveness the moment you remember that you did, in fact, marry only a sinner, and so did he.1
Even pastors are occasional sinners. So are pastor’s spouses. We are not so much the elite troops defending these barricades as we are paramilitary recruits at best, rushed into service with a minimum of training. That is why we must lean upon each other for help, study one another’s mistakes, forgive the lapses, and above all cleave to the sacred commitment that binds us together, whether in war or in peace.
Elisabeth Elliot, Let Me Be a Woman (Wheaton, Ill.: Tyndale, 1976), pp. 78, 80.
Copyright © 1985 by Christianity Today
