The hazards of the previous section, though intensely personal and close-range, are still “objective” to a degree. They can be named, analyzed, compartmentalized.
The personal stresses to which we turn now are more internal, less organized, more amorphous. They are harder to “blame on the church.” They are the vexations of soul, the plagues that strike at selfdefinition, self-respect, security.
Some of the ministry couples in the following pages talk about their struggles to define roles, to focus the contribution each has to make. Some deal with aloneness in the ministry. Some portray communication problems, getting beyond small talk to deep communion. Then, three separate case histories present the difficult subjects of temptation and unfaithfulness.
Among the many definitions of love over the centuries, here is one with a bite to it: Love is giving someone your undivided attention. Wives need that. Husbands need that. More than one pastor who has come to realize the limits of sermons and meetings craves a deep fellowship with just one other person. His wife? Sometimes she is too busy mothering, leading the church women’s organization, or working at a secular job. This situation, of course, is not nearly as frequent as the opposite case: a preoccupied husband and a deprived wife. But both cases are hard to bear. And both are dangerous.
As in the other sections of this book, each vignette is followed by “Reflections.” This time the source is David Seamands, longtime United Methodist missionary, then pastor, author, and now associate professor of pastoral ministries at Asbury Theological Seminary, Wilmore, Kentucky.
For Greg and Kara Pacynski, neither the early hospitalization (chapter 5) nor the messy firing of a staff associate (chapter 10) were as troubling to their marriage as their struggle over a number of years with identity. For one thing, both of the other situations were fairly short-term; a few months, and life was back to normal. But defining roles and contributions has taken longer to settle.
In the early days of youth ministry, before children came along, Kara did nearly everything with her husband. There were occasional moments when she felt shut out, when Greg was too busy to notice her, but most of the time (after conquering the kidney infection) she was in the swirl of action along with him.
Ryan’s arrival, after five years of marriage, coincided in some ways with Greg’s ascension as a youth leader of note. Attendance was swelling, the group was winning awards at regional gatherings, the church board of elders was impressed. Two weeks after Ryan’s birth, for example, was youth camp.
At the last minute, Kara came down sick with a breast infection. Well—I had to go to camp; that was all there was to it. I stashed her with the senior pastor and his wife for good, loving care, while I headed out to save the world of kids.
In my mind, I wasn’t abandoning her; she’d be with a woman she loved who would take care of everything. So no big deal, right?
To Kara, it was a big deal. She felt deserted with a newborn. But the tape of her father-in-law’s warning (“Be careful she doesn’t put you on the shelf, Greg”) still played in her mind. She was not about to say, “I need you.”
The only thing to do was to get back into the stream of ministry as quickly as possible. Soon she was packing Ryan up and toting him to youth retreats, Friday fun nights, basketball games. She continued as much of her public life as she could manage. It was the only way to hold onto Greg, who was now being asked to lead seminars on youth work. The next year he was elected to a term on the denomination’s Christian education board.
The summer Ryan turned two provided a watershed moment. They were on a mission trip to Mexico: Greg, Kara, a third adult sponsor, and a dozen teenagers. They arrived to find that the missionary and the national church had not followed through on plans. The work project wasn’t ready for them. They had nothing to do. Greg remembers it vividly:
We got there about four in the morning, after driving straight through from Dallas. Everybody was exhausted and vulnerable. For the first thirty-six hours, the group just basically slept, shopped, and stood around while I—the great “leader” of this expedition—tried to figure out what to do next.
We could go pass out literature on the streets, but if anyone asked a question, we didn’t speak Spanish. And they didn’t have Mexican young people lined up to be our partners or anything. The whole trip had just kind of stalled out.
Kara, of course, was busy from dawn to nightfall with food preparation for fifteen hungry gringos. She haggled for bargains in the open market, brought the food back to the church, organized kitchen crews, and spent hours over a hot stove. Without her efforts, nobody would have eaten.
Greg recalls the second evening:
I went to bed around nine o’clock—there was nothing left for me to do. I still didn’t have a solution for the next six days. I wanted to talk to Kara about things. But she was still in the kitchen.
I lay there thinking, Everybody else needs her. They don’t need me. Kara, don’t you have any time for me? You have time for everybody else, and I’m feeling like a failure down here.
Kara came to bed around ten, and Greg began to talk. Within minutes, he could see her eyelids beginning to droop. He felt frustrated. “I can’t wait till we get home so I can have you again to myself,” he said.
Kara opened her eyes wide, looked at him, and delivered one pungent sentence: “Now you know how I’ve felt all these years.”
With that, she rolled over and was soon fast asleep.
Greg was nailed in an instant by the realization that his wife had often felt squeezed out, abandoned, unneeded—the way he felt right then. The temporary role reversal drove her pain home to him. Says Kara:
That was the beginning of our awareness of the need to talk with each other about how we felt. Seven years of pent-up feeling finally began coming out.
I remember when we got home, we went out to dinner for the express purpose of talking about that night in Monterrey. Greg said, “Now tell me what you meant by that.”
And finally—father-in-law or no father-in-law, “shelf” or no “shelf”!—I began talking. For the first time I was able to verbalize, and for the first time he was able to feel.
Our regard for each other didn’t turn around overnight, but that was the beginning.
It was good that the breakthrough came when it did, because within two years Ryan had a little sister. That meant a definite trimming of Kara’s sails. She recruited another woman in the church to direct the teen plays. The youth newspaper staff tried to do its work around Kara’s kitchen table, but that was not always satisfactory.
She did, however, begin to think more about developing her latent interest in writing. At least she could do that at home while the children slept. Greg encouraged her to attend a writers’ workshop, and before long she had sold her first article.
About the time Greg turned thirty, he realized he did not want to be a perennial youth man. His reputation in the field meant little to him; he was experiencing some burnout. The move to a larger church as minister of Christian education was an attempt to broaden his scope and recharge his creativity. He found himself, however, with greater desk responsibility. This was not quite his dream for the future, either.
Kara’s typewriter kept humming. She was now being asked to do articles on assignment. She began work on a master’s degree in journalism. Finally, she signed her first book contract.
Greg recalls:
It was like the success was all in Kara’s court.… Where was the hero now? What would become of our marriage if I could not be the professional head of the home? Was I really a quality Christian leader or just a pretty face on an overgrown adolescent?
I wasn’t all that thrilled about the reputation I’d built. What was I really good for?
There was a movie just then called A Star Is Born. Kris Kristofferson was in it—a rock musician who helped his lover—Barbra Streisand—get to the big time as a singer. In the meanwhile, his own career went downhill. I saw a lot of myself in that story. Self-pity, I guess.
What salvaged this situation was the broadened communication that had been constructed in the wake of the Mexico trip. The church also provided for each staff couple a consultation with a Christian psychologist: three tests plus three months of counseling if desired. Greg and Kara welcomed this and learned a great deal about each other in the process. The psychologist pointed out that Greg rated very low in “succorance”—the need to be aided or mothered, while Kara very much wanted to be a caregiver. No wonder they had been tense with each other at times.
The Pacynskis ended up paying their own way for another three months of help and insight. Their relationship has grown and expanded the more they have learned to share feelings and emotions and to affirm the other person’s contribution, both professionally and inside the marriage.
Reflections
by David SeamandsIt is my observation that wives—at least in North America—usually begin marriage with a strong desire for intimacy and closeness. Many of them also begin with a low identity of themselves. They don’t get much identity fulfillment out of a job, whereas the husband is very much the opposite: he finds great fulfillment in his work and cannot understand his wife’s yearnings.
As time goes on, however, these two needs seem to cross. Norman Wright has written that as the man gets older—whether he is a success or a failure—he realizes his job doesn’t fulfill all his needs. He begins to look for more intimacy and closeness. He becomes more tender toward his wife.
Meanwhile, she is headed the other direction. Her primary work as a mother is now nearing completion, and she begins to seek fulfillment and identity from an outside job. To her husband she says, “Sorry, fella—closeness is what I wanted back yonder, and you didn’t give it to me.” A lot of marital tragedy takes place right here.
That is why the Mexican debacle was the best thing that ever happened to Greg Pacynski. He learned quickly, only seven years into marriage, that God had made him—and his wife as well—for something bigger than a job, a role.
Kara Pacynski’s outburst (“Now you know how I’ve felt all these years”) was excellent; she let him have it. She was very angry and expressed that, but this prevented a long slow burn of repression for years and years. She blew a gasket early, which was very fortunate. It was a shock treatment that forced communication before she developed hardness of heart.
Greg got a taste of his own medicine and saw her pain. He was able to feel. That is a strategic ability. In ministry marriages there’s a lot of logic/theory/Scripture/ideals stacked up against feeling. Ministers often do not hear their wives’ pain.
The breakthrough of communication in this case was really ahead of schedule. Both Greg and Kara made the crossover and began to pay attention to the opposite need (intimacy for the man, identity for the woman), which probably prevented a serious crisis later on. This kind of thing seldom occurs during the twenties. Divorce statistics, we notice, rise noticeably after people have been married sixteen or seventeen years.
When a minister finds too much fulfillment in his work, he doesn’t need a spouse—or at least she thinks he doesn’t. My wife and I went through a similar crisis that resulted in my finally showing her my weakness. We were in India, and through a converging of nationalism, Hinduism, and communism, we had to leave a certain area just as I was drowning in my own successes. We were at the heart of a mass movement; I was baptizing three thousand new believers a year—a rare privilege for a young man in his late twenties. We were building a new church every month. I had said, “This is my dream; we’re going to stay here a lifetime.” It was a miniature Pentecost.
But God knew better. I would have been the biggest phony in the world if we had stayed there. When we were forced out, I really hit bottom.
Until then, my wife had always seemed a bit on the weepy side, and so I had thought, My goodness—if I tell her what’s bugging me about the church or the mission station—that it’s getting to the lonely, scared boy inside of me—we’ll both go down the tube together. I don’t dare tell her. I felt I had to play the strong role.
Actually, she wasn’t weak; she was just expressive. The moment I revealed my weakness, the most amazing thing happened. She said, “My goodness—I never knew whether you needed me.” Suddenly she opened up like a flower to the sun and became the strong person she had always been. I only had to let her know she was needed. I allowed her to minister to me. This met an emotional need in her during a time of life when many wives are tied up with children and can’t do much outside. She began a whole new ministry along with me.
The minister who denies his emotional needs is really denying his weaknesses. He thinks he’s a ninety-day wonder who can’t fail. God has to pull the rug out from under that kind of person.
Oswald Chambers said, “The twin deceivers of the Christian life are success and failure. Christ has not called us to either; he has called us to faithfulness.”
Copyright © 1985 by Christianity Today
