Wife

In his book Becoming a King, consultant Morgan Snyder writes about meeting a decorated U.S. special forces warrior who was a master on the battlefield but who struggled at home. The soldier said, “I can handle any firefight and a 300-hundred-man ambush, no problem. My role and objectives in war are clear. It is my life at home I can’t handle—my marriage, my kids, my mortgage. I’m failing. I feel like I live in Afghanistan, and I’m deployed to my home in Texas.”

Morgan Snyder comments: “Nothing to expose more of the unfinished places in us than our marriage and parenting. Marriage and home life are the most difficult relationships in which to love well, because they are the only place in which it is least possible to hide.”

One morning Mauricio Estrella walked into the office, sat down at his desk, and was greeted with the message: “Your password has expired. Click ‘Change password’ to change your password.”

You know how, when you are emotionally raw, small things can be so frustrating? This, for Estrella, was one of those times. He was running late that morning, had forgotten to eat breakfast, had a meeting to attend, and then there were those nagging frustrations with his ex. Estrella had just gone through an emotionally brutal divorce that had left him in a deep depression.

At his workplace, the server is configured to ask thousands of employees around the planet to change their password every 30 days. As the empty field with the pulsating cursor awaited his input, Estrella thought to himself, “I’m gonna use a password to change my life.” His password became: “Forgive@h3r.”

Each time he came back from a break or lunch, he typed “Forgive@h3r.” For one month, the password became a mantra. And that mantra changed his life. Estrella shared: “That constant reminder that I should forgive her led me to accept the way things happened at the end of my marriage, and embrace a new way of dealing with the depression that I was drowning into.”

Pastor Timothy Keller and his wife Kathy Keller wrote a book called The Meaning of Marriage. In it Kathy Keller gives an example of submission in a tough life choice:

In the late 1980s, our family was comfortably situated in a very livable suburb of Philadelphia where Tim held a full-time position as a professor. Then he got an offer to move to New York City to plant a new church. He was excited by the idea, but I was appalled. Raising our three wild boys in Manhattan was unthinkable! Not only that, but almost no one who knew anything about Manhattan thought that the project would be successful. I also knew that this would not be something that Tim would be able to do as a nine-to-five job. It would absorb the whole family and nearly all of our time.

It was clear to me that Tim wanted to take the call, but I had serious doubts that it was the right choice. I expressed my strong doubts to Tim, who responded, “Well, if you don’t want to go, then we won’t go.” However, I replied, “Oh, no, you don’t! You aren’t putting this decision on me. That’s abdication. If you think this is the right thing to do, then exercise your leadership and make the choice. It’s your job to break this logjam. It’s my job to wrestle with God until I can joyfully support your call.”

Tim made the decision to come to New York City and plant Redeemer Presbyterian Church. The whole family, my sons included, consider it one of the most truly “manly” things he ever did, because he was quite scared, but he felt a call from God. At that point, Tim and I were both submitting to roles that we were not perfectly comfortable with, but it is clear that God worked in us and through us when we accepted our gender roles as a gift from the designer of our hearts.

Possible Preaching Angle: Submission recognizes and affirms leadership. There’s a certain respectful and trusting quality about submission. A husband’s leadership in marriage should be self-sacrificial.

PBS’ The Great American Read is an eight-part series that explores America’s 100 best-loved novels. The series notes that one theme emerges often in these 100 best-loved novels—the quest for love, especially a romantic love that will endure. Here are some quotes from literature experts commenting on the series and the novels:

“[According to theses novels] Love is the driving force behind everything that we do. So I think reading about all these different types of loves and the ways in which they present, is one of the great human questions.” Another commentator wrote: “I love a good love story. I think everybody wants it. If you don’t want it you’re trying to get it. If you have it you’re trying to keep it.” A third summarized: “Every book on this list is about love and death. And finding love that transcends death. I mean, who’s not going to love a love story?”

Others added the following quotes:

“We want to see that things last. We want to know that you can’t just throw love away. As human beings, as readers, we want something to be that important that you would stick with it forever.”

“We are fascinated by the fact that things can go wrong in love. We don’t want to go there. We don’t want this sort of thing to happen to us.”

Possible Preaching Angles:

Romantic love; marriage; God's love; gospel: The gospel provides the ultimate love story, not just romance, but the God who enters into a love story that involves commitment and sacrifice.

In her book Primal Loss, author Leila Miller explores the thoughts of 70 adults who watched their parents divorce. They still have negative feelings about it and have experienced significant impacts into their adult life as a result. Here are some excerpts:

I believe [the divorce] instilled a fear of abandonment in me with regard to all of my relationships. I developed problems trusting people to be there for me, believing that when the going got rough, people would leave me. I never learned any skills for solving conflict in relationships. As much as I desperately craved intimacy and love, the closer someone came to me, the more terrified I was of getting hurt, or worse—abandoned. I unconsciously sabotaged relationships, as I didn't know how to receive and accept real love …

I'd want people to know and understand that people with divorced parents see the world differently. It's just how it is. Even with the "best" divorces like mine, a seven-year-old should never be in a position to somehow take the responsibility of her parents' emotions. She should never have to think about which parent gets to hear or see something from her first, for fear of hurting the other parent's feelings. She should never have to feel like she doesn't belong in the home of her parents. None of these things were done on purpose. My parents did the best they could to keep me at the center, to keep me as the focus, so that my life could have minimal turbulence.

A parent might be able to totally start over with a new spouse … [but the children's] worlds will forever be fundamentally split. Forever. There is no starting over with a clean slate; things are now complicated and fractured. Divorce starts a family onto two different paths that, as the years unfold, grow further and further apart. It's not a onetime event, but rather an ever-changing and ever-widening gap that only the children are really tasked with straddling and reconciling, season after season, change after change.

Bottom line: even the best divorces have profound, apparently life-long negative effects on the children. Parents who rationalize their divorce as somehow better for the children are engaging in denial, plain and simple.

Hannah Peterson was involved in a serious car accident just one month before her wedding in Ontario. She broke her pelvis in three places, punctured a kidney, broke some ribs, and suffered a concussion and partial hearing loss during the July 18 collision.

Despite being confined to a wheelchair, Hannah was determined not to let the accident affect her big day on August 25. So when it came time to walk down the aisle, Hannah's father wheeled her part of the way down, and then her fiancé, Stuart, tenderly carried her the rest of the way.

Hannah, 23, who along with her now-husband is originally from Northern Ireland, said that despite her predicament, the only emotion she allowed herself to feel on the day was joy. "Obviously, being in the wheelchair and not able to walk was very upsetting for me on my wedding day," she told reporters.

Because of her injuries, Patterson Hannah sat during most of her wedding, but wanted to stand for one very important part. "I was determined to stand for my vows," she said. "It was hard on me to stand for that long even with Stuart holding me up, but it doesn't seem obvious in the pictures and video the pain I was in."

Hannah has continued to heal in the two months since the nuptials, and is now able to walk around the house using a cane. She added: "Stuart has never left my side during all of this … He was strong for both of us. He always made me see how blessed I was."

Possible Preaching Angles: 1) Love of God; Love of Christ; Christians too were wounded by sin and helpless, but God came to us and carried us into a loving relationship with Himself. 2) Security; Stumbling; God keeps us from falling. Every day we should remember how blessed we are to have God's faithful love holding us up. 3) Love, human; Love, romantic; A husband should love his wife as he loves himself and support her always.

For a culture that's bought into the photo-shopped notion that romance equals euphoria, or blissful self-fulfillment, or nonstop infatuation, writer Heather Havrilskey offers the following advice on true romance:

After a decade of marriage … I'm going to tell you my most romantic story of all. I was very sick out of the blue with some form of dysentery. It hit overnight. I got up to go to the bathroom, and I fainted on the way and cracked my ribs on the side of the bathtub. My husband discovered me there, passed out, in a scene that … well, think about what that might look like …

My husband was not happy about this scene. But he handled it without complaint. That is the very definition of romantic: not only not being made to feel crappy about things that are clearly out of your control, but being quietly cared for by someone who can shut up and do what needs to be done under duress …

Now let's tackle something even darker and more unpleasant, the seeming antithesis of our modern notion of romance: Someone is dying in their own bed, and someone's spouse is sitting at the bedside, holding the dying person's hand, and also handling all kinds of unspeakable things that people who aren't drowning in gigantic piles of cash sometimes have to handle all by themselves. To me, that's romance.

New York Times columnist David Brooks argues that there are three different lenses through which to think about marriage decisions—the psychological, the romantic, and the moral lens.

Most of the popular advice books adopt a psychological lens. These books start with the premise that getting married is a daunting prospect. So psychologists urge us to pay attention to traits like "agreeableness," social harmony, empathy, and niceness.

The second lens is the romantic lens. This is the dominant lens in movie and song. More than people in many other countries, Americans want to marry the person they are passionately in love with. But in their book "The Good Marriage," Judith Wallerstein and Sandra Blakeslee concluded that 15 percent of couples maintain these kinds of lifelong romantic marriages.

The third lens is the moral lens. In this lens a marriage exists to serve some higher purpose. Brooks points to Tim Keller's book "The Meaning of Marriage," where Keller argues that marriage introduces you to yourself; you realize you're not as noble and easy to live with as you thought when alone. Brooks writes:

In a good marriage you identify your own selfishness and see it as the fundamental problem. You treat it more seriously than your spouse's selfishness. The everyday tasks of marriage are opportunities to cultivate a more selfless love. Everyday there's a chance to inspire and encourage your partner to become his or her best self. In this lens, marriage isn't about two individuals trying to satisfy their own needs; it's a partnership of mutual self-giving for the purpose of moral growth and to make their corner of the world a little better.

Outside a grocery store in Tucson, Arizona, a troubled college-dropout named Jared Lee Loughner opened fire, killing six people and injuring 13 others. He also shot and severely injured U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords. Dorwan "Dory" Stoddard, a 76-year-old retired construction worker, was among six people shot to death. Stoddard used his body to shelter his wife Mavanell, 75, or Mavy, from the gunfire.

The next week, several hundred mourners gathered for a memorial service for Dory. His loved ones remembered that Dory didn't become a hero during that tragic shooting. For years he had lived with the character of a hero, and on January 8th, 2011 he acted in tune with his character. At the service, Dory's pastor Mike Nowak put it this way: "Dory Stoddard … didn't die a hero, he lived a hero. He completed his heroic act of kindness one final time with his wife, Mavy." Dory's son Dale, one of four sons, recalled a selfless family man known as "Mr. Fixit," who was consistently looking to help others. "He was always helping someone, someone who was hurting, someone who needed some care or just a gallon of gasoline," he told the service, flanked by his three brothers. "Guys like my father are rare."

Tim Keller, in the sermon "Literalism" said:

Many years ago, when I first started reading the Book of Genesis, it was very upsetting to me. Here are all these spiritual heroes—Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph—and look at how they treat women. They engage in polygamy, and they buy and sell their wives. It was awful to read their stories at times. But then I read Robert Alter's The Art of Biblical Narrative. Alter is a Jewish scholar at Berkeley whose expertise is ancient Jewish literature. In his book he says there are two institutions present in the Book of Genesis that were universal in ancient cultures: polygamy and primogeniture. Polygamy said a husband could have multiple wives, and primogeniture said the oldest son got everything—all the power, all the money. In other words, the oldest son basically ruled over everyone else in the family.

Alter points out that when you read the Book of Genesis, you'll see two things. First of all, in every generation polygamy wreaks havoc. Having multiple wives is an absolute disaster—socially, culturally, spiritually, emotionally, psychologically, and relationally. Second, when it comes to primogeniture, in every generation God favors the younger son over the older. He favors Abel, not Cain; Isaac, not Ishmael; Jacob, not Esau. Alter says that you begin to realize what the Book of Genesis is doing—it is subverting, not supporting, those ancient institutions at every turn.

When I read Alter's book, I then reread the Book of Genesis and loved it. And then it hit me: What if when I was younger, I had abandoned my trust in the Bible because of these accounts in Genesis? What if I had drop-kicked the Bible and the Christian faith, missing out on a personal relationship with Christ—all because I couldn't understand the behavior of the patriarchs? The lesson is simple: Be patient with the text. Consider the possibility that it might not be teaching what you think it's teaching.

Fred Winters, the pastor of First Baptist Church in Maryville, Illinois, was shot and killed during a Sunday service on March 8, 2009, by a troubled young man. A week after the tragic event, his wife, Cindy Winters, was interviewed by Julie Chen of CBS's Early Show. When asked about her husband's alleged killer, Terry Sedlacek, Winters spoke only a message of forgiveness—a message quite fitting for the Easter season:

I do not have any hatred, or even hard feelings towards him. We have been praying for him. One of the first things that my daughter said to me after this happened was, "You know, I hope that he comes to learn to love Jesus through all of this." We are not angry at all, and we really firmly believe that he can find hope and forgiveness and peace through this, by coming to know Jesus. And we hope that that happens for him.

Based on a survey of 1,000 U.S. adults:

• Forty-eight percent of men still have feelings for an ex-girlfriend or ex-wife.
• Thirty-seven percent of women still have feelings for an ex-boyfriend or ex-husband.
• Overall, two in five adults feel they let the "right one" get away.

When Dick Peterson's wife, Elizabeth, was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, he knew many challenges awaited his family. What he didn't know was just how many lessons he would learn along the way about love and service in the name of Christ. He writes:

The intruder invaded Elizabeth's body, and by extension, mine. Her disease became my disease and made demands on our relationship we were ill-prepared to manage. As she moved from cane to walker to electric scooter and finally to a powered wheelchair, then lost use of her right hand, I had to adjust my life to fit her needs.

Uninvited and unwelcome, this disease now forces us into a kind of sick reality game, leaving no choice but to follow the rules even as they change and become more restrictive …

Every family divvies up chores, fairly or not so fairly. The MS dictates ours and it's not at all fair, but we do have the choice to let it tear us apart or use it to strengthen our marriage bond as we face the adversity together. This reaches deeper than deciding who does what. It reaches to feelings, emotions, and attitudes about what we do, what's done to us, and who we are to ourselves and each other …

We both pray for healing. With our families and our church, we agonize before God for a return to the day when Elizabeth can offer an open handshake instead of a permanently clenched fist, or take a flight of stairs without thought.

But if we only grieve the loss, we miss the gain—that what this disease does to us may also be done for us. Even as the MS steals abilities from Elizabeth's life, a healing grows almost undetected inside. When we talk about this, Elizabeth wonders aloud, "Did it really take this to teach me that my soul is more important to God than my body?"

And I ask, "Is this what Jesus meant when he taught his disciples to serve? When he washed their feet, did he look 2,000 years into the future and see me washing my wife's clothes and helping her onto her shower seat to bathe? Did it really take this to teach me compassion?" …

God's healing can be sneaky. We pray that Elizabeth will resume her old life; he wants her to assume a new life. We long for change on the outside; he desires change on the inside. We pray for what we want; he answers with what he knows we need …

[God] has made me question whom it is I love. When I pray for healing, is it for Elizabeth? Or is it because her healing would make life so much easier for me? I challenge, "Aren't you the God who heals? I love her and I want her well." But in the back of my mind I know I also want her healed for me.

In response to my challenge, Jesus asks me as he asked Peter, "Do you love me more than these?" I think, He wants me to love him more than my wife. So I reply with Peter's words, "Yes, Lord. You know that I love you."

"Tend my lambs," he tells me …

The exposure shames me. Do I love him more than these? This is the love of Matthew 22:37–39 that commands me to love God with all that's within me, with all my heart, soul, and mind, and to love my neighbor—my wife—as I would myself.

Loving what I want for myself isn't even on the list. It's not in me to love like that, except that God has promised that his love "has been poured out within our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us" (Romans 5:5, NASB). God has given me an impossible command, but he has given me the power to obey it.

The intruder still resides in our home, still presents us with new challenges each day, and still teaches us forceful lessons on submission, dependence, service, and a love that endures all things and never fails—even when I fail.

Strange as it may seem, that intruder is beginning to look more and more like a guest.

In the book Stories for the Journey, William R. White tells about a European seminary professor named Hans and his wife, Enid. World War II forced them to flee to America where he found a job teaching. He was warm, gentle, beloved by his students, and he brought Scripture to life for them.

Hans and Enid were very much in love. Nearly every day they took long walks together, holding hands, and they always sat close in church, until Enid died, overwhelming Hans with sorrow. Worried because he wouldn't eat nor take walks, the seminary president, along with three other friends, visited him regularly, but he remained lonely and depressed. Experiencing the dark night of the soul, Hans told his friends, "I am no longer able to pray to God. In fact, I am not certain I believe in God any more."

After a moment of silence the seminary president said, "Then we will believe for you. We will make your confession for you. We will pray for you." So the four men met daily for prayer, asking God to restore the gift of faith to their dear friend.

Many months later, as the four gathered with Hans, he smiled and said, "It is no longer necessary for you to pray for me. Today, I would like you to pray with me." The dark night of the soul had passed. Instead of carrying Hans to Jesus on a stretcher, they had carried him on their prayers.

Friends of ours grew up in the church and have a fine house, sweet kids, and good jobs. But the wife has an emotional/mental problem. She periodically steals from her own family and gambles the money away.

She's been to counselors, doctors, and pastors, but nothing helps permanently. Imagine your own wife stealing from you, pawning objects of value, withdrawing money from bank accounts intentionally (but not infallibly) denied her, and lying about it for months.

Every time she's stolen from her husband and ruined his future, he's forgiven her and taken her back. Even when she gave up on her own life and tried to kill herself, he refused to give up on her.

I asked this husband once why he didn't end this marriage, in spite of pressure from many friends and family to do so. His words were courageous and simple: "She is a good mother most of the time, and my children need her. But more than that, they need to know the love of their God. How can they know of a Father in heaven who forgives them if their own father won't forgive their own mother?"

A man should eat and drink beneath his means, clothe himself within his means, and honor his wife above his means.

Flight attendants give these instructions to airline passengers: "For those of you traveling with small children, in the event of an oxygen failure, first place the mask on your own face and then place the mask on your child's face."

In family life, parents often spend most of their time placing oxygen masks on their children's faces while the marriage relationship suffocates. The only way to have a strong family is to make sure that husband and wife keep the oxygen supply of love flowing strong between them.

I'll be sashaying along through life, feeling pretty cocky, when something will jolt me back into a sense of my neediness--my need for my husband. It could be a fleeting loneliness, a bad day at the office, a troubling phone conversation. And I'm reminded: "As competent and independent as you think you are--you can't go it alone. And you don't have to." ... That's what marriage at its best does for you: it puts someone in your corner.