14 Before Dark
John and Jackie got into a pattern; they didn’t know how harmful it would prove to be. Jackie was quiet and thoughtful, the type who would rather curl up with a good book than go out for the evening. Jackie’s father was a history professor at a major university, and her mother stayed at home and concentrated on the children. There was an attractive regularity to Jackie’s home growing up. Holidays were always spent the same way, and every summer the family would spend a week at the same lake house. Jackie went to school with the same group of friends from kindergarten to high school graduation and went off with many of them to the local university where her father taught. Nothing much changed in Jackie’s life, and she liked it that way.
John was raised in big cities. His father was a very powerful lawyer who had worked his way up the food chain to big-time success. John had lived in Los Angeles, Dallas, and finally New York City. John was a big-city boy. He loved the sights, sounds, and chaos of the city. John wasn’t afraid of change; in fact, he liked it. He loved a new location with all its new challenges, and he was not afraid to do something he had never done before. So this is how John arrived at a major university in a relatively small town. He had never lived in a small town, and he liked the fact that the university was the center of what was happening there. By the time he graduated from high school, John was ready for something new, and he determined to stick around until it wasn’t new anymore.
Jackie’s family was quiet and careful. There wasn’t much ruckus in their house, even when they were celebrating something. The TV was used primarily for news, and the music that was played around the house was usually classical. Jackie’s parents were careful financially, as well, the result of raising four children on a professor’s salary. They lived in the same house for thirty-five years, building one addition about ten years after they purchased the house. They never bought a new car, and they furnished their house very modestly.
John’s family lived in a succession of bigger and bigger houses. It wasn’t long in John’s father’s career before money was no longer an object. John’s family bought and did expensive things. John was given a car on his sixteenth birthday and took a European road trip the summer after graduating from high school. John’s family had taken vacations around the world and seemed determined not to take a vacation to the same place twice. They were a family who liked action and excitement. In the evenings their television was always on and music always seemed to be playing.
John and Jackie met during the second semester of their second year. They were across from one another in Starbucks near the Student Union. Jackie was taken by John’s infectious laugh. Before long they were talking, and before the conversation was over they had agreed to get together later that evening for coffee. It wasn’t love at first sight, but it was close.
John loved how grounded Jackie seemed. He had never met a girl her age who was so mature. Jackie projected a quiet confidence. She didn’t need excitement or drama in her life. She seemed to know who she was and where she was going. She was a font of information about the town and the university; it made John feel that he was always getting the insider’s tour. And to top it off, Jackie was a very committed believer.
Jackie loved how John seemed to want to live life to the fullest. It was exciting that somehow John got her to do things she had never done. She loved John’s laugh and the fact that he made her laugh more than she ever had in her life. It was a fun and new experience to be with someone who didn’t need to pinch his pennies. Jackie couldn’t believe it when they began to talk about their faith that very first evening. She really did think she had hit the college-boyfriend jackpot.
Graduation was followed quickly by a beautiful wedding in the church where Jackie had grown up. John was accepted into law school in a big city, so off they went to start their life together. But Jackie and John got into a pattern, and they didn’t know how harmful it would be. There were two aspects to this pattern. First, John and Jackie hadn’t taken time to think about how different they were in personality, lifestyle, and Christian maturity. It was almost as if they didn’t want anything to mess up the joy they were experiencing in their relationship with one another. Yet once they got married, things immediately got sticky. It didn’t take long for John’s spontaneity and impulsiveness to drive Jackie a bit crazy. No two days ever seemed the same. Nights always seemed to be filled with some kind of activity. It seemed that she was on a ride that she could not get off. And if Jackie attempted to question or debate John’s plan, John would pout.
John began to think that if he saw Jackie with another book in her hand, he would lose it. It bothered him that she was so slow and methodical. It irritated him that she took so long to make even the most minor decision. He couldn’t handle watching her labor over what outfit to wear to wherever they were going. He was sick of her saying she just wanted to stay home. He had quickly grown tired of her constantly telling him that he was spending too much money. And he simply did not want to be told again how noisy he was.
Jackie and John were tired of how both of them held forth their respective families as a better example of how to live. But Jackie and John had never examined how different they were from one another and how these differences would tempt them to criticism, anger, and bitterness.
But there was a second part to their pattern: they never talked about their moments of tension and disagreement, and they seldom asked for forgiveness for wrong attitudes, words, and actions in those moments of argument or debate. Night after night they would go to bed tense or angry. Morning after morning they would wake up silent, discouraged, or a bit bitter. Day after day they would rehearse the events of the previous evening in their heads. There were many suppers where they would eat quietly, the silence broken only by the percussion of their utensils on the plate.
John began to enjoy being away from home more than being at home, although he didn’t know it at first. He would make any excuse he could to extend his day. Jackie began to wonder if she had made a mistake, although she wasn’t aware that she was having this conversation with herself. The fact was that two very different people had gotten married, and these differences created almost daily difficulties, but they were working harder to deny their difficulties than to deal with them, and they were paying the price. They were both discouraged and increasingly bitter, and it didn’t seem to be getting any better.
Jackie and John weren’t in trouble because of their differences. No, they were in trouble because of the way they were dealing with their differences. They had established patterns of denial, wrong communication, anger, and unforgiveness—all without decisive moments of resolution. They were sucking the life out of their marriage, and they didn’t even know it.
DEALING WITH REALITY
So, what should you do as you are confronted with daily differences between you and your spouse when it comes to the way that you think about and respond to the issues and situations of daily life? Let me suggest steps of a productive pattern that will work to strengthen the unity, understanding, and love of your marriage as it again and again calls you to reconcile with one another.
1) Face reality. It never works to deny, reject, or avoid reality. You simply cannot deal with reality in a way that leads to change by refusing to face it. Yet, I am afraid that this is exactly what many, many couples are attempting to do. They work to convince themselves that things are not as bad as they seem, that things will work out, or that they just need to give things a little more time. Perhaps they are afraid that in attempting to deal with things, they will just make things worse. But inaction is seldom an effective course of action leading to change. Reality is something you should always face. The truth is something you should not be afraid of.
Here is where Scripture provides the exact model that we need. I am daily appreciative for the way the Bible deals with reality. Scripture is on one hand brutally honest. The level of honesty in the Bible never fails to stun me. The blood and guts of a broken world filled with flawed people is on every page of the Bible. There are stories in the Bible that force you to deal with how dark and dangerous things can get in this fallen world. There are passages that require you to accept things about yourself that you would be tempted to deny. On the other hand, the Bible is the most hopeful and encouraging book you could ever read. Scripture’s offer of life, real and eternal life, is on every page in some way. The whole story of the Bible marches to a glorious end where sin and death will die and things will be right forever.
Why do we have both these themes in the Bible? Because God is inviting us to understand that when we place our trust in him, we don’t have to sacrifice either honesty or hope. The honesty of the Bible is not softened by its hope, and the hope of the Bible is not negated by its honesty. Because of who God is and because of the grace he has given us in Jesus Christ, we can face reality unafraid. We can look difficulty in the face and not panic. You can face your differences with honesty and hope even on days when those differences seem huge and unity seems distant.
2) Deal honestly with your anger. As with reality, it never works to deny your anger. You know how it works. You know your wife is angry because there is more pot and pan percussion than normal as she is preparing dinner. So you go into the kitchen and ask her what is wrong. She replies rather sharply, “Nothing’s wrong!” You respond, “Honey, I think you’re angry about something.” So she replies, “I’m not angry. It makes me so mad when you accuse me of being angry! I’m just trying to get dinner on the table. It would be helpful if you would leave me alone and let me do what I need to do.” You say, “I think we need to talk.” And she replies, as she turns her back on you, “You don’t want to talk to me right now!”
One of the most important steps in dealing with your differences is to admit to, and own, the things that are going on in your heart. You need to admit and confess when you have been irritated, impatient, or angry, and you need to own the wrong things you have done or said in those moments. I was always amazed when I would counsel couples who had struggled with their differences for years that they would begin to admit and confess their anger for the very first time in my office.
If you are going to deal with your anger, then you must be willing to overlook minor differences. You cannot live with another person and make every difference equally important and equally an issue between you. Some differences are not important at all. It is not important that you and your husband or wife don’t always like to eat the same thing or appreciate the same kind of movie. It is not important that one of you is neater than the other. There is plenty of room for these kinds of differences to live in a good marriage. When dealing with your differences, you must prioritize the places where there should be some kind of functional unity in order to cooperate. For example, it is probably not workable or healthy for you to attend different churches. It wouldn’t work to have different approaches to parenting. You have to reach agreement on how you are going to approach your financial decisions and your daily use of money. These you cannot and should not overlook, but there are many places in your marriage where you should allow your differences room to breathe.
There is one final thing that is essential to commit yourself to do. Deal with your anger before it gets dark and you go to sleep. The failure to do this was a fatal error for John and Jackie. It allowed both their anger and their hopelessness to grow. Paul gives wonderfully practical counsel: “Be angry and do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger, and give no opportunity to the devil” (Eph. 4:26–27). Each of his three directives here is helpful.
First, in a commitment to keep short accounts and deal with things humbly and quickly, don’t be angry and don’t give way to sin. There are many things loaded into these words, but here is one commitment you must have. When you are angry, resist going where your anger is leading you. In Jesus, you do have the power to say no to the desire to indulge your anger by saying and doing things that you shouldn’t. When you do this, you are complicating your own trouble, layering more hurt on the hurt that is already there.
Next, in marriage it is vital to refuse to let the sun go down while you are still angry. I cannot tell you what a protection this biblical directive was and is to Luella and me. We determined from day one that we would not go to sleep angry. Sometimes that meant we would be lying in bed, propping our eyes open, waiting for the other person to ask for forgiveness first! But we were protected by keeping short accounts, and bad moments were not allowed to grow.
Paul adds one more thing. When you have done sinful things in the heat of anger and have refused to deal with what you have done before you go to bed, you give the Devil an opportunity to do his nasty work of deceit and division. It is amazing how, if you give hurt and anger time, they will grow even though nothing further has happened! So keeping short accounts by dealing with your anger humbly and quickly is a great protection for you and your marriage.
3) Communicate in ways that are wholesome. What we have done with our understanding of wholesome talk is sad. We have reduced wholesome communication to vocabulary; that is, wholesome talk is understood as little more than refusing to speak a certain set of words. The biblical definition of wholesome communication focuses not so much on our vocabulary but on the intentions of our heart. Let’s consider the words of Paul again: “Let no corrupting [unwholesome] talk come out of your mouths, but only such as is good for building up, as fits the occasion, that it may give grace to those who hear” (Eph. 4:29). The addition of the word unwholesome is mine. Every one of our marriages would benefit from a daily commitment to speak to one another in this way.
When you are dealing with your differences and the hurt and anger that has resulted, it is essential that you commit yourself to communicate with your spouse in a way that lives up to the biblical standard of wholesome communication. It is possible to never raise your voice, never use a curse word, and never call the other an unkind name, yet still to be proud, unkind, and unwilling to change, more worried about what you want than what the other needs. Wholesome communication is other-focused and other-directed. You say what you are saying in a way that considers your spouse, and you speak in a way that is helpful to him or her.
What does this look like practically? Paul tells us. It means you want to speak to your spouse in a way that builds him up. You want to leave your spouse hopeful, encouraged, and feeling loved. You don’t want to leave him discouraged and hopeless. You don’t want to communicate to him in a way that stimulates him to be angry or bitter. You don’t want to say anything that would tempt him to doubt God, his presence, and his help. It means that you will want to speak to your spouse in a way that fits the moment. If you are in a public setting or if you are with a group of people, it is not wholesome to engage your spouse in a conversation about your differences, nor is it loving to force your spouse to talk to you about how he has once again irritated you when he is exhausted or distraught. When you are not conscious of your surroundings and talk to your spouse in a way that is insensitive or embarrassing, you are talking to him that way not because you are considering him, but because you are considering yourself. You are indulging your anger and are unwilling to wait until you are in a moment that will be more helpful for your spouse and more productive for your relationship.
The last thing Paul says is his ultimate definition of wholesome communication. It is talk that gives grace to the one hearing. Wholesome talk gifts a person with the grace of love, the grace of hope, the grace of comfort, the grace of forgiveness, the grace of wisdom, the grace of peace, the grace of patience, and the grace of faithfulness. When you speak with this kind of grace, you become a tool of transforming grace from a wise, loving, and powerful redeemer, who is at work in this moment of struggle to change you and your spouse and your marriage. He has an amazing ability to turn bad things into beautiful things. Think of the cross; the worst thing that ever happened became the best thing that ever happened. When you function as a tool of grace, God is able to do in you, through you, and for you things you would never, ever be able to accomplish on your own.
You see, the hope of your marriage is not your ability to win an argument or to forge some sticky compromise. The hope of your marriage is not convincing your husband or wife that your way is the right and only way. The hope of your marriage is not your ability to swallow your anger and edit your words. The hope of your marriage is not acting as if things are okay when they are not. The hope of your marriage is not following demands with threats until the other succumbs to your power. No, the hope of your marriage is not to be found in your husband or wife. It is found in one place and one place alone—the amazing grace of an ever-present and ever-faithful Lord. He alone is able to take you where you need to go in order to experience what he designed your marriage to be.
The problem you really need help with is not so much that you are different, but how the sin inside you causes you to deal with your differences in a way that deepens your trouble rather than solving it. This is why God’s grace is the real hope of your marriage. His grace gives you everything you need to say no to sin and do what is wholesome, even in moments when you are angry or discouraged.
4) Run to your resources. As you’re dealing with your differences, it is important to remember that your marriage was never meant to exist in isolation. To be healthy, your marriage needs to be connected to a larger community that offers you resources that you could not offer to one another if left to yourselves. The community of help that God has designed for you is the church. Right near you in the body of Christ are couples who have been through what you are now going through. Luella and I wonder where we would be in our marriage if we had not benefited from the wisdom of brothers and sisters who honestly shared their struggles with us and graciously shared what God had taught them.
There is also the teaching and preaching ministry of the church. It is amazing to me as I preach how many people come up to me, e-mail me, or text me and let me know that what I said on Sunday was exactly what they needed to hear. I’ve had many husbands or wives ask me after a sermon whether I had talked to their spouse, or if I had a secret camera placed in their house! God will apply his Word to your situation with a specificity that no preacher in his best application moment would be able to.
Then there are the sacraments of the church that so powerfully remind you of who you are as a child of God and the amazing gifts that are yours because of the broken body and shed blood of the Lord Jesus Christ. Along with this there is the encouraging and strengthening fellowship of a small group and the insight and hope that can be gained from solid Christian books. You are not alone. God is not unkind and unfaithful so as to leave you without the resources to do what he has called you to do.
5) Resist the lies of the enemy. He will whisper two deadly lies into your ears. The first lie is, “It’s not your fault.” Here he is working to convince you that you are okay, that you have no need to grow and change. He will work to convince you that your big problems are outside you and not inside you. And if he successfully convinces you of this, then you quit being excited about the help that God has offered you, because you don’t think you need it. If he can convince each of you that the other is the problem, then you can spend all your time pointing the finger and assessing blame, and in your standoff you grow more self-righteous, and the condition of your marriage worsens.
But there is a second lie. The enemy of your soul and your marriage will whisper this in your ear as well: “You don’t have enough.” He will work to convince you that you simply do not have what you need to face the realities of your differences with hope and courage. He will tempt you to give in and give up. He will tempt you to run and hide. He will tempt you to give way to things that you have the power to resist. He will work to make you feel poor and weak. And if he can get you to minimize your sin and doubt God’s provision, he’s got you.
Dealing with your differences is never just about communication, negotiation, and compromise. It is spiritual war. You are still a sinner, and so is your spouse. You are both capable of desiring, thinking, speaking, and acting in ways that are not only fundamentally wrong but are destructive to the unity, understanding, and love of your marriage. It is never just the two of you. You live in a world where evil still exists. You and I cannot live in our world with a lazy, comfort-oriented, peace-time mentality. The war still rages. We must be wise and alert, good soldiers in the war that is being fought for control of our hearts.
6) Create something new. Marriage was never intended to be a lifelong series of his-way/her-way skirmishes. Your home, your lifestyle, and your schedule shouldn’t reflect the vision, tastes, desires, decisions, or instincts of one of you. No, God has intended your lives to become so fundamentally intertwined, so beautifully woven together in every way, and so much a reflection of a daily commitment to cooperation, that the only term that could be used for your union is “one flesh.” You have celebrated your created differences and how the influences throughout your life have shaped each of you, but you have also caught the vision of how God has chosen you to be melded together in marriage in a way that makes each of you better-rounded in experience and perspective and more mature in character. In other words, by God’s grace you have made use of your differences to become better people, better able to be what God created you to be and do what he created you to do.
As I sat with John and Jackie and listened to the story of the hurt and disappointment of their marital struggle, I was impressed at how skillful they had been at living separately together. They had not become “one flesh” in any way. They had become increasingly irritated by their differences and increasingly distraught with the fact that they had gotten to a place where it was practically impossible to do anything together without a major debate that would quickly descend into a debilitating argument. Hurtful things were said and done, leaving each of them determined never to go through that again. So, rather than following the pattern we have been considering of growing in appreciation and unity, they dealt with their differences by living separate lives, and they worked to win the day and control the outcome when it was necessary to do something together. Night after night they would go to bed discouraged or angry. And the more this happened, the more they separately wondered if they had made a terrible mistake.
Yet, the more I got to know John and Jackie, the more I could see God’s wisdom in bringing them together. John really did need to become a more reasoned and measured man. He did need to see the value of thoughtful planning. He did need to grow in his commitment to examine his thoughts and edit his words. He had so much to learn from Jackie if he would stop feeling threatened and celebrate the wonder of God’s bringing her into his life.
Jackie needed to be yanked out of her comfort zone. She carried with her a package of unused gifts because she always seemed to opt for what was familiar and comfortable. She seemed unable to be spontaneous and got way too uptight when she was required to deal with something that she had not anticipated or that had not been part of her plan. Jackie was more motivated by fear than she knew. It was impossible to get to know her and not be impressed with the wisdom of God in causing her story to become intertwined with John’s. In a real way, John was the perfect man for Jackie, and it was good that he was with her. No, I don’t mean that he was perfect. John was far from perfect, but he brought a set of innate gifts and experiences that were the perfect balance for Jackie. She really did have so much to learn and to gain from John.
Here’s what I am saying. John was strong where Jackie was weak, and Jackie was strong where John was weak. It is amazing to stand back and consider the wisdom of God in bringing them together. Yet, rather than capitalizing on one another’s strengths and growing as a result, they played to one another’s weaknesses. In so doing, instead of growing in character and unity they participated in a silent conspiracy in a marriage of distrust, fear, disunity, hurt, anger, and disappointment. They thought their marriage was impossible. The real truth was that they had taken a relationship of beautiful possibility and made it impossible by a stubborn unwillingness to listen, give, serve, and learn.
I would sit with Jackie and John and think to myself, “This marriage could be a thing of beauty, but look at what it’s become.” However, there is one thing John and Jackie did that was right: in their hurt and disappointment they ran to their resources. They were not alone. Jackie had developed a relationship with an older woman at the church who had been married for over thirty years. Fear and shame had kept Jackie from being honest with her older friend about what was going on in her marriage, but she got desperate enough that her desperation became stronger than her fear, and she reached out for help. It was through the counsel of this older woman that John and Jackie ended up with me. It took a while, but these two desperate people became celebrants and began a life that was truly lived together.
7) Humbly admit your ongoing struggle. The good news of the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ is that you have all the help you will ever need to face whatever is written into your life by the one who is writing your story. But you must humbly face the fact that until you are in his final kingdom, where sin, suffering, and death are no more, you will need his rescue, forgiveness, empowerment, and deliverance moment by moment every day. You will never become a grace graduate! This means that there will never be a point in your marriage where you can just lay back, chill out, and coast. As long as sin still lives inside you, with its self-focused, antisocial instincts, you need to live with open eyes, listening ears, and an approachable heart.
None of us is yet all that grace is able to cause us to be. None of our marriages is all that God has designed each of them to be. No one reading this can say, “Our marriage is perfect and without need of growth in any way.” We all must confess that every day we struggle with sin. Every day we say and do what is wrong. Every day we desire things we should not have and think things we should not think. Every day we fall once again into living for ourselves rather than for God and others. We don’t celebrate who God has made our husbands and wives to be in the way that we should. We do get irritated and impatient because we want our spouse to be our clone, and we don’t really want to have to deal with the difficulty of molding our lives together into one. We love our comfort more than we love one another. We want to have our own way rather than going God’s way. We want things done our way rather than having to consider another way or being required to admit that there is a way that may be better than ours. We don’t want to admit that there are ways in which our husbands or wives are stronger or more mature than we are. We don’t want to admit that not everything can be reduced to a moral right or wrong. We don’t like having to live with differences.
We each have to humbly admit that the struggle still goes on, but we do not have to give way to fatalism or cynicism, because grace guarantees that we are not alone. Grace has bound Jesus to us and us to him forever. Grace is working to pry each of us out of our tiny little kingdom of one to live together in the lushness of God’s big kingdom of love.
Your King and Savior is at work, even when you have given up. He loves you even when you don’t have sense enough to love one another or to love him in return. He is working outside you to produce in you a sense of need, and working inside you to give you what you need. You never arrive at a location where he is not present. You never live in a relationship without him being there as well. You never face a disappointment, temptation, responsibility, obligation, opportunity, or calling without the resources of his grace. In your darkest moment, his grace lights your way. In your deepest disappointment, his love gives you hope. When you are weak and exhausted, his strength gives you reason to go on. When you are confused and don’t know what to do, his wisdom gives you direction. In the moments when you feel wounded and alone, he comforts you with loving and healing hands. When you have lost your way, he seeks you and finds you and brings you back.
Your hope of a long-term, loving marriage is found in one place— God’s love for you. Admit that you need it and then give yourself to celebrating that this God of love has brought you and your spouse together for his glory and your good. And remember, he will not call you to a task without giving you, in his grace, what you need to do it.