15 Eyes Wide Open
Beth wanted out, and Eric had little motivation to convince her to stay. I had seen it before, so I wasn’t shocked, but it was sad nonetheless. Beth and Eric had known each other for thirty years and had been married for twenty-five. Just two months short of their twenty-fifth anniversary they were in my office to talk about dissolving their marriage. Beth had already designed her escape plan, and Eric had already decided not to fight. I wasn’t too clear on why they wanted to see me.
Yes, I had seen it before, but I was reminded once again of the very first time. It had been a couple named John and Judy. They had been married for thirty years, but they both desperately wanted out. I had been immediately confronted with the irrationality of it all. You would think that if a couple could make it for thirty years, they could make it forever. You would think that in thirty years, they would have learned what it takes to live together. You would think that after thirty years, they would have benefited from all the wisdom that they had gained from difficulty and failure. You would think that if they had lived that long with one another, they would have been determined to die together, but that is simply not always the case. Beth and Eric reminded me of John and Judy.
Beth’s tears flowed easily, and Eric seldom looked up. With slumped shoulders and few words, Eric was about to let his marriage go. And with an almost delusional hope in a renewed future, all Beth could think about was life beyond Eric. What they said wasn’t at all unfamiliar. They both wondered where the love had gone. They had a detailed litany of the wrongs the other had done. They both came armed with arguments for why it was impossible for their marriage to continue. But it hit me that their analysis of their marriage was marked more by accusation than regret. It was this that caught my attention. Somewhere they had quit living as one and begun living separately together. Let me explain.
There is a sometimes subtle, but always dramatic, difference between standing as one to fight together the things that threaten your marriage and standing separately and keeping a record of the things the other does that make marriage difficult for you. The first is an act of relational commitment; the second is a posture of self-preservation and survival. The first strengthens a marriage; the second weakens it. The first draws you closer together as you learn to protect yourself from your weaknesses; the second tears you apart as weaknesses morph into accusations and judgments. The first makes you growingly aware and merciful in the face of struggle; the second causes you to be increasingly impatient with, and intolerant of, your spouse’s struggle. The first leads you to seek God together; the second causes you to seek escape separately. The first leads you to hope; the second reinforces your despair. The first convinces you that you must and you will; the second convinces you that you can’t and you won’t. The first builds your resolve to stay; the second gives you reason for going. The first refuses to consider options; the second thinks that options are the only hope. The first accepts that staying means sacrifice; the second has had enough of sacrifice. The first knows love means work; the second is done with the work of love.
Clearly Beth and Eric were no longer standing together and defending their marriage against threat. Clearly they stood separately in a daily state of finger-pointing acrimony. It was this that gave me hope. You see, it was not that their marriage hadn’t worked. It wasn’t that it had been a cosmic mistake so that the only sensible course of action was escape. It wasn’t that God’s structures, principles, and promises had failed. No, Eric and Beth had quit being married. What I mean is that they had quit doing the things that make up the content of this book, and when they quit, it didn’t take long for their marriage to be in trouble.
Now, get prepared because I am about to surprise you: I think they quit doing the good things that make a marriage sturdy and beautiful not because they had a bad marriage but because they had a good marriage. At some point they quit watching and praying. At some point they began to lie back and enjoy the ride. They took good as an invitation to quit working, and now they were paying the price. This was not a marriage without hope; this was a marriage without work, and this side of heaven, walking away from the work never works.
LIFETIME WARRANTY
Grace gives your marriage a lifetime warranty. What this means is that God will give you everything you need to be what you are supposed to be and do what he has called you to do in your marriage. But you must do it. His grace enables, reconciles, restores, and repairs. His grace teaches you and changes you. His grace gives you what you need to ask forgiveness and to forgive. His grace empowers you to overlook minor offenses and target what is truly important. His grace helps you see yourself with greater and greater accuracy and respond to what you see with greater and greater wisdom. His grace gives you strength to continue when you feel like quitting. His grace gives you the power to resist temptation and to turn and do what is right. His grace rescues you from your obsession with self-love and welcomes you to the joyous work of loving another. His grace enables you to be good and angry at the same time. When grace works a commitment to God’s kingdom and righteousness in your heart, you will be angry at what sin does to you, to those you love, and to the situations in which you live, and that anger will motivate you to be a tool of change. His grace causes you to be committed to giving grace. His grace is a marriage warranty, because it gives you what you need, but what you get is grace in motion.
You see, Eric and Beth were not in trouble because God’s plan for marriage was infected by inherent defects or because his grace had practical gaps. No, they were in trouble because they got lazy and quit doing the things that would deliver to them the grace they had been given. It is here that I think Old Testament biblical accounts can help us. Consider Israel encamped on the shore of the Red Sea. It was a scary and discouraging situation. In such moments you have only two choices. You can look around and say to yourself, “This is nuts! There is no way out, so the best thing to do is cut and run.” Or you can remember God’s promise that he would deliver that enemy into your hands, and you can wait for his instruction. You will not experience the grace of redemption from the bondage of Egypt and from the threat of the enemy if you cut and run. You will only experience this grace if you do what God has called you to do and walk across the Red Sea between those gurgling walls of water, no matter how crazy and terrifying that may seem.
Or consider Jericho. How in the world is this ragtag group of recently freed slaves going to defeat this walled city? Now, again, you can respond based on the seeming impossibility of the task and give up the hope of ever living together in the Promised Land, or you can remember the promises of God and do what he calls you to do. This incident is especially helpful, because the walls didn’t come down after the first day’s parade. They didn’t come down after the second or third day either. You can see some of the Israelites either doubting this is ever going to work or wondering how many processionals it will take before it does. There is perseverance called for here. On the seventh day, at the sound of the trumpets, the walls crumbled.
From ground level, God’s call to Israel is humiliatingly irrational. No one would march around a walled city in close proximity to its weaponry and expect to live, let alone defeat them! But maybe that is the point. God uses occasions of trouble to deepen our trust in him and our willingness to do what he says, no matter how much it goes against our natural instincts. In order for Israel to receive the grace of the defeat of their enemy, they had to be willing to take the walk until the walls came down.
Yes, the Red Sea was an obstacle, a huge and discouraging one. And, yes, Jericho was an obstacle, one that seemingly could not be overcome. But they were both much more than this. They were both part of God’s plan. If you examine the first few verses of Exodus 14, you will realize that Israel didn’t end up in front of the Red Sea because Moses had a defective internal GPS. No, God commanded Moses to guide Israel there because God knew exactly what was going to happen and what he would do. He was going to use this scary occasion to reveal his glory to Israel so that they would know that he was with them and would exercise his power on their behalf. And he was going to use this situation to let Egypt know once and for all who is Lord.
God was also not surprised that fortified Jericho was in the way of Israel’s possession of the land of promise. In fact, it was his plan that Israel participate in the clearing of the land of promise. In so doing, Israel was to become strong in faith and in worship of the Lord. In the same way, God is never surprised at the obstacles you encounter as you live with your husband or wife. He planned for you to be married to a flawed person and for you to live in a fallen world together. He intended marital hardship to drive you to his grace and, as it does, to cause you to grow and mature together. He also ordained these changes in you, and your marriage, to be a process and not an event. He is with you and gives you what you need, but you must get up and follow him across the sea into battle.
WHERE THINGS OFTEN GO WRONG
The sad thing about the broken state of Eric and Beth’s marriage was how quietly it went bad. It was going bad and they didn’t even notice it. They didn’t see that they were coasting, and that this side of heaven you can’t be a sinner living with a sinner and coast. You have to get up every morning and reconcile once again to one another and to God. You have to accept the call to work every day to make your marriage what it was intended to be. You have to humbly admit that you are a person who is still in need of change and growth. You have to be willing to be confronted and to examine your choices, desires, thoughts, words, and behavior. You have to live with your eyes and heart open. You have to be a good student, studying your spouse and learning how to love him or her in fresh new ways. You have to locate the potholes in your marriage that have the potential of bumping your marriage out of line. You have to be willing to go through tough and sometimes tense moments of honesty to get things on the table that need to be examined and discussed. You have to be willing to get up early or stay up late because there are things you need to finish between you. You have to be willing to open up your marriage to God and others, getting the help you need for the things you are facing. You have to remind yourself daily of the amazing resources of grace that you have been given, and celebrate. You have to resist giving way to cynicism and discouragement. You have to battle giving way to anger or fear. You have to fight the “what ifs” and the “if onlys.” You really do have to believe that God will always supply what is needed at the moment it is needed. You have to pay attention to your marriage and remember him. You have to watch and pray.
Your marriage may be good. It may even be great. You may have grown together in appreciation, respect, unity, understanding, and love. You may have learned where problems typically exist for you as a couple, and you may have learned how to solve them together. You may have identified places where you and your marriage need to mature. You may have created a lifestyle of honest communication and efficient problem solving. You may have forged a solid and enjoyable friendship between you. You may be able to look back and be thankful because you recognize what you once were compared to what you are now.
But there is one thing that you need to accept: your marriage may be great, but it is not safe. No marriage this side of eternity is totally problem protected. No marriage is all that it could be. This side of heaven daily temptations are constant threats to you and your marriage. This side of heaven the spiritual war goes on. This side of heaven good marriages are good marriages because the people in those marriages are committed to doing daily the things that keep their marriages good. Things go wrong when couples think they have reached the point when they can retire from their marital work and chill out, lie back, and slide. Perhaps the greatest danger to a good marriage is a good marriage, because when things are good, we are tempted to give way to feelings of arrival and forsake the attitudes and disciplines that have, by God’s grace, made our marriage what it has become.
WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE TO COAST
So maybe you’re thinking, “Paul, I get the point; we cannot allow ourselves to coast, and we need to keep watching our marriage, but I’m not sure I know what coasting looks like.” Well, let me give you six characteristics of a coasting couple.
1) Visual Lethargy
In some way, at some time, we all quit looking. Some place in all of our lives we live with lazy eyes. Let me give you a couple of illustrations. The first time you drove to work, you were wide-eyed and attentive because you didn’t know where you were going. You marked down particular landmarks in your mental notebook so that you would remember your journey a second time. For the first few weeks you watched your surroundings closely as you drove, making sure that you identified your markers and made all of your turns. But after a while it didn’t seem so necessary to pay such careful attention. After a while you quit looking. Someone new rides with you and says, “Hey, when did that gas station close?” And you say, “I don’t know, I didn’t notice that it was closed.” You didn’t notice because at some point you quit looking. At some point you began to be preoccupied and easily distracted. Your drives to work were occupied with coffee and a scone, messing with the radio, and texting while driving. There are now times when you get to work and don’t remember stopping at lights or making those important turns. You don’t remember because you have quit looking. You are suffering from visual lethargy.
Luella and I have recently moved. From our previous location, we had to take a beautiful, tree-lined winding road along a river to get to Center City Philadelphia. Recently, we were in our old neighborhood and had to drive that road again. We both remarked how beautiful the drive was. As we were talking, I was thinking about how many times I drove that road and did not see its beauty.
To use another illustration, maybe you’re at an art fair and you have no intention of making a purchase. You are just there because it’s something fun to do. But as you’re strolling from booth to booth, a painting reaches out and grabs you. You say to your spouse, “Come here for a minute; you have got to see this.” After what seems to be an interminable negotiation, you are putting the painting in the car. You know exactly where you are going to hang it, and for the first few days you pause and look and smile when you are in the room where the painting is. You can’t believe that you own it. You are impressed with how it changes the atmosphere of the entire room. You are very grateful that it is yours. You reason that it needs proper light, so you have some track lighting installed. You notice that the pillows on the leather chair clash with the color themes of the painting, so you buy new pillows. When you have guests, you proudly show them the painting, and you share with them the story behind it.
But there comes a point where you are no longer aware of your prized purchase. There comes a time when you don’t smile anymore when you walk by it. There comes a time when a visitor is sitting in the room with you and says, “I love that painting,” and you say, “We got it a few years ago at a fair someplace,” and you go on with the conversation. You are no longer excited, because you no longer see. You are living with lazy eyes. It takes an outsider to get you to focus for a moment on what once captured your attention. You are suffering from visual lethargy, and you probably don’t know it.
Such is the state of many married couples. Beth and Eric had their eyes wide open during courtship. They listened to and watched one another carefully. Beth hung on Eric’s every word, and Eric watched all Beth’s reactions. They were always on the lookout for problems that might arise between them, and they were quick to solve what needed to be solved. There wasn’t much about their relationship that they took for granted, and they didn’t mind being good students in the laboratory room of the school of love.
The early days of their marriage were much the same. Beth couldn’t believe that she had actually been blessed to marry a man like Eric, and Eric knew that in marrying Beth, he had married way above his pay grade. They worked at their marriage, both being afraid to mess up the good thing that they had been given. But at some point, as the years rolled on, their eyes got lazy and their schedules got busy. At some point they began to feel that they were okay, and they began to coast. At some point they quit noticing the blessings. At some point they quit being thankful and watchful. And when they quit, they began to let things creep into their marriage that they would not have tolerated before. Because they quit paying attention, they quit noticing things that needed attention, and because they quit noticing, they quit working on the things that needed work. Lazy eyes were a major part of what led their marriage to disaster. Where is there evidence in your marriage that you have been living with lazy eyes?
2) Habit Inconsistency
There is no doubt about it—a marriage of unity, understanding, and love is the result of good attitudes, which result in the instituting of good habits. There are many examples of the importance of good habits in your life if you just look around.
When you purchase a new car, you are very aware that it is new, and you are very committed to keeping it that way. You don’t think that your new automobile will keep itself washed on the outside, clean on the inside, and mechanically maintained. You accept the reality that, if your car is going to remain clean and in good working order, you have to approach it with the work ethic of good habits. You don’t mind doing these things because you like your car, you are pleased that it belongs to you, and it is a source of pride for you to keep it well maintained. The weekly washing and vacuuming, the warranty inspections, and the regular oil changes aren’t hassles for you; no, they are things you want to do because you appreciate your new car. You even buy special gadgets, cleansers, and deodorizers to keep things fresh and clean. And when you are driving you listen for sounds that may indicate that something is not right with your car.
The problem is that at some point your car is not new anymore. It doesn’t smell new since you spilt coffee on the way to work. When you drive it, it makes sounds that it didn’t make when it was new. And besides, you seem to have gotten a whole lot busier since you bought the car, and finding time to keep it clean and the oil changed is not as easy as it once was. At some point it doesn’t bother you that there are a week’s worth of empty Starbucks cups on the back floor of your car, and you don’t really mind that it’s not so clean. You have begun to let go of the good habits of auto maintenance, and you probably haven’t noticed, but your car begins to pay the price. One morning, quite unexpectedly, you go to start your car, the oil light comes on, and the car won’t start. You are surprised because you didn’t know that anything was wrong, for months ago you simply quit paying attention, and you forsook the habits that would have kept your car in good repair.
Beth and Eric started their life together committed to good habits. They committed to humble approachability, wholesome communication, rapid problem solving, quick conflict resolution, spiritual communion, and patterns of forgiveness and to communicate thankfulness and to build trust. These commitments resulted in a marriage that was godly, enjoyable, and fulfilling, and they both grew in the process. But they began to feel all too satisfied and all too comfortable, and they began to let their good habits slide.
They began to allow themselves to go to bed in the middle of a conflict. Sure, they would say that they would discuss it in the morning, but they seldom did. They began to allow themselves to step away from habits of wholesome communication and say things they would not have allowed themselves to say earlier. There were times when they failed to seek or grant forgiveness, telling themselves that it was a little thing and wouldn’t make any difference. They became more and more inconsistent in doing the good things that make a marriage loving, peaceful, and sturdy. The more they became inconsistent, the more their marriage suffered until they reached the point where it seemed to them that they had an insurmountable set of problems, and they were overwhelmed at the thought of continuing. Are there good habits that were once a regular part of your life together that you have now forsaken?
3) Laziness
I drove by it almost every day for years, and I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. It didn’t happen overnight, but it happened nonetheless, and it was sad to see. It was a beautiful house with a complicated, cross-shaped roof. It was beautiful the way the gables all came together in the center. I thought about what a source of pride it must have given the builder when the house was completed and he was able to stand back and take a look. It was the nicest house on the block.
But there was a problem. The house was inhabited by lazy people. You could tell that by the lawn, which was closer to needing to be bailed than mowed, and by the bushes that had grown widely in every direction. One morning as I drove by, I noticed a small tarp over one part of the roof. Now, a tarp only means one thing: the roof is leaking and needs repair. A tarp nailed down to a leaky roof is not a repair. No, it is what you do as an emergency measure until you can get the roof properly repaired. But the tarp stayed there and was soon accompanied by another tarp. It was not long before the entire roof had been tarped, but no repairs seemed to be in sight. Some of the tarps had been on the roof so long that they had frayed and torn and now flapped in the breeze.
There was no way that the patchwork of tarps created the kind of moisture barrier that a properly shingled roof would. So under those lazy tarps, the structure of the house was absorbing moisture and slowly deteriorating. I remember the day I saw workers removing the tarps, but over the next few days, I realized they were removing more. They removed the roofing, the sheathing, and the gable structures themselves. Lazy neglect had rendered the roof irreparable, and if the family was going to continue to live there, major structural repair would have to be done. Laziness is destructive to anything that needs to be maintained.
Yet, there are many lazy marriages out there. Well, to be more accurate, the marriages aren’t lazy; it’s the people in them that are. They want good marriages, but they just don’t want to do the daily work necessary to keep them healthy.
Beth and Eric got tired of the hard work. They somehow fantasized that their marriage would remain good, long after they had quit working on it. In their laziness, Beth and Eric became quite skilled at throwing tarps over the roof leaks. When offended they would say, “It’s okay,” when it really wasn’t okay. In their laziness they would try to squeeze a big conversation into a little moment. In their laziness they sheltered themselves from one another by busyness and entertainment. But the leaks in their marriage got bigger. It wasn’t long before the structures that were holding them together became weak and rotten. Laziness was part of what had rendered their marriage virtually unlivable. Where is laziness damaging the health and beauty of your marriage?
4) Impatience
I would like to say that I am patient, but I am not. I would like to say that I am always willing to wait, but I am not. I would like to say that I have learned the value of waiting, but I am still learning. I would like to be able to confess that I have seen the value of approaching my marriage with a process mentality, but I don’t always appreciate the process. There are times when I would like instant marriage—you know, just add water and stir. But when I resist the processes that make a marriage beautiful and demand things in an instant, I am not resisting marriage or resisting my wife; no, I am resisting God.
It is God who designed change to be a process and not an event. It is God who chose to put flawed people together in the intensity and close proximity of the intimacy of marriage. It is God who designed marriage to expose your heart, to take you beyond the borders of your own strength and wisdom, and to mature and grow you as you quit relying on yourself and begin to seek the help that only God can give. It is God who created marriage as a workroom to form you into a person who loves as you have been loved and finds joy in giving the same kind of grace that you have been given. It is God who knew that the messiness of marriage would be productive in advancing the work that he began in us when he adopted us as his children.
Every marriage between the fall and eternity is in the middle of a lifelong process of change. Your marriage may be better than it once was, but it is not yet all that it could be. In marriage you are meant to grow together in an increasingly maturing love and to grow personally in your love and service of the Lord.
You see, patience in marriage is vital, because the goal of marriage is greater than marriage. The goal of marriage, from God’s perspective, is not that you would reach some mutually agreed-upon plateau of romantic and interpersonal happiness. No, God’s goals are much wider and more beautiful than that. God’s goal is that your marriage would be a major tool in his wise and loving hands to rescue you from claustrophobic self-worship and form you into a person who lives for nothing smaller than his kingdom, his righteousness, and his glory. God’s goal is to transform you at the causal core of your personhood—your heart. He is working so that everything you think, desire, say, and do is done in loyal and joyful service to him. God’s goal is not to deliver to you your well-thought-through dream of personal happiness. No, his goal is nothing less than holiness; or as Peter says, that you may become “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Pet. 1:4).
Eric and Beth began to grow impatient. Beth would say, “Eric, how many times do I have to tell you . . . ?” Eric would complain, “She does the same thing over and over again even though she knows it drives me crazy.” They both began to see opportunities to grow as obstacles in the way of the good life, and they worked harder at moving the obstacles than they did at growing. In their demandingness and impatience, rather than learning from their problems and progressively learning how to solve or avoid them, they repeated them over and over again. Again and again they settled for instantaneous solutions that did not get at the heart of the matter. They wanted more in an instant, but what they got was less. Are there places where you are demanding in an instant what will only be formed in a process?
5) Responding in Discouragement
There is an insightful little directive in Psalm 37:8: “Do not be afraid; it will only lead to evil” (my translation). There is a point in the lives of many couples when they quit responding in faith, hope, and love and begin to respond to one another in discouragement and fear. Their practical, everyday responses are formed more by what they are afraid of than by what they hope for. They are more driven by discouragement at what is than they are by faith in what could be. They respond more out of hurt than love.
Now, let’s be honest. Marriage is often discouraging. We have already concluded that all of us have been disappointed in our marriages in some way. We have all had to deal with the undesirable and the unexpected. We have all sinned against one another, and we have all been sinned against. All of us look back with remorse and regret because our marriages have not been all that we hoped they would be. It is true that the person whom you love the most has the ability to hurt you the most. In some way, we all get our dreams dashed and our expectations thwarted.
So we will struggle at moments with disappointment, and we will wonder if things will ever get better, and the fear of things staying the same will grip us. The problem is that you tend not to make your best decisions when you are discouraged, and you usually live to regret the decisions you make out of fear. It is in moments in our marriages when we are revealed as the sinners we actually are that fighting discouragement with hope and battling doubt with faith is so important.
Where do you get this hope and faith? Well, you don’t get it from your husband or wife. No, you get it from the third person in your marriage, the person we are tempted to forget. You get hope when there seems to be no reason for hope from Immanuel. Your Savior shed his blood and died for you; does it make any sense that he would abandon you in your hour of need? You see, hope is not to be found in your spouse or in your circumstances. No, hope is found in one place and one place alone—in Jesus your savior, your brother, and your friend. He loves you, and he will never turn a deaf ear to your cries.
So you have to fight the instinct to respond in discouragement and remember who you are and who God is and act in hope, even when hope is hard to see. Where are you tempted to respond in discouragement and fear?
6) Dining with the Enemy
Earlier in this book we looked at Ephesians 4 and Paul’s directive not to let the sun go down on your anger nor give the Devil an opportunity. But this is what many couples end up doing. They not only give the Devil an opportunity, but they end up inviting him for dinner! How? By thinking that they have arrived and by letting go of the good habits that made their marriage a relationship of unity, understanding, and love. When you quit paying attention, let go of good habits, allow yourself to be lazy and impatient, and respond in discouragement, you are inviting the Devil into your marriage to do his nasty work of deceit, division, and destruction.
Remember, marriage is spiritual warfare. There really is good and evil. There really is someone who is the enemy of your soul, the enemy of everything good, true, wise, and beautiful. There really is someone who does not want to see you grow and change. There is someone who fights against the unity, understanding, and love of your marriage. Living blindly and naïvely gives him an opportunity to destroy the good things that God has created in you and in your marriage.
So we must remain alert. We must commit ourselves to being watchful. We must resist growing tired and becoming lazy. We must refuse to give way to cynicism and discouragement. We must not demand in an instant what will only come as the result of a process. We must not do these things, because when we do we are dining with the Devil, and that never leads to anything good. Are there places right here, right now, in your marriage where you are giving the Devil an opportunity?
RESTORING GRACE
Yes, it was true, Beth and Eric were a bit of a mess, and so was their marriage, but they did the right thing. They stepped out of their secret world of discouragement and acrimony and sought help. It was hard for them to admit how bad things had become. It was hard to own how petty and divisive they had both been. It embarrassed them to admit to things they had said and done. But they were tired and afraid and grabbed hold of hope anywhere help could be found. I was glad to help, because I had a sense of what was going on.
Beth and Eric had done one disastrous thing in their marriage, and it had created a mess. They had given in to the delusion that they had arrived, and so they quit paying attention. Good habits waned and bad ones took over. Laziness replaced the daily work of love, so things got progressively worse. But God met them at their moment of need and enabled them, by his grace, to get back up and to do the good things that have to be done for a marriage ever to be what God designed it to be.
There were many places where forgiveness needed to be sought and given. There were many habits that needed to be replaced with the old habits of attentive love. There were clear places where each was being called to wait, and there was grace for the waiting. There were many topics they needed to discuss with a commitment to humble listening and wholesome speaking.
But they did listen, and wait, and forgive, and God began to restore the unity, understanding, and love that seemed beyond repair. They learned the importance of being committed to watch and pray no matter how good things were and to respond in hope no matter how bad things seemed, and they learned that they were never alone.