Sapphire Sky

Wives submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord … Husbands love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her … .  In the same way husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. Ep. 5:22, 25, 28

Let marriage be held in honor among all … Heb. 13:4

Love bears all things, … endures all things. 1 Cor. 13:7

A post I wrote last year about Christians and divorce receives the most traffic on this blog, thousands of hits.  See here.  It occurred to me recently that some of this traffic might be Christians struggling with thoughts of divorce and perhaps I should write some encouraging words about marriage, particularly about sustaining marriage through difficult times.  Thinking about this, I realized that most of the useful stuff I know about marriage I learned from others who shared with me and my wife marital truths from and premised in scripture.  Our learning started with lots of advise and insight on dispute resolution mechanisms from an Army chaplain prior to our military marriage (pre-marital counseling from the chaplain was mandatory), and our learning continues.

My wife and I recently celebrated our 18th anniversary so our marriage has “matured” to a young adulthood of sorts.  We’ve been married long enough that we can look back and figure out some stuff we did wrong and some stuff we did (and will hopefully continue to do) well and what works.  So we put down a “top 10″ to do list for a healthy marriage.  Several of these overlap.  And no, my wife did not ghost write this; she’s just further along the path on most these virtues and techniques than me!  We are both fellow journyers with many of you on the marital road. Arrival is on the other side of the divide.  Please feel free to share any encouraging words or advice about marriage in the comments …  Here goes:

1.  Purpose. Remind yourself daily of the Biblical purpose for marriage. Although I’m blessed to find happiness in my spouse, the purpose of Christian marriage isn’t happiness; the purpose is to become more like Christ.  This does not mean Christian marriage isn’t intended to romantic or pleasurable, quite the contrary, God is love and in Christ is eternal satisfaction for those who pursue him. Pursue Christ first, and everything else starts falling into place.  The presence of Christ in us should become increasingly noticeable the better someone knows us.  No one is closer than our spouse, whom scripture describes as our same flesh.  Our marriages should be the starting point for lives of grace, love and service.  Both submit to Christ.  The Bible calls on the wife to submit to the husband and the husband to love his wife as Christ loved the church.  Christ was nailed to the cross for the church.  For more on this point, read the excellent book by Gary Thomas, Sacred Marriage.

2. Priority.  A simple tool to practice living like Christ: put yourself last.  Put J.O.Y. priorities in your marriage – look to serve Jesus, Others, then Yourself, in that order.

3. Love.  Love is a feeling and a verb.  So even if you don’t feel lovey, we’re called to do love.  Christ likely didn’t feel in love when being beaten and nailed to the cross.  In fact, he was quite open about not wanting to drink from that cup of misery. Yet out of the action of love for us, he did it.  I am certain he was not feeling giddy and “feeling in love” when they drove the spikes through his hands and feet, yet it was love and obedience to the Father’s will that held him there. The sacrament of marriage continually requires the Christian application of selfless love and obedience to God.  In marriage, two become one.  There is no better place to regularly practice and witness the presence or absence of Christ-like love.  With unconditional love, the marital union blossoms with commitment, trust, happiness, and peace.  Without it, the relationship and spouse withers.  Sadly, many couples endure dead relationships.  Just do love.

4. Knowledge. Know how to love your spouse.  One of the biggest revelations to me, after we’d been married for over ten years, was that love has its own languages.  Plural.  I had no idea.  I thought there was one love language – the one I spoke and understood.  I had often felt kinda rejected when my sweet wife didn’t seem to hear or speak my language.  Come to find out, I had no clue how to speak her love language.  I’ve since come to learn and appreciate that we each feel and convey love quite differently.  Dr. Gary Chapman, whom we discovered through our church, explained the 5 dominant love languages people speak and understand.  There are explanations and free tests at his website here and his bestselling book The 5 Love Languages is a must read if you’re not familiar with these concepts – a must read for marital bliss (see also Dr. Chapman’s book on the same topic for parenting here).  Most of us respond to and naturally understand just one of these languages.  My wife and I had entirely different languages – what an eye opener and blessing to discover.  This is one thing I wish we had learned at the outset of marriage.

5. Dare to be intimate.  The Bible advises spouses to not deny themselves to the other.  There’s an obvious and sometimes neglected sexual side to this affirmative duty.  There is also a spiritual and emotional side.  There is much said and written about sex in marriage.  It’s obviously an important component that we’re directed to not neglect.  Enough is not, however, said about the necessity for intimacy beyond sex, and this is far more challenging for most of us.  It’s often easier to share our bodies than our feelings.  Spiritually, it’s easier to pray alone or superficially than to close hands together and bare your soul before God, together, in prayer.  Candor and prayer.  Help each other to dare to bare more than just your bodies.

6. Prime Time. The Army chaplain told us to “hold our fire” until “prime time.”  This was excellent advise.  The time to raise a disputed issue is not when our spouse first walks in the door.  Give each other time to unwind from the day and recuperate.  ”Prime time” for TV is also a prime time to engage our own biggest issues, after we’ve had a time to settle down from the days activities.

7. First Person.  That same Army chaplain also advised us that when we “open fire” against the other, to do it in the first person tense.  Speak from the perspective of how the accused issue affected you.  Instead of saying, “You were wrong in how you talked to me,” try “The way you talked to me made me feel like [fill in the blank].  I was really hurt, embarrassed, etc.”  Explaining how someone’s actions made you feel or otherwise affected you makes the same point as attacking the accused action/flaw, but it’s far less antagonistic.  This technique works. (My wife has shared a lot of such “feelings” with me …)

8. Peers. Hang out with people who support and encourage your faith and believe passionately in marriage.  Hanging out with single friends at the singles club is a recipe for disaster, for even the best marriages.  Equally dangerous, be discerning in your “friendships.”  Most affairs don’t originate in clubs.  They start with emotional bonds formed around the water cooler or community events.  Spiritual bonds can be a significant trap for those in ministry. Be careful with whom you grow close ties.

9.  Patience.  Marriage isn’t about “helping” your spouse improve, changing their minds, or winning arguments or anything else about the other.  Wrong paradigm. See number 1 above.  If you want to change something about your spouse, spend a lot of time praying about it and for them before even raising the issue, unless, of course it’s a clear spelled out in scripture sin issue.  Even then, particularly then, pray even more.

10.  Forgive.  Love keeps no record of wrongs.  Live grace.

Related articles: Sacrificial Love by Matthew White; Marriage Gems by Lori Lowe; Is Religion an Answer? Marriage, Fatherhood, and the Male Problematic by W. Bradford Wilcox;  Why Monogamy Matters by Ross Douthat; Marriage as Witness to the Culture by JC Sanders.

Love makes us sensitive us to so many things we would otherwise miss.  Ann Voskamp elegantly shares this point today, writing about the convergence of time, love, pain and trust.  Ms. Voskamp captures the heightened and painful sense of time passing when we’re deeply in love, in this case, the deepest love most of us experience, the love for our children.  She shares her struggles over the inability to slow it all down, and where she finds peace in the struggle.

God who is the spring of the river of life, He has plans, places, purposes that time’s current will carry these children to — off to destinations, to new skin, to kingdom dreams.

The water cycle streams: from Him, through Him and to Him are all things.

See The Way a Mother Can Make Peace with Time

Love Post

We have a tendency of busying ourselves with the business of being busy.

Smart phones, tablets, computers of every incarnation, et al. fill our every moment with distractions. Despite all these ways of connecting, we still have a lingering desire to connect with others that remains unsatisfied.

Lately, I have fallen prey to the same. Last night, we were finishing up decorating the Christmas tree, and I was busying myself with my latest obsession on the computer. Despite familial beckoning (my daughter physically grabbing my arm), I remained wired to the computer but disconnected from the family.

In hindsight, the older I get, the more I realize the moral for being is connecting with others. More often than not that means being physically and mentally present. Being on the computer or watching TV in the same room doesn’t qualify.

How do you truly connect then, in a meaningful way? I’ve often wondered.

You hear popular notions of connecting, but the one definition that holds me captive each time I read it is I Corinthians 13.

David Ballard

Praise God for the blessing of fathers and fatherhood.

Looking back, I always thought John Wayne movies were interesting, but didn’t really understand why so many people were so impressed by the John Wayne character.  Years later, likely at some point when I was in the Army infantry, I realized my father was a whole lot like John Wayne– he was (and is) true grit, day in and day out.  If he was the talkative big word type, he would have taught us to say “perseverance.”  I thank God for my father and the fundamentally “male” things he always sought to instill in me and my siblings.

If I only had a dime for every time he said as a matter of course, “No Whiners” and “Quit Whining”, which worked as an answer to many questions and situations, particularly questions where there was no answer.  There were myriad subsets of the “no whining” theme as well.  Some were fairly creative.  An “I’m hungry” spoken between meals would almost automatically elicit, “Go knock your chin against the table and you won’t feel so hungry any more.”  If it didn’t involve arterial blood or bone protruding from the skin, the answer was typically “Quit your belly-aching.” 

When I went out for freshman football, I asked my dad for help in practicing tackling.  He grew up in Germany playing another type of football.  We went in the backyard where we figured the best practice would be for him to charge at me head on with the football, kinda like a goal line stand, but without helmet or pads.  I learned three things: why football players wear pads, particularly helmets; what it’s like to lose a head on collision, and how fleeting consciousness can be. 

Soon thereafter my dad was hired as my highschool’s first varsity soccer coach.  I eventually switched from football to soccer.  Growing up through grade school, like most other kids, I thought my dad was a giant. Smelly at times, but still, a strong giant and hands made of iron.  By my senior year in high school, I had by then several years of being taller than him — nearly 8 inches taller, though I’m not sure I weighed much more.  Toward the end of my senior year of soccer, when Dad entered the fray of a varsity scrimmage playing for a shorthanded opposing side, I thought I could bump or check him off the ball.  I knew my height would give me leverage and I made some boisterous claim as I rushed in to bounce Dad off the ball.  I did have leverage, for a moment, and quickly learned two things: a hip check does nothing to impede an elbow upwardly swinging at a high rate of speed, and despite the coolness of the then ever-present Michael Jordan tongue wag, having your tongue between your teeth and hanging out of your mouth was a bad idea in contact sports when someone else’s elbow shuts your mouth.  He kept the soccer ball and I lost whatever propensity I might have developed for trash talking.

I remember my Dad working 55 hours a week in a tool and die shop my entire time growing up, with two weeks vacation each year.  I had no idea what that meant until I tried it for one summer.  That summer of labor guaranteed that I would graduate from college.  I also learned from observation the true grit necessary to be a blue-collar worker for decades.

He’s not afraid to let you know that blood flows thicker than water and that family always comes first. I only saw him fight once.  When I was a trouble making teenager with a drivers license, one of my friends in the back seat apparently looked cross-eyed at another car.  The car followed me home and a very large, belligerent man jumped out and began shoving us around, apparently looking for a fight.  If he didn’t outweigh me and my two friends collectively, it was close.  He was big and fortunately loud.  Within seconds, my Dad was outside.  He explained that I was his son and politely asked the man to leave.  Unfortunately for himself, the big man declined the invitation and instead become more belligerent as he advanced upon my much shorter father.  That lasted less than a minute before his attitude drastically changed and he retreated to his car to hastily depart, apparently unappreciative for the flavor of my father’s knuckles at high rates of speed. 

My Dad was 5′ 9″.  He claims that he’s now 5′ 8″, but I think that’s a bit of a stretch.  He’s lost over an inch.  And that happened fairly quickly.  In his 50s, he was practicing motocross with my youngest brother.  He overshot a jump at too high a speed on his KX500.  Actually he overshot the landing — and came down on the back side of a hill instead of on the top.  His back wheel floated out too far in front so he landed on the back of the motorcyle with the 225 pound bike on top of himself.  I wasn’t there.  As I recall it, my little brother didn’t have his driver’s license yet and Dad didn’t want him to worry, so he eventually got back on his feet.  Drove his bike back to his truck.  Loaded it and my brother’s bike and drove a good distance home.  The next day, when the excruciating pain hadn’t subsided, he went to the doctor to find out he shattered a vertebrae.  He’s shorter now.  True grit.

I remember being the tallest kid in my class but being a fairly rotten basketball player.  I remember playing basketball with my Dad, who was also a much shorter fairly rotten basketball player.  I took a shot that was so far off the mark, I had to tell you it was a shot and not an arm spasm that inadvertently shot the ball into space.  I also remember how, after Dad finished laughing and I continued to glower, he used that time to laugh and teach me the importance in life of not taking yourself too seriously and being able to laugh at yourself.  Of course, I had a lot of source material, still do, and it was a valuable lesson I never forgot.

There are so many things I remember about my Dad teaching me about life.  Hardly none of it was scripted or didactic lessons, instead, they were lessons, mostly spontaneous, derived from living life and spending time together.  The best communication he showed was the time he took to be with and around us.  Dad was always there when we needed him and still is. 

True grit.  True lessons.  True love.

Thanks Dad.

Praise God for fathers who invest themselves in the lives of their children.