Beyond Ordinary: When a Good Marriage Just Isn't Good Enough (6 page)

JUSTIN & TRISHA:

ONENESS BROKEN

God designed and created us to be known by him and to be one with our spouses. That is his vision for marriage. That is his desire. But there has been a war against that oneness since the Garden of Eden. The initial battle in the Garden was lost, and oneness was broken:

“Of course we may eat fruit from the trees in the garden,” the woman replied. “It’s only the fruit from the tree in the middle of the garden that we are not allowed to eat. God said, ‘You must not eat it or even touch it; if you do, you will die.’”

“You won’t die!” the serpent replied to the woman. “God knows that your eyes will be opened as soon as you eat it, and you will be like God, knowing both good and evil.”

The woman was convinced. She saw that the tree was beautiful and its fruit looked delicious, and she wanted the wisdom it would give her. So she took some of the fruit and ate it. Then she gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it, too.

We know the story of Adam and Eve. For some of us, we’ve heard it so often that it has lost its punch. At a glance, it’s a story that seems black and white. Adam and Eve eat the fruit, and there are consequences. But if we look closer, we see layers of dysfunction that provide a road map to the breaking of intimacy—not only in Adam and Eve’s relationship, but also in our own marriage relationships.

In verse one, the first spiritual battle takes place. Satan moves in on the human relationship with a simple question: “Did God really say . . . ?” From the very beginning, Satan tapped into an unspoken fear that we as humans have:
God is holding out on us
. When we start questioning God’s provision, God’s goodness, and God’s plan, it is easy to question God’s Word. “Did God really say . . . ?” Eve’s choice to believe God was holding out on her broke intimacy between her and God and between her and Adam.

Think about your own relationships. Can you remember a time when “Did God really say . . . ?” broke intimacy in your relationship with your spouse? It may not be a question that involves eating fruit, but Satan is shrewd and knows which questions to provoke you to ask yourself. Maybe your questions go something like this:

• “Did God really say I have to respect my husband even though he’s disrespectful to me?”
  
• “Did God really say that I should love my wife as Christ loves the church even though she gives her best to everyone but me?”
  
• “Did God really say to not let the sun go down on my anger?”
  
• “Did God really say to be slow to speak and quick to listen?”
  

In Satan’s attempt to trip up Eve, he simply posed a question and left Eve to answer it herself. Satan knew the effect the question would have on Eve. In that moment, Eve was focused on her own needs rather than taking the time to pose her own question, like, “Will my actions draw me closer to God or closer to my husband?” Often it’s the small, simple, it’s-just-a piece-of-fruit moments in our marriage relationships that can cause the most damage as we think only about what’s best for ourselves.

THE ENEMY OF ONENESS

Last October, our family was given free rein of a beach house in Florida during our kids’ fall break. We had a blast playing on the beach and swimming in the clear ocean water. About halfway through our second day, I (Justin) started feeling numerous stings all over my legs and feet. I am somewhat of a hypochondriac, and my family tends to make fun of me at times for my tendency to believe I am dying from illnesses that don’t even exist. So there was no way I was going to share the stinging sensation I felt in my legs. As the discomfort became more intense for me, my kids said that they were feeling something too. I was just pumped that I wasn’t crazy.

Just then, this David Hasselhoff–looking guy came running down the beach toward us. He stopped by me and pulled his swim trunks up from his knee toward his upper thigh—honestly a little higher than I was comfortable seeing. On his thigh was a huge welt. Inside a bucket he was carrying a huge jellyfish. As we looked around, we noticed literally hundreds of tiny jellyfish in the water and washing up on the shore. The truth is that these jellyfish had been in the water the entire time; we only noticed them when they started stinging us.

That is how spiritual warfare works. There is a battle for your marriage all day, every day. Most of the time we only notice it after we get stung.

Marriage is physical and emotional, but more than anything
else, marriage is spiritual. We have an enemy who seeks to steal our hearts, kill our hope, and destroy our marriages. Our struggle against this enemy is what we know as spiritual warfare.

Spiritual warfare isn’t something we talk about very much, especially as it relates to marriage. We see it most often as something TV preachers exploit, or something crazy guys talk about when they’re claiming the end of the world is near. But just because I don’t understand spiritual warfare and just because I don’t always acknowledge spiritual warfare doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

Maybe what you need to move past ordinary is to recognize the war being fought against you right now. God longs to shift the momentum of your marriage, and often that shift is found in recognizing the battle that your marriage is fighting every single day.

From the very beginning, there has been a war waged against oneness. Satan’s mission was to destroy the intimacy Adam and Eve experienced with God and to destroy the oneness that God had created them to experience with one another. With one act, both were destroyed. The momentum of their marriage shifted. The result of their choice was hiding and blaming.

Look at Genesis 3:7-8: “At that moment their eyes were opened, and they suddenly felt shame at their nakedness. So they sewed fig leaves together to cover themselves. When the cool evening breezes were blowing, the man and his wife heard the L
ORD
God walking about in the garden. So they hid from the L
ORD
God among the trees.”

Adam and Eve’s first response after succumbing to temptation was to hide. For the first time, they felt shame. For the first time, they felt as if who they were wasn’t good enough and that they needed to cover up. They were exposed, vulnerable. They were naked, and they knew it. So they covered up and hid from each other. When they heard God, they knew they were caught, so they hid from him, as well.

One of the biggest enemies to extraordinary oneness is the desire to hide.

When we get married, we truly believe that the person we marry knows us better than anyone else. We have a desire to share our entire life with him or her. But as we go through life, we become tempted to hide. We feel ashamed, and we grab our fig leaves because we aren’t comfortable being exposed—even to our spouses.

Somewhere along the way, we convince ourselves that we can hide from God, as well. If we attend church enough, if we pray enough, if we read our Bibles enough, then we think we can withhold parts of our hearts from God and this hiding won’t affect us. But hiding withers away the oneness that God longs to experience with us.

In the Genesis passage, God finds Adam and Eve (as if they were ever really lost), and Adam does something that married couples tend to do when problems are exposed: he blames his spouse. “The man replied, ‘It was the woman you gave me who gave me the fruit, and I ate it’” (Genesis 3:12).

Wait, who’s the enemy again? Your spouse? No—we have one enemy, and when we blame each other, we become victims in our marriages rather than partners.

Maybe that describes your marriage today. Maybe it feels easier to hide from your spouse than to spend time with him or her. Everything that happens in your marriage is the other person’s fault. Even though you know you have a share of the blame, you find it much easier to shift blame than to take responsibility. You are both victims, not partners. Trisha and I lived like this for years, and it almost destroyed our marriage.

But God created us to be one with our spouses. Anything short of that is merely ordinary.

HOW WE TRY TO RESTORE ONENESS

When our marriages drift toward ordinary, we often try to roll up our sleeves and fix them ourselves. We won’t go down without a fight. We’ll come up with a plan. We are going to make our
marriages better. We are going to try harder. We truly believe we can restore oneness. We try to better our marriages ourselves in three (misguided) ways.

I Can Change You

If we are honest, probably all of us think we can change our spouses. Ladies, you truly believe that you can make your husband a better driver. You can make him more punctual. You can make him put his dirty underwear
in
the hamper instead of
next to
the hamper. If you complain enough, nag enough, and pout enough, you will be able to change your husband into the man you thought he was when you married him.

Guys, you believe you can change your wife. You truly think that you can make your wife want sex as often as you do. You think you can make her want to watch Chuck Norris movies. You really believe that if you are good enough or on time enough or clean enough, then she won’t get sideways when you go golfing on Saturdays.

The truth is this:
we can’t change our spouses
.

None of us has the capacity to change a human heart. We think that by trying to change our spouses’ behavior we are changing their hearts, but that isn’t true. By trying to change our spouses’ behavior we are actually damaging their hearts. So many marriages exist full of bitterness and hurt. Why? Because we believe we can restore oneness by changing our spouses. One spouse is upset that he or she is never good enough; the other feels like all he or she does is nag and complain. Oneness slips further and further away.

Milestones & Achievements

Another way we try to restore the oneness we were created to desire is through milestones and achievements. We have visions for our marriages, and we think that as we accomplish certain things, we will experience the intimacy that we know is missing. Couples think:

• When we make more money, then our marriage will be better.
  
• If we can just get out of debt, then we won’t feel as much pressure, and our marriage will be better.
  
• When I get that promotion, it will be a game changer for us.
  
• When we buy that new house, it will make a lot of problems go away.
  
• If we could just have kids, that would bring us closer together.
  
• If we can just make it to our next anniversary, then I’ll have hope for our marriage.
  

We create these if-then scenarios. If we could just have this or do that or accomplish this or build that or buy this or achieve that,
then
our marriages would finally be what we want them to be.

The problem is that none of these milestones or achievements brings the oneness we desire. There will always be another milestone. There will always be another achievement. When we look to an accomplishment or a stage of life to provide us with marital intimacy, we will always come back to ordinary.

New Expectations

This last attempt at oneness is why so many marriages become ordinary. When we realize that we can’t change our spouses and we grasp that our milestones and achievements haven’t brought us the fulfillment we thought they would, we create new expectations for our marriages.

In other words, we
settle
.

We settle for a smaller vision. We resign ourselves to the idea that this is the best our marriage can be. We lower our expectations. We stop dreaming about the future. We give in to the reality that this is the best version of oneness that we can create. Our new expectations lead us to a more isolated marriage that is more about coexisting than thriving. Intimacy is reduced to how many
times a month we have sex rather than being fully known to our spouses. We come to believe that being fully known in our marriages isn’t possible. Once upon a time we experienced intimacy and oneness in an extraordinary marriage; now we think of those days as a fairy tale.

ACHIEVING ONENESS

Oneness in marriage is possible. It isn’t easy, but it is possible. And it only comes as each spouse individually pursues God.

When you decide to stop trying to change your spouse and pursue God instead, and when your spouse decides to not measure the health of your marriage through milestones and achievements but rather pursues God, the distance in your marriage decreases. Pursuing God looks different for everyone, because all of us are in different places in our relationships with God, but there are two things that will be true for each of us who longs to pursue God. First, we will choose to think about God. This involves personal prayer, reading God’s Word, and becoming aware of God’s promptings and presence. Second, pursuing God involves a willingness to surrender our rights and our desires to God for his desires and his plan. It is an invitation to allow him to change us.

Individually, as you move closer to God, then you naturally move closer to each other. It’s a pursuit in which the ordinary dies and the extraordinary begins to live.

If we would spend the same amount of time and energy asking God to change ourselves as we do asking him to change our spouses, our marriages would be anything but ordinary. It is so easy for us to apply truth to our spouses before we apply it to ourselves. It is easy for us to see the faults in them and to stay blind to the faults that live in us. Oneness in our marriages is restored as we ask—and
allo
w
—God to change us. Even if your spouse doesn’t change, your marriage will be better because
you
will be changed.

A question we are often asked is, What if my spouse isn’t pursuing God at the same pace as I am? What we have come to realize is that all of our journeys will look different. Your pursuit of God doesn’t have to be at the same pace, just with the same commitment. Each of us will go through peaks and valleys in our relationship with God. It is our commitment to that journey that allows us to experience oneness the way God intended.