Making Marriage Work (30 page)

God gave me the gift to communicate His Word, and I can’t glory in the fact that I do the preaching part of our ministry because I didn’t go after it or earn it. We have a good thing going here that is helping hundreds of thousands of people, but we could all have been cheated out of God’s blessing and remained miserable our whole lives if Dave would have kept trying to preach and if I would have tried to be quiet. We didn’t conform to society; we submitted to God’s plan for our individual lives.

I encourage you to be all that you can be, but do not despise yourself if you can’t be something that somebody else can and don’t despise others who are not like you. Jesus puts up with all of our weaknesses. He is long-suffering and patient with us. When we make mistakes, He doesn’t clam up and refuse to talk to us. The Bible teaches us to be like Jesus in the way we treat others. We are to be tolerant towards others through their weaknesses and faults. Every person has weaknesses. We will never find the perfect church, the perfect pastor, or the perfect spouse.

When you are married to somebody long enough, and your love has grown, you may get to the point where you think your spouse is perfect after all. I think my husband is nearly perfect. But I know the weaknesses that he has, and I accept them and he accepts a lot of mine, so I don’t keep inventory on his weaknesses. You can enjoy the strengths that a person has instead of focusing on his weaknesses all the time.

To assist in recognizing strengths and weaknesses in other people, a study has been done on four major personality types. Usually, a person fits one of these descriptions or a blend of two. See if you recognize you and your spouse in these models. In general, a choleric wants to control, phlegmatic wants to watch, sanguine wants to have fun, and a melancholy wants to have peace and order and perfection. Being a choleric, myself, I frequently compare the other traits against my own personality to illustrate the differences we share.

SUNNY SANGUINE

The sanguine normally loves to talk and is highly motivated by “fun.” These personality types believe life was meant to be enjoyed, and they are not too interested in hard labor if fun is not incorporated in the task somehow.

Sanguines are never bored because everything about life fascinates them. They can be interested in a bug, a thread, or a fly. After a few minutes of studying it, they can tell you a big long story about it.

Sanguines are always ready to start a new day unbefuddled by yesterday’s problems. They are fearless and full of optimism for tomorrow.

My daughter, Sandra, is a sparky sanguine. She greets us every morning with a song or bubbly conversation. When I get out of bed, I don’t even want anybody talking to me, let alone singing at me! There is nothing wrong with singing, but my choleric nature wants it quiet in the morning.

When you are a certain way, then people who are different can irritate you if you don’t understand the difference in their nature. The girl that used to live next door to me was a sanguine. She and I were good friends, and I remember how she would often point out something I had not even noticed. One time she said, “Oh, did you see that cat over there in that tree?” She went on to explain that it was a certain kind of unusual cat and seemed quite amused to see it in the tree. I didn’t even see the tree let alone the cat because trees and cats aren’t interesting to me.

Cholerics, like me, only pay attention to what’s important to them, only what helps them accomplish their goal. They don’t care about anything else. I am so single minded on this ministry that God has to pull me up short every once in a while and say, “You need to get your mind on something else for a while.” I am driven by what God has given me to do, and so I spend all my energies on this goal, and of course I want everybody around me to do it, too. Cats and trees don’t impact my goal so I don’t even see them.

Now that I understand personality types, I am better about paying attention to sanguines who want to give me all the details of a story, but there was a time I easily frustrated the sanguines in my life as much as they were frustrating me. While the choleric wonders why the sanguine can’t just tell the point and finish the story, the sanguine would rather not tell the story at all if they can’t tell you all those wonderful details.

If you understand that just because a person is different from you, it doesn’t mean there is something wrong with them, you will start to enjoy their differences.

Sanguines are great company if you want to start a new project because they are easily inspired to try new plans. They may find it difficult to stay with the task to the end, but they will certainly charm you by their sincere affection that they have for people. Sanguines like to be with people, and they will often hold on to you to keep you from getting away from them.

Once you understand that just because a person is different from you, it doesn’t mean there is something wrong with them, you will start to enjoy their differences.

In these studies it is nearly as fun to look at weaknesses as it is to look at strengths because these tendencies are typical now to groups of personality types rather than faults of an individual. While we do not have to feel badly about these weaknesses, we must face them if we want to change.

The sanguine can easily get distracted from intended goals because of her fun-seeking nature. Her spontaneity can leave her disorganized and unfulfilled. She may have high goals for the day. First she is going to attack the pile of laundry, then the dishes. After cleaning the house, she will go to the bank and the grocery store. Her melancholy husband even listed her priorities for her before he left for work.

She was going to have a productive day. But you have to remember that sanguines are not excited about work. When her friend calls and says, “Hey! How about going to garage sales?”, she is off in a flash! When her husband asks why none of the errands were accomplished by the end of the day, she honestly doesn’t know. The sanguines have to work at self-discipline in order to live up to potential. The good thing about their weakness is they don’t care that they aren’t living up to their potential so they just keep enjoying life.

A sanguine often marries a melancholy. The melancholy is more the depressed, deep type, and the bubbly sanguine balances him out even though one is in the basement all the time and the other one is on the roof. The sanguine fits the cliché, “He never gets ulcers; he just gives them to everyone else.”

METHODICAL MELANCHOLY

The melancholy has by far the most sensitive nature of all the temperaments. Most of the geniuses come out of the melancholy temperament. Einstein and Michelangelo were both melancholies. Michelangelo studied the human anatomy and prepared for months before he painted the Sistine Chapel. If a sanguine were going to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, he would do it with a can of spray paint. Even then, he would probably leave his paint down on the floor and have to crawl back down from the ceiling to get it.

Whatever God has called us to be, He equips us with the abilities and the personality needed to accomplish that task. He wanted Michelangelo to paint that ceiling; it was part of God’s plan for him, so He equipped him with the ability to plan out and think through all that needed to be depicted in his art. The whole point is we are all supposed to work together to facilitate each other’s gifts for the glory of God. When I look at our ministry, it is phenomenal to see how each individual is equipped with just exactly what they need for their part. I couldn’t do this without them, and yet, they couldn’t do what they are doing without me.

Whatever God has called us to be, He equips us with the abilities and the personality needed to accomplish that task.

Melancholy temperaments are creative thinkers who appreciate life’s true values and excel in the arts. They enjoy perfection and lift the standard of excellence often with higher expectations than most of us can achieve.

One woman said that she was married to a perfect melancholy, who was so neat and orderly that when he put his shoes in the closet, he actually tied the strings in bows and put them all in a nice and neat row together. Our friend and ministry associate Roxane is a melancholy, and when she heard that story, she said, “You know, I don’t tie the strings, but I do put all the strings inside my shoes when I line them up in the closet.”

The melancholy’s tendency is to set goals of perfection that he cannot reach, which causes him to spend a great deal of time internalizing what went wrong. He will sit around for days and think about how he can change it. He tries to sort out what is wrong with himself that keeps him from the perfection that he deeply desires. Consequently, he searches for details that most of us find tedious.

Whenever a project is suggested by a choleric or a sanguine temperament, Mr. Melancholy can analyze it in a few moments and pick out every potential problem that they will encounter. They always point out the problems but those problems are real issues for them. Anything out of order genuinely bothers them.

It was so hard for me and the melancholy personalities who worked for me until I learned what was happening between us. I’m real positive and goal oriented. When I dream up a project, there is nothing that is too hard for me to plow through and make work. I present my idea with a hip, hip, hooray, and those melancholies quickly sink into deep introspection. I’m shocked when they don’t meet me with enthusiasm, but now I understand that they are processing the details involved in my idea and will most likely be the ones to come forward with a working design in a few hours.

My phlegmatic husband can look at me with a blank face and honestly feel no excitement whatsoever. The melancholies are quickly telling me every little thing that is wrong with my plan, but thank goodness for those sanguines. They are my best cheerleaders if it sounds like fun. As long as it is exciting, they don’t care. They nod their head in agreement, encouraging me to keep talking. But now that I understand their personalities, I can affectionately accept each one of those people for where they are.

You have to understand that a melancholy can’t help seeing those problems any more than I can help not seeing them. When a melancholy enters a room he sees what is wrong with it, seldom what is right with it. The list of vocations given for this temperament includes mathematics, science, diagnostic medicine, architecture, philosophy, writing, and other exacting vocations.

The melancholy temperaments are naturally faithful to their friends and easily lay aside their own interests to serve those people they love. They are usually uncomfortable when the attention is on them, and they often choose a profession that improves the quality of life for others.

While a pure melancholy reserves his opinions until asked, a melancholy-choleric will quickly volunteer everything he thinks. And you can trust that he has been thinking about everything; yes, any topic, in great detail, and his answer will be worth listening to because it has been carefully analyzed. Most everyone swings to a second nature that causes a unique blend of tendencies. A melancholy-phlegmatic would operate differently from a melancholy-choleric.

The melancholy has many weaknesses that I won’t cover in detail, but their greatest strength and their greatest weakness is that they are extremely sensitive. If you are hurting, the melancholy knows it and empathizes for your hurt. However, the weak side of that is that they get upset if you don’t understand their needs, and they don’t expect to have to tell you what they are. Because they are so sensitive, they feel like that everybody else ought to be that way, too. They don’t understand why others aren’t sensitive, too.

Melancholies are creative, orderly, and organized, but their detrimental weakness is self-centeredness, which makes them hard to please. Too much self-examination can stop them from accomplishing what they start out to do. If you just think about your imperfections all the time, you will be paralyzed and drained of energy.

The melancholy can overcome his weakness by becoming more outwardly focused. His self-centered viewpoint will destroy him if left to entertain itself. He can never be as perfect as he wants to be, so he must turn his strengths toward helping others enjoy the finer things of life.

CONTROLLING CHOLERIC

The choleric is determined, confident, and aggressive when it comes to accomplishing his goals. Consequently, being this personality myself, I know that it is difficult for this strong personality to learn how to trust God. To totally trust God, you have to stop trusting yourself, leaning on yourself, and relying on yourself, and self-efficiency is not easy for the choleric to give up.

The choleric has a plan and is in constant movement toward that plan. He is single-minded towards that purpose and believes his ideas are better than anyone else’s. The choleric might not necessarily have as good a plan as the melancholy, but the choleric will usually succeed because of his dogged determination and unwillingness to give up. Adversity spurs him on and makes him more determined to be first at the finish line. The determination in the choleric is one of his greatest strengths. I like the Scripture that says, “Put your hand to the plow and don’t look back.”

The choleric temperament is given over almost exclusively to the practical aspects of life. We are often complimented that our teaching is so “practical.” Now you can see that practicality is part of my personality; I’m almost purely choleric. If something is not useful, I don’t want to mess with it.

The choleric is happy when busy with some worthwhile well-organized project. Cholerics make quick, intuitive decisions based on their “gut feeling” of what seemed right or wrong. If you have an emergency, one of the best personalities to have on the scene is the choleric. They just jump up right away and do something.

I like the example I read illustrating what these four personalities would do in a fire.

“If the barn caught on fire, the melancholy would rub her brow and say, ‘I’m afraid the barn is going to burn to the ground.’ The phlegmatic would wonder, What should we do? The choleric would immediately organize a bucket brigade, and the sanguine would say, ‘Oh, great! Now we can toast marshmallows.’”