Two Important Things Learned From Marriage

A long, LONG time ago, my sister-in-law Kaile wrote a blog about 6 things she had learned in her first 6 months of marriage: http://aspects-of-me.blogspot.com/2014/02/6-things-learned-from-6-months-of.html  I enjoyed reading it and was inspired to write a similar blog reflecting on my 5 years of marriage and hoped to draw an equivalent 5 things out.

Well, I came up with two.  Very hard ones.  And had to stop there because it made me realize that there is a lot more hard learning that I still have to do.  I'm not saying that marriage is only hard lessons, but in marriage there is an awful lot of self-sacrifice, which for Christians is simultaneously the most difficult and most necessary lesson we will have to learn.

The tough lesson of self-sacrifice comes even more into play when two become three, and marriage becomes not just marriage but parenting--which is the milestone Steve and I will be hitting in the next 5-6 weeks when our little guy enters the world.

So I figured I better post what I've got before Baby Boy arrives and I have a whole new phase of self-sacrifice to learn and it's even harder to finish things I've started.  :)

So here are two of the most important lessons I've learned in my 5 years of marriage.

1. Communicate, even when it's hard.  This was a hard one for me to learn.  I grew up believing with all my heart that negative emotions should not be shared with others.  And that conflicts were best handled by not handling them at all.  To say that my husband did not grow up believing these things would be an understatement.  Our worst, longest, most brutal nights in our first years consisted of a horrible cycle: I got upset, I shut my mouth, Stephen tried to pry everything out of me, and the harder he pried, the deeper I dove into anger, pain, silence, and resentment at him for prying.

To this day, when through a conversation my deepest negative emotions are brought to the surface for all to see, I'm still reminded of The Chronicles of Narnia, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, when Aslan takes his claws to Eustace's scaly exterior and removes his layers upon layers of dragon skin.  It is an extremely painful experience for Eustace.  And so extremely necessary.

While it's hard to face my own ugliness, God has given Stephen an amazing capacity to forgive, fully and without any consequences.  That forgiveness, I have learned, is SO much healthier in a relationship than simple conflict avoidance.

2. The difference between heat and thorns.  This is one I first learned from a counselor (Steve Green from Impact Biblical Counseling), and marriage became my platform for putting it into practice.  It is tied to Jesus' teaching from Mark 7:20-23, where he says, "What comes out of a person is what defiles him. For from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery,  coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, foolishness. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.”  To paraphrase Steve Green in his article "The Gospel Makes a Difference": You aren't angry at your spouse because they "made" you angry.  You are angry at them because deep down inside you have anger.  In metaphorical terms, your spouse's words or action are the heat that was applied to you--but the thorns that came to the surface in you were already there.  The heat just brought them out.  And the solution is to turn to the Cross in repentance for your thorns, and let Christ do His work to heal you from them.

This is not to say that your spouse has no thorns of his or her own.  For every fallen human being, thorns are a given!  But what we've learned is that it is not your job to make your spouse repent of his or her thorns.  That is the Holy Spirit's job.  Our job is to continually turn back to Christ to heal us from our own thorns, and to pray and trust the Holy Spirit to work on each other's thorns.