Marriage, Part 4

"Marriage Is (Almost) Impossible"

Marriage is difficult. And it becomes almost impossible if we expect it to be easy. A friend of mine was in a conversation about marriage with a man in a deeply troubled marriage. This Christian man asked my friend, “I thought God wouldn’t give me more than I can handle?” My friend wisely replied, “I hate to disagree, but I think that is exactly what God does. He gives us more than we can handle so that we will learn how to depend on Him rather than ourselves.”

The best thing you can do for your marriage is to learn how to get your life, your strength, your perspective from God. In Tim Keller’s words, we have to “know where the filling station is, and even more important, that it exists. Marriage is part of God’s design to lead us where we are out of our depths, where we know that unless God works, we will drown.”

Our task is NOT to burden our mates with the job of fixing us. I am convinced that our marriage didn’t drown because Cathy and I didn’t expect too much from each other. We knew that God was the only one capable of fixing what was/is broken in each of us. When we let God fill us up, “we have enough love “in the bank” to be generous to each other when we aren’t getting much kindness at the moment.”  

Did you marry a wounded person? someone who was abused by a parent? someone bullied and rejected by his classmates? Be careful about the type and amount of support that you give them. Henry Cloud claims that often these damaged people need LESS encouragement: Telling your troubled spouse “to try harder is one of the worst things you could possibly do. The best thing you can do is to discourage him from believing he can do it on his own.” We want troubled people to give up on themselves so they can depend on God instead.