Beyond Ordinary: When a Good Marriage Just Isn't Good Enough (7 page)

A BATTLE PLAN

One of the things we have learned is that there is a huge difference between good intentions and being intentional. We said in the last chapter that most marriages don’t intend to drift into ordinary. Ordinary is the by-product of the equation time + unintentionality = ordinary.

In order to move beyond ordinary, we have to be intentional. We have an enemy who is intentionally coming against our marriage relationships. We won’t drift into extraordinary; we will have to fight for it.

Intentionality + time = extraordinary. Here are two crucial ways you can fight the battle for an extraordinary marriage.

Pray for Your Spouse

As a pastor, I (Justin) get paid to pray. Trisha and I have always believed in the power of prayer. We knew the importance of prayer. We prayed all the time. We would pray for small-group leaders. We would pray for people having marital problems. We would pray for people who came up after the Sunday service and wanted to rededicate their lives to Christ. We just never prayed for each other.

Looking back, I know how ridiculous this seems. How could we not pray for each other? I would pray for Trisha occasionally. It would go something like this: “Dear God, please prompt Trisha to not gripe at me when I get home tonight. In Jesus’
name, amen.” I didn’t consistently pray for Trisha and her needs, desires, and feelings. I never took time to lift her up to God as I should have.

If you want to change the climate of your marriage immediately, start praying for your spouse. Then you will realize that you are engaging the spiritual battle in your marriage rather than becoming a victim of it.

Pray with Your Spouse

I read a statistic not long ago that shocked me: less than 8 percent of Christian couples say that they pray together on a regular basis.
²
While that is shocking, it isn’t surprising. For some reason it is difficult to pray with your spouse.

Praying with your spouse is huge in fighting for his or her heart. This may feel weird at first and may not feel natural. There isn’t anything more intimate—
including sex
—than praying with your spouse and hearing your spouse pray for you. Our prayers to God are some of the most intimate conversations we have. We share our hopes, our dreams, our fears, our insecurities, our failures, and our successes with our heavenly Father.

When I pray with Trisha, I am allowed to hear her articulate the things in her life that are most precious to her. I am able to understand her more. I am invited into a part of her heart that is sacred. There is a bond and a connection that is formed through praying together that can’t be simulated or created in any other way. The Holy Spirit joins us and draws us closer together as we seek God with our spouses. This aspect alone has been a huge part of our journey, and we have heard so many stories from other couples who have chosen to share this part of their heart with their spouses and have experienced intimacy in ways they never thought possible.

Marriage is no ordinary battle. To overcome an ordinary marriage, you have to fight
for
your spouse, not
with
your spouse.

QUESTIONS

1. Can you recall the very first argument in your marriage? If so, what was it about?
   
2. Can you remember a “Did God really say . . .” moment that altered the way you looked at your life and your marriage? Why was this moment so influential?
   
3. As a couple, do you live with an awareness that there is a spiritual battle for your marriage? How do you respond to that battle?
   
4. Do you feel comfortable praying with your spouse? Why or why not? Would you consider praying with your spouse for the next 30 days?
   

What prevents us from being fully known?

The greatest adversary to being fully known is dishonesty. And fear is the driving force in most of our dishonesty. Our fears are often greater than our desire for intimacy and leave our marriages ordinary.

Those who compromise honesty generally do so because of three fears: fear of being exposed, fear of emotional pain, and fear of not being loved. When any of these fears is larger than our desire for intimacy, ordinary becomes the norm in our marriages.

Many of us have something in our lives that we hope no one finds out. Many of us live with secrets that even our spouses don’t know. Maybe it’s the number of people we slept with before marriage. Maybe it’s an eating disorder we had or currently struggle with. Maybe it’s lustful thoughts about a coworker. Maybe it’s a pornography addiction. Maybe it’s abuse we suffered as children.

Our secrets don’t always have to be something we’ve done;
often they are something that was done to us. But our fear is that someone will expose our secrets. That fear—fear of being exposed—feeds the fear of emotional pain.

We don’t want to be exposed, because we’ve calculated the emotional pain our secrets or our lies or our addictions or our confessions will cause, and we have concluded that the emotional pain we will endure or the emotional pain we will cause will be greater than any good that could come from being exposed. So we continue to hide. We continue to pretend that things are better than they really are, thinking we are sparing ourselves and those we love from emotional pain. That fear is fueled by another fear.

We are convinced that if we were exposed and our secret was found out, the emotional pain it would cause would make us unlovable. So we think,
If my wife ever knew that about me, she would stop loving me
. Or,
If my husband found out about that, he would be done with me
. Or,
If I am honest about that, I will be all alone
. Our dishonesty, we believe, will help our marriages, not hurt them.

We’ve talked a lot in the first two chapters about oneness. Oneness can seem like an abstract concept—how do we quantify
oneness
? Oneness—as we will repeat throughout this book—is intimacy, being fully known. All of us desire to know and be fully known by someone. We all desire to experience intimacy with God and intimacy with another human being. God gave us that desire, and it is God’s design for marriage.

But while there is this deep desire for intimacy, there is another part of us that is fearful of someone really knowing us, really seeing the dark parts of our hearts. We have a desire to be known, but a competing desire to avoid pain. We want to be emotionally safe. The problem is that biblical intimacy isn’t safe.

TRISHA:

One evening when Micah was just a baby, I could not get him to stop crying. He was a colicky baby to begin with, but this particu
lar day, his tears of unhappiness seemed inconsolable. He had cried all day, and by the evening I was worn out. Unfortunately, Justin had a meeting that night and couldn’t come home to help. But a few hours into the evening, I was losing my mind and begged Justin to come home. Justin left his meeting to take care of us. What I didn’t know was what had transpired along the way.

The only thing that seemed to calm Micah was the shower. I would stand in the shower with him and let the warm water soothe his pain. By eight o’clock, I just stayed in my bathrobe rather than getting dressed, knowing that another shower was just around the corner. Relieved Justin was on his way home, I sat on the couch and released a deep sigh because help was coming.

But my help came sooner than expected, and I was startled by the sound of our doorbell.

Listening to the doorbell frantically ring, I thought,
Justin was twenty minutes away. How did he get here so quickly, and why is he ringing our doorbell?
When I opened the door, there stood two male EMS workers with their ambulance lights ablaze in the background. Sleep deprived and exhausted, I assumed they had the wrong apartment. But the younger of the two said, “Are you Trisha Davis?”

“Um . . . yes?” I replied.

Can I just pause here before I finish this story? I need to say that I am a rules follower; Justin is not.

While Justin made a mad rush home to his crying son and crazy wife, a police officer pulled him over for speeding. In order to get out of the ticket, he told the officer that there was an emergency at home. The officer said he had to call an ambulance in order to let Justin out of the ticket.

And so there I sat, half-dressed, hair and face a mess, trying to follow the rules and tell them there was no emergency—just a crying baby and a soon-to-be-crying husband!

To my amazement, the older EMT showed me grace and dealt with my “emergency.” He took Micah from my arms, gently rocked him, and in minutes handed back to me a miracle—a sleeping baby.

Looking back, I can see that this was just the first of many instances when I went from being enchanted by the way Justin would attempt to fix my problems to
expecting
him to fix all my problems. It was really funny at the time that Justin told the police officer there was an emergency in order to escape a ticket. Little did I know that compromising truth to escape consequences would become a pattern for Justin and for our marriage for years to come. Distorting truth and compromising truth often seems innocent and harmless, but it always comes with a price. The price for us would be eroded intimacy and broken trust.

JUSTIN:

One of the complicating factors during the time of Trisha’s parents’ divorce was my job situation. I was becoming increasingly unhappy as our student ministry outgrew the desire the church had to reach kids who were far from God. There was constant tension between the elders and me because our student ministry was growing at a pace they weren’t comfortable with.

I brought that tension home. I wanted to go to a bigger, more progressive church, a church that would embrace a growing student ministry. Our home situation seemed like a perfect storm: I was unhappy with my job; Trisha longed to be closer to her family. I wanted to pretend that we didn’t argue all the time. I wanted to pretend that we felt confident as parents. I wanted to make believe that Trisha wasn’t emotionally needy and I wasn’t emotionally disconnected. I wanted to pretend that our marriage wasn’t as weary and frayed as it already was. I wanted to pretend that things were okay with us even when they weren’t. Because I am a fixer, I thought that if we could move closer to her family, that would solve everything. We could find a bigger, better ministry so I would be happy, and we could move closer to Trisha’s family so she could be happy.

I made some phone calls to pastors, professors, and other contacts I had in the Chicagoland area, seeking a youth ministry
position closer to Trisha’s home. A little over a year into our first student ministry, I resigned, and we moved to Batavia, Illinois, to a bigger church and student ministry.

But far from fixing our problems, the move made some of them more evident than ever. One of them, as Trisha mentioned, was my not always being truthful. I remember the first time I intentionally distorted truth with Trisha. We had been in Illinois only a few months when we took a group of students to a campus event at Lincoln Christian College. The college was just a few hours away, so we loaded up a few fifteen-passenger vans and headed south. I thought this would be a great way for us to get to know the students and to build the foundation for a healthy student ministry.

The kickoff to the weekend was a concert performed by Audio Adrenaline, one of my favorite Christian bands at the time. Because Trisha and I were only a little more than a year removed from being students at the college, we still had several friends who were there, and I was asked to help with security at the concert. I was all in favor of that, because I tend to be starstruck, and working security would give me an all-access pass to stalk—I mean,
meet
—the band. I was pumped.

My security responsibility during the concert was pretty easy. I had to stand at the front of the auditorium and make sure none of the kids tried to get on stage. Trisha and I stood next to each other during the concert, and our students were allowed to be up in the front as well. It seemed like a win for everyone.

About halfway through the concert, my eyes caught Trisha’s, and she looked furious. She said, “I can’t believe you!” and left the auditorium. I knew in my heart what she meant, and I followed her outside, through the lobby, and into the parking lot. She was walking fast, crying hard, and not interested in anything I had to say. I repeatedly asked her what was wrong. She turned and looked at me dead in the eyes, tears streaming down her face, and said, “I saw you checking out that girl in front of you. You were staring at her body!”

She was right, of course, but there was no way I was going to admit it. I had to convince her she was wrong. I was defensive. I acted appalled. I pretended she was crazy. I matched the intensity of her accusation with determination to prove my innocence. I told her I would never do that. I told her she was projecting her parents’ divorce on me and that this was about her insecurity and not my lusting. I broke her down, convincing her that our marriage was different; I was different; she didn’t have to feel insecure or anxious. What was going to destroy our marriage was her living with a posture of accusation, not my lusting after other women. What I’ve just said in a few sentences took a few hours of manipulation then.

The three fears mentioned at the beginning of the chapter will do incredible things. Fear of being found out, fear of emotional pain, and fear of not being loved convinced me that the lies I was telling were helping our marriage, while I was actually tearing Trisha apart—I just couldn’t see it at the time. My intention wasn’t to hurt Trisha; it was to protect our marriage—and me. I know that sounds crazy given the blatant lies I told her, but in my mind, I was terrified that if she knew the truth about me, our marriage would be over. If I told her the truth, she wouldn’t love me anymore. I thought our marriage was too delicate to survive my admitting to her that I
was
lusting; I
was
staring; I
was
checking that girl out. There was no way that confession would be good for our marriage, so I simply distorted the truth. Hiding truth, I felt, would have fewer consequences than admitting truth.

TRISHA:

Much like Lucy in The Chronicles of Narnia, I’d somehow stumbled through a wardrobe to an unfamiliar land. But the world I had stumbled into wasn’t filled with strange people and animals, but rather familiar people doing strange things. I grew up knowing friends whose parents had divorced, but
my
parents were different.
And I had friends whose husbands were caught lusting after other women, but
my
husband was different.

My parents’ divorce opened my eyes. I realized that things were not at all as they seemed. If I had known where the wardrobe door was to go back to the way things were, I would have run full speed back through it. Catching Justin looking at that girl confirmed that he was no different from the other untrustworthy men I knew. Justin had now become part of this new and unfamiliar landscape.

As Justin chased me in the bitter cold across the frozen field, I felt disoriented. My heart was beating fast, causing my body to feel like it was on fire, matching the anger blazing in my heart. I continued running across the field, thinking,
If my parents’ marriage crashed after twenty-five years, what will keep ours from falling apart after only two?

Justin kept calling after me, “Trisha, stop!” I didn’t care who might have been watching or listening; I just wanted to leave. But I eventually did stop and screamed through my violent tears, “You told me you were different! You told me you didn’t struggle with lust, but you lied! I saw you undressing her with your eyes! And you know what? You can have her, because I don’t care anymore!”

Justin tried to explain that what I saw didn’t happen. He told me I was projecting the hurt my dad caused me onto him. But I knew what I saw.

Still, the more Justin talked, the more I was convinced that he was right and this was my issue, not his. I was defeated.

I didn’t know it, but a piece of my heart grew as cold as the field I was standing on. I was resigned to the possibility that this new world was where I now lived. No longer would I allow my heart to love Justin intimately. Rather, I would hold him at arm’s length.

JUSTIN & TRISHA:

When we act out of fear, we gradually drift into two types of dishonesty: distortion of truth and withholding truth. Distorting
the truth is intentionally and consciously lying. The word
distortion
implies deliberately giving misleading or false information. Withholding truth is different from distorting the truth because it isn’t outright lying—it is not sharing all of the details. It is not offering truth when you have the opportunity. It is hiding information or emotions from someone.

We attempt to justify both forms of lying with a belief that we are protecting intimacy in our marriages, but the decisions we make to compromise honesty gradually destroy intimacy, a little at a time. We don’t set out to lie to our spouses. We don’t intend to be dishonest. But ordinary marriages live in the gray area of partial honesty.

DAVID & BATHSHEBA: TRUTH DISTORTED

In the story of King David, we see a man who experiences great intimacy with God. God anoints him. He is set apart to be the king of Israel and a spiritual exemplar to God’s people. He knows God’s heart, and God knows his. From David’s youth as a giant-slaying shepherd boy to his inauguration as king over all Israel, God is with him.

One afternoon David is on the roof of his palace, and he sees a woman bathing. Captivated by her beauty, he sends one of his messengers to find out more about this woman. His messenger returns to explain that she is the wife of Uriah, a faithful soldier in the Israelite army, who is away at war fighting for David.