Adversity

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Fighting to Forgive

My wife and I fought a lot early in our marriage. We had a shouting match almost every day about something.

Typically I caught myself and turned my emotions off. I’d wait for my wife to say something that was slightly irrational in my opinion, and then pounce like a lion. She would usually just walk away in anger.

I would quickly try to reconcile, admitting to the one or two things I had done wrong. “I probably raised my voice a little.” Then I would proceed to list the seven or eight things she had done wrong. “I repent of my two sins. Now you repent of yours. Then we can forgive each other and move on.”

She would respond, “My emotions aren’t a light switch! I can’t just instantly forgive!”

I would answer, “I’m trying not to let the sun go down on anger. But you are still sinning.”

And so we rode the downward spiral.

Married to a Pharisee

After a year of fighting, we were both sick of our marriage. Both of us said, “I don’t believe in divorce, but if I did . . . ”

One night she said, “Before we were married, I was confident. I liked myself and thought most people liked me. After a year of marriage to you, I feel like I have lost all self-esteem.”

For the first time, I saw a glimpse of just how pharisaical I had been. I had not washed my bride with the water of God’s Word. Rather, I had viciously attacked her in her weakness, using his Word like a swift sword of justice. I also had downplayed my sin and excused my weaknesses.

Something finally clicked that night.

My New Vow

When Jesus teaches us how to love each other, he tells us to focus first on our own sin before moving too quick to help others with theirs. He says, “First take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye” (Matthew 7:5). Even if we think our spouse is 99 percent wrong and we are only 1 percent wrong, we first should turn our energy and effort on our sin—the sin closest to us, the sin for which we are responsible.

Even if we think our spouse is 99 percent wrong and we are only 1 percent wrong, we first should turn our energy and effort on our sin.

If my wife and I both had a speck of dust in our eyes, the speck in my eye would look larger because it is closer to me. Ignoring our own sin to focus on someone else’s is like having a 2×4 stuck under your eyelid. We compare our sin to others, thinking they are wicked, while we aren’t so bad.

I realized how ridiculous I was to poke at the speck in my wife’s eye with a plank sticking out of my face. I said to her, “All I’ve done is criticize you. So, for the next year, I promise not to bring up any of your sins or faults. If you ask me a question, I will answer it honestly. But I will only initiate talking about my sin. For now, any sin I see in you, I will just pray about.”

How God Humbles Husbands

I’ve made many promises in my life, and broken too many of them. But God helped me keep this one. My wife and I would get into an argument. As soon as I caught myself, I shut my mouth and listened. I didn’t attack her. I focused on receiving and embracing her correction.

It was hard. Often I was boiling inside. But when the conversation ended, I prayed. I would start out complaining, telling God how he needed to change her. But eventually I would confess my own sin to him. Over time, I started to soften, break, and be humbled by how much God was constantly forgiving me. The radical mercy of Christ, flowing from the cross to me, began to change me as a husband.

It became easier to listen to my wife, easier to be compassionate, easier to admit my faults. After weeks of this pattern, she rebuked me one day. I quickly admitted she was right. She stopped mid-sentence and said, “You know, this isn’t all your fault. I’ve sinned, too.”

Race to Repent

It took more than a year, with counseling, to work through our baggage. But the tenor of our marriage changed over those months. For the first year or so, we had been in a race to defend ourselves and attack each other. We wanted to score the most points by landing the best rebuke. We wanted to win the argument.

Now, for the last fifteen years or so, we typically race to see who can repent first. Rather than rushing to the other person’s specks, we try to focus on our planks first. In the process, we have become humbler, because we are more conscious of our own brokenness and need for grace. We have become more gracious, because we are so much more aware of how much Christ is constantly forgiving us. We have become gentler, because we realize how tender it can be to get sin out of our own eye.

God saved my marriage not by fixing my wife’s problems, but by helping me see my own and showing me mercy where I am wrong. After years of apologizing, extending grace, and learning, we now are far more likely to repent and forgive than to fight and scratch.

Olan Stubbs is director of Campus Outreach Birmingham, Alabama, at Briarwood Presbyterian Church. He is a husband and father of four. He writes more at his ministry blog, which can be found at https://cobirmingham.org.

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Surviving the Strain of Special Needs

It’s amazing that any marriage survives raising children with special needs. A relentless schedule of specialist appointments, filling out forms, meetings, unexpected hospitalizations, repetition, persistent sleep deprivation, difficult mealtimes, public embarrassments, and financial pressures can create a lethal cocktail for any marriage. Add in the personal disappointments and frustrations most parents experience and the sense of disenfranchisement that comes with them. Let’s just come out and say it: Raising children with special needs is hard on a marriage.

Turned upside down

The story I’d planned for my life was turned upside down with the birth of our two children, Zeke and Anna. Like many young women, I was aware that motherhood would be a hefty challenge, and once I discovered I was pregnant, I did what I could to prepare. I read, sought advice from people I respected, prayed, and studied other parents — both those I wanted to imitate and those I was sure I did not! But what I hadn’t anticipated was that this was not the sort of challenge you could carb up for in advance. It was hugely demanding, but not in the sorts of ways I had expected or experienced previously. There was no structure provided, no feedback available. Days were monotonous and lacked adult conversation.
That much, I imagine, any stay-at-home parent will tell you. But when we first suspected, and then had confirmed, that our children had special needs, it simply added to the isolation and disillusionment I experienced. And crucially, from a marriage viewpoint, the gap between my husband Andrew’s daily experience and mine grew wider and wider.

Prior to getting our son, Zeke, diagnosed, we were trying to follow the advice we’d come across in parenting guides and manuals. But we were finding they simply did not work. I was increasingly aware that normal parenting rules did not apply. We would go to toddler groups, and as Zeke and Anna ignored the toys and activities and wandered around aimlessly, I would wonder, Why are we here? Why can’t they do what the other children can do? These weekly opportunities to compare the children with their contemporaries brought me to the realization, much earlier than Andrew, that our children were different. I realized we needed to treat them differently. Fewer words. More flexible eating requirements. Moveable boundaries. Avoiding lectures as much as possible (Zeke, quite genuinely, finds a lecture so stimulating that he thinks it is a game and will repeat the behavior in order to get another).

We tried hard not to be controlled by our children.

On the other hand, my husband, Andrew, wanted us to persevere down the traditional road of family life: clear boundaries, lots of verbal encouragement, firm discipline, sanctions where necessary. Our parenting became disjointed, causing friction between us. We tried hard not to be controlled by the children and continue to offer hospitality, be generous financially, budget frugally, and work long hours as we’d always done. Before entering church work, Andrew had been a management consultant in the city, and he was determined that just because he worked in a church, he would not drift in late and clock out early. But trying to hold to all these principles, in the face of very new circumstances, took its toll on me.

Because Andrew was working, I did most of the appointments and hospital stays and checkups. As I described to him alien concepts like sensory needs, I got the distinct impression he was not convinced. My daily routine was about learning and integrating all this new information into parenting; meanwhile, he was concerned I was being bamboozled by woolly social-care mumbo-jumbo. We were pulling in different directions, and the strain was increasing.

At the same time, Andrew worked hard, hoping each day to come back to a happy family — only to walk through the front door into more tears and shouting. He did the early morning shifts as my sleep deteriorated, took the children for long drives on Saturdays to give me some space, and spent hours on the trampoline with Zeke when I had lost the emotional energy and motivation to keep trying. I remember how defeated I felt when Andrew first said that his “day off” was by far the most exhausting day of his week. This isn’t what I wanted for him, but I just didn’t have the reserves to do anything abut it.

Coming to a head

Then, in rainy February 2013, things came to a head. We had had a particularly difficult few weeks: Anna had been hospitalized again, Andrew had been away for two days, and I had nothing left in the tank. Reluctantly at first, Andrew eventually agreed to cancel all his traveling commitments for a period of six months, decline all future invitations, and start working nine-to-five locally. Gradually, the strain decreased as we identified more with each other’s lives and the challenges of day in, day out care. I knew he was in the thick of it with me. Our marriage improved.
It seems so obvious now, but at the time, that small sacrifice seemed like too much. Throughout those early months of recognizing that the children had special needs, we had been desperately clinging to the idea there must be limits to the control Zeke and Anna were able to wield with their meltdowns, refusals to eat, erratic behavior, and sleeplessness. We were trying to live the lives we had expected, even as life imploded around us. Two years later, having learned some painful lessons, we have conceded a huge amount of ground on our previous standards for raising children — Zeke only ate toast and cereal for a year; Anna is allowed to lick metal railings, and so on — and we would never go back.

In the end, because we refused to let our marriage go, we had to agree to let a lot of other stuff go. We’ve gotten to a point where we’ve decided that our life simply cannot operate as other people’s do. We’ve acknowledged that while there are some things that might help our children, we simply don’t have the capacity to do them, because it would put our relationship under too much strain. I’ve often wondered, actually, whether having a marriage might be the biggest challenge special-needs families face. But if we can recognize it for the explosive battle it is, rather than the peacetime jaunt we hoped it would be, then at least we can throw all our best firepower at the challenges and concede more ground in other areas to protect something that is truly valuable in God’s sight.

One final thought

The breakthrough came, when it did, not by me talking to Andrew but by me talking to God, who talked to Andrew. It didn’t result from a sustained period of banging the “you need to be home more” drum. It was just one line from the Lord, “Your life for you wife,” in this case — and the trajectory of our marriage changed.

Excerpted from The Life We Never Expected by Andrew and Rachel Wilson. Copyright 2016. Used with permission of Crossway www.crossway.org.

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