Wife

I am trouble and strife.

I am Sarah. I am Hagar.
I am Rachel and Leah.
I am Bathsheba. I am Ruth.

I am stumbling.
Struggling.
Short-sighted and slow-witted.

I am wielded. I am poured.
Tapped and driven.
A formation tool.
My blemishes smooth away your corners.

My lateness is making you patient.
My forgetfulness is making you flexible.
My need is making you self controlled.
My hasty tongue thickens your sensitivity.

Tonight I long for distance.
My closeness makes for more bruises in you.
Tonight I long for proximity.
Your closeness comforts me.

I wrote this a few months ago, after seeing the pain I cause my husband. It burned me that he understood the pain and hard work of marriage. Through being married to me.

Again and again I realise that perfection, goodness, praiseworthiness is out of reach. That I long to be the one who excels, with ease and with pride. That if I succeeded at this I just might be insufferable. And that I make others suffer already.

And then I know (with a whole-body, whole-heart, deeply-relieved knowing) perfection is not mine to grasp. That we share need, my husband and I, because we let each other down. That we also share the intimacy of failing each other and it being OK. That I am his trouble and strife as well as his joy. That we clumsily love the other to show a tiny glimpse of God's perfect covenant love for each of us.

Tomorrow is our 14th anniversary. I'm not a sentimental blogger, but these years have been slowly teaching me the science and art of being known and what covenant love is. Truly I say, marriage is shaping me. Making me.

A curtain hides glory, truth and faithful love from us. My husband has lifted the bottom corner, beckoned me over and shared a peek with me.

 

I'm linking with Emily at Imperfect Prose on Thursdays.

Men get depressed

She's never called it depression before. I know it's taken me years to say it.

Last week she said he's depressed and I nodded because my soul gets stretched like that too. Depressed husbands make themselves push through. They twist their heart darkness into any other possible shape. They call it frustration or they label themselves "the melancholy type" or they just constrict to the necessary, hiding in bed but barely sleeping. They don't say "I'm depressed" very often.

Some have such rigorous self standards that they face a mountain of daily disappointment. Some wrestle with inadequacy bred into their bones and they doubt every urge or idea. Doubt paralyses them, and risking new notions fills them with terror. Fear that they cannot admit or perhaps cannot see.

Grace is the only solution. But depression conceals grace because it is born of self-criticism and failure. Failure to be what we long for, failure to see another's love for us.

So we talk about counselling and 'strategies' for self-care and the last thing he needs is strategies. He's all strategied up and he's worn out because it's another way to 'do the right thing' and be a good husband or father or person. His fear is of giving his all to God and finding nothing left for himself. That God would steal his soul if he offered it.

Someone else fears that God has nothing good to do through him. The fear robs him of passion and motivation. It leaves him misunderstood, dissatisfied and frustrated with himself. Another friend thinks others don't really like him and that man's wife reflects that she's 'a bit of an annoying person'.

It maddens me, this blindness. That we measure ourselves along such human scales, and our inadequacies become an obsession. Arrogance and pride can be about our achievements. But self- criticism is a type of pride too.

I see us all carrying self-critical burdens and they sap the life from us. God wants us to be free of this. Maybe freedom would come from seeing them more clearly and being willing to give them up. Willing to stop defining ourselves with them. To stop letting our imperfections be the barrier to God using us.

Let's turn the measuring around. Stop applying it to ourselves. Put it up against God, measure the life of Jesus. Start looking for achievement and adequacy where we're guaranteed to find it. Give up the flurry to be good enough. Accept ourselves, not to excuse failures but to stop the distracting internal war.

God is not stealing our souls, he's renewing them. We'll never find ourselves empty or soul-bereft trusting him. He's doing more than we can imagine in us (and through us), if we'll let him.

*NB. I write this, not knowing your particular experience of depression or self-criticism. Please forgive me if this does not ring true for you. I'm just reflecting on some things I've been thinking lately. This is not an exhaustive treatise on depression.

The Ship Song

There are a couple of reasons to share this video. It's been made as a tribute to the Sydney Opera House, the most iconic building I've ever been in. It features some of the best musicians/performers in Australia (imho), and it's a song written by Nick Cave, that I love.

I admit that there are tears in my eyes when I watch it. I walked down the aisle to this song almost 13 years ago.

Marriage is like a dance. It takes time to co-ordinate and to learn a shared rhythm.

It becomes familiar, comfortable and dependable. I can know the steps and anticipate. The safety of being held in common movement allows vulnerability and understanding.

But what if the steps are a pattern that stifles? Sometimes the dance we develop allows us to keep underestimating each other. To keep blaming each other. To drain each other, rather than build each other up.

How do we change the well-learned steps? Sometimes the footprints are worn deep in the carpet from years of this mutual to-and-fro. To keep treading in these spots would be easier, but what would we lose? Would the dance become automatic, taken-for-granted rather than mutually safe.

I question myself - is this drive to change the dance just my headstrong pride, or my bruised anger? Or is it the transformation we need to spur each other on, in love and good deeds? How can I know?

And maybe I've just never been very good at dancing with someone else...

I think about the dance, and search for courage to experiment. How to start? This balance of familiarity and freshness teeters back and forth. Does anyone ever get it right?

Paradox and Synergy

Paradox in marriage...

Feeling isolated in intimate relationship.

The moment of love depletion is when love is most needed.

Meeting betrayal with grace. Injury with pardon.

A long life together is not the fulfillment.

Familiarity breeds both devotion and contempt.

We know each other best, yet can never know or be known completely.



Synergy in marriage...

We are more than just the two of us.

The space between us is important. It is where we become one, where we create together, where we love people together.

The repetition of daily life together delivers space for renewal. The errors of the past are redeemed as we practice getting them right, over and over again.

Intimate relationship can magnify our faults, but provides a safe place for unexplainable healing.




My husband still insists that if I let him get Foxtel, he would be truly happy.

Covenant Love

Marriage, that blessed arrangement, that dream within a dream... (from the Princess Bride)

What makes marriage?
Is it the strength of the relationship?
Is it spending lots of money on a big celebration?
Is it people thinking you make a 'great couple'?
Is it survival? Through pain and betrayal and loss.
Is it romance and being in love?

Throughout the world, marriages are made in a myriad of ways.
Stripped back, what makes marriage?

The word I arrive at is Covenant. A religious, slightly jargonish word.
Persevering commitment to love and serve.

Deep down, we all want to know that there is someone we can count on, no matter what.

What a great blessing, what a comfort it is when our marriage brings us that experience.

But marriage does not always deliver. Not because it was poorly designed, but because we are human. We are not always able to persevere unswervingly in our commitment to love and serve. Big and little betrayals, personal failures, terrible storms and trials, touch many, perhaps most, marriages.

Sometimes our dream of the perfect or fulfilling marriage distracts us from being really available and listening in our imperfect human marriage. Disappointment with my husband usually springs from unfair or selfish expectations in my heart.

Marriage is an earthly shadow, showing us God's love for us. A metaphor for Jesus serving his people. A gritty, hard-work, mix of joy and struggle. A touch of heavenly grace mixed with the messiness of human hearts.

It is easy to idolise the shadowy reflection, while missing the reality it illuminates. We need words like covenant as we talk about marriage, because they remind us of the covenant-maker. We need forgiveness and grace in our marriages, to reflect the forgiveness and grace of Jesus among his people.
And when our marriages fail to give us what we need or dream of, we need Jesus. The one we can count on, no matter what.




Richard Beck posted about 'traditional' marriage, linked to a column in The Atlantic.

It is actually a compliment to marriage, and the importance people attribute to it as a unique commitment, that same-sex couples want to get married. People look at marriage and see a love that they want to have.
Perhaps a desire to marry can reflect a desire to participate in the forgiving, committed love that God has for his people.

"For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh." This is a profound mystery—but I am talking about Christ and the church. Ephesians 5:31-32

Uncomfortable truths

Marriage reflects some uncomfortable truths.

I really like being the one in the right. The one who is managing. The one who looks virtuous.

Sometimes I love that buzz of 'having it together'. Sometimes I even enjoy that my husband is having times when he struggles because I can be the one who covers for him.

WHAT?

How can I find even a skerrick if joy in the person dearest to me being sad or downtrodden? Why can I 'manage' when he is defeated?

Part of me knows that it is OK for him to need time and that 'managing' is what I need to do for the rest of my family.

But part of me likes to look good, for him to be thankful and realise what a great wife he has.

WHAT?

Real love does not delight in another's struggle in their pain. Real love reaches out to him, bears his burdens with him. Acknowledges that I am like him. I hurt and I especially hurt with him.

Real love does not rob him of the chance to be the one who rescues me and cares for me.

Marriage is teaching me that real love is sacrificial, and not about what other people think of me.

Marriage is a gift from God that will refine me, if I let it. If I can face what I see in the mirror marriage lifts before my face.

Eye-opening

He spits at her. Gathers himself and projects his disgust at the woman who carried his child. Once within her, now on her hip. Screams foul accusations, words that his son, her son should never witness.

They become attacking, circling beasts. Even she forgets to nurture. to protect. We drag her inside, pulling the child, the woman, trying to stop the searing frenzy. Something human, empathic, compassionate is lost in the wounded desire to break each other.

"Your baby's crying," as the door locks behind us. The phrase is echoed three, four times before the hackles can rest and she can clasp her roaring child.

This will be seared in his memory, burnt in by the terror, the animal smell of attack. Perhaps it will join a litany of similar images, stomach-souring dreads. Protect him lord, heal him.

Men and women can love each other with such pure, sacrificial, protecting love. But before me I see the wreckage of passion, of joining together. The child from their love sees the curse on it.

I think of the man who loves me. What if we lived out this drama? Even without an audience it would strip my soul bare, stir despair within me.

How easy it is to take for granted, to not be thankful. But today my relief, my loved-ness is palpable. The light on the hill I can see is the nurture and care I receive in my own home. Not perfect, but moulded by grace. Forgiving, thoughtful, one who enjoys me and welcomes me.