Compassion for the Struggle

Thoughts from Sacred Marriage chapter 4

Well summer hit Seattle for six weeks or so J and I guess my blog got the boot. That’s fine. I think watching ponytails fly in the sun and my kids actually put on bathing suits and my own skin feeling warm is much more valuable than a bunch of introspection anyway J. But now it’s winter again (another J) and I’m back.

I don’t think I hit chapter three from Sacred Marriage yet but all I can think about is what happened to me recently when I re-read for the third time chapter four, so here goes.

Can you think of a moment when your heart has been significantly softened for your spouse? When the walls on the room you used to leave for grace for him just got pushed back? That is what it felt like when I read the end of this chapter again. I had actually underlined a ton of great stuff in the beginning of the chapter about dealing with contempt for your spouse – very convicting truths actually. And as I re-read the chapter my heart turned to mush for my husband on a totally different segment.

Gary Thomas had a portion of the chapter entitled “Remember the effects of the Fall.” Allow me to quote a bit of it for you on p.67-8…

“We need to understand how profoundly broken this world is. Sin has radically scarred our existence. As a result of the Fall, I will labor with difficulty and angst (Gen 3:17-19). Lisa will mother our children and enter into relationships with mixed motives and frustrated aims (Gen 3:16). Even an unusually good marriage is not able to erase the effects of sin’s curse on individuals and society…

“The problem is that even though we can’t go back to the idyllic existence prior to the Fall, we were created with an understanding of what pre-Fall days were like – in other words, we know what relationships should be like, but we are incapable of making them perfectly in tune with that ideal: ‘Our souls are wired for what we will never enjoy until Eden is restored in the new heaven and earth. We are built with a distant memory of Eden.’

“This calls me to extend a gentleness and tolerance toward my wife. I want her to become all that Jesus calls her to become, and I hope with all my heart that I will be a positive factor in her pursuit of that aim. But she will never fully get there this side of heaven, so I must love and accept her in the reality of our lives in a sin-stained world.

“Accepting the fallenness of this world – with its bitter disappointments, physical limitations, and myriad demands – helps me to understand how difficult life is for Lisa, which helps me in turn to have contempt for contempt.”

It’s so important for me to understand as my husband’s wife that there’s a whole backdrop to what is going on in our relationship. It’s not like his life is roses and then we have a disagreement and it’s a complete surprise. The backdrop for my husband is first the fallen world around him, filled with sinners who sin continually, so he struggles in the world. He navigates broken conversations, filled with selfish gain. He works in an environment focused on pleasing man and performance, while internally struggling in the spirit towards being a man who only strives to please God. And then backdrop of his heart personally is that he lives his whole life with a sin nature, with which he struggles and fights in the spiritual realm to be transformed by Jesus from now until he leaves this earth. On the outside it may look like day to day work and mowing the grass and vacations and “what do you want to do today’s” but deeper and weaved into every interaction is a life-long struggle in the spirit.

So without me even evaluating who is at fault or who should apologize first or before I start building up contempt for this person who I feel has burst my beneficial relationship bubble…I really feel compelled and convicted to see his struggle.

Jesus himself tells us that “In this world you will have trouble.” He is talking to his disciples about how he will be leaving the world soon and that they will be scattered, but there will be a day when they will be able to be with him again, and no one will take away their joy at that time. If I read that as Jesus speaking that personally to my husband, I can hear him telling Jason, my husband, “Jason in this world you will have trouble…” and a great compassion falls over me.

I think in the moments I feel misunderstood or sinned against or wronged, I am completely walled off to this difficult state of struggle that we are in as human beings, and more specifically the life of struggle that my husband will have, until he goes to that joy everlasting with the Lord. But when I let those hard words sink in, that my dearest companion lives in a fallen world, in fallen relationships, and lives in a battle with a fallen nature, that breaks my hard heartedness and self-absorbtion towards him in our more difficult moments.

In just the next chapter, John 17:15-19, as Jesus prays to the Father, he ministers to me concerning this struggle he has allowed us to remain in.

“My prayer is not that you take them out of the world but that you protect them from the evil one. They are not of the world, even as I am not of it. Sanctify them by the truth; your word is truth. As you sent me into the world, I have sent them into the world. For them I sanctify myself, that they too may be truly sanctified.”

It is the Lord’s will that for now we remain here, in a fallen world. But the remaining is for a purpose. That he might sanctify us by the truth. This is the HOPE that I must, must, must couple with my deeply compassionate seeing of my husband’s struggle. I must couple his struggle with the hope that Jesus has left us here for a time to transform us. He finishes his statement from earlier, “In this world you will have trouble…” with “but take heart, for I have overcome the world.” Jesus has overcome the struggle! He has overcome this fallen world. He has overcome the fall of sin.

And he has overcome our fallen hearts.

I used to think that the word “praise” was old and kind of silly to say outloud here in 2010. It’s still sometimes an prideful, awkward struggle for me to respond to a friend’s answer to prayer with a heartfelt “Praise God!” But all I can say to the truth that I am to take heart, because Jesus has overcome all of this fallenness is, I PRAISE HIM!

I am so thankful that he has not only given me the difficult, yet Christlike, compassion to see clearly and deeply my husband’s struggle, but also he has encouraged me towards the rest of the story: that he has overcome this world and its fallenness.

Jesus is so gracious. I have to include his final words of that prayer. These are the words of God himself, before he left us here on earth in this struggle with fallenness. “Righteous Father, though the world does not know you, I know you, and they know that you have sent me. I have made you known to them, and will continue to make you known in order that the love you have for me may be in them and that I myself may be in them.”

Our struggle is not ours alone. “Praise be to the Lord, to God our Savior, who daily bears our burdens.” (Psalm 68:19)

JJ Heller’s – Your hands

I have unanswered prayers

I have trouble I wish wasn’t there

And I have asked a thousand ways

That you would take my pain away

I am trying to understand

How to walk this weary land

Make straight the path that crooked lie

Oh Lord before these feet of mine

When my world is shaking

Heaven stands

When my heart is breaking

I never leave your hands

When you walked upon the earth

You healed the broken, lost and hurt

I know you hate to see me cry

One day you will set all things right

When my world is shaking

Heaven stands

When my heart is breaking

I never leave your hands