The Christian Woman

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Oct 23, 2008

Stepping up to the Plate



I know when I first became a blogger on this site, I said that I would talk about the challenges of a marriage that had hit the wall. My purpose was to encourage other women who may be going through the same challenges, and to give them hope.


What I have found, however, is that some of the things we are experiencing are so deeply personal, that it's hard to share them without opening up a door into our relationship that really is not for anyone to see beyond except us.


But I will try to share something that happened a few nights ago, without filling in all the blanks, because God really did some amazing stuff.


Two months ago, due to certain events, I decided that I was done with the marriage. Finished. After spending a week with my younger daughter at our cabin in the woods (my older daughter was at a Christian camp), and being sick to my stomach the entire time as I prayed about what to do, I came back to inform my husband that I was moving out.


That conversation went on for four hours. My husband and I had never talked like that at any time during our 22 years of marriage. It wasn't pretty--it was actually very painful. Still, when we were through, I wasn't so sure I was moving out. This is not to say that he asked me to stay. Both of us were sitting on the fence, wildly uncomfortable in our present position--even feeling trapped--yet afraid of following through with divorce. We knew the carnage that would follow.


Over the next month or so, I prayed and prayed and prayed. Eventually God's voice came through to me. He told me that I had been "talking the talk" all my life. Now I needed to "walk the walk." It's easy to say that with God, all things are possible. But did I really believe it? Did I believe that He is who He says He is? That He can do what He says He can do? Even with MY marriage?


With some reluctance, I climbed down off the fence. I had this sense that God expected me to be the one to do it--to believe Him and take a stand for the marriage, because I am the "Jesus freak" of the house. My husband calls me a zealot. (It could be worse, you know?) My oldest daughter says that I turn everything (conversations, yada yada) into a "God thing." (Don't be fooled--my oldest daughter is showing signs of Jesus freakness, too, but she doesn't realize it. When viewing the big ghost hanging from our neighbors' tree, she said something like, "Goodness, why invite Satan in?") God led me to step up to the plate and take a stand.


I decided that I was not leaving. Not ever. I was going to believe God; believe that He could resurrect a dead marriage. Period. When I did that, two things happened. First, I knew that the devil was furious. I mean furious. I won't tell you about some of the weird stuff that happened around our house. Secondly, I learned that when God calls you to the plate, He doesn't leave you standing there without the right equipment. He began to teach me how to love my husband in a way that I never have.


He has given me a servant heart for my husband that was never there before. He has taken every ounce of fight out of me. He has given me a new humility that my husband doesn't quite know what to do with. For the first time in my life, I am now learning what REAL love is--unconditional, expecting nothing in return.


But let me also make it clear that this new behavior of mine is not "mine." It is the Holy Spirit working through me. I am really not all that wonderful. I know that it is the Holy Spirit, because it has been two months since I climbed off the fence, and if I was still trying to do this in my own power, I would have had 18 knee-jerk reactions by now, several tirades before God, and three or four in-your-face confrontations with my husband. And incidentally, that was life before I stepped up to the plate--before God honored my faith, and equipped me.


Now, about the other night. My husband told me he wanted to talk to me. We sat behind closed doors and he told me about how he was feeling. Without divulging what he said, suffice it to say that he is still on the fence and very uncomfortable.


But you know what? A miracle actually occurred, because the words he said to me should have knocked me flat. They weren't mean-spirited, but they were honest. Maybe some of the most honest things he has ever said to me. And that is a very good thing--that he can feel safe enough to say such things. But they were the last thing I wanted to hear. Strangely though, as I listened to him, I felt no pain. God held my heart in His warm hands, and I was really OK. I was actually astounded that I was OK.


I told him that I was going to stay in the marriage, and I was going to love him, no matter what. He wasn't quite sure what to do with that information, or me.


Afterward, I went out for a walk like I often do. It was 9:30 p.m., but I have my faithful Jessie dog (who sleeps beside me as I write), and my God, and both enable me to walk comfortably in the dark in our neighborhood. As soon as I got past our driveway, this amazing, unearthly joy took hold of me. I can't describe it. All I could do was smile. But I knew first of all, that God had been there in the midst of that conversation, and that He had used me, and that He had held me and kept my heart safe. And something told me that the joy was a precursor to what will come with time. All I could do throughout that 45-minute walk was praise God.


The next day, the Lord brought my dearest friends to "fill my cup" (unbeknownst to them). I called one friend, and two others just happened to call--which almost never happens. I was on the phone for a total of almost three hours that day (an all-time record because I am not a phone talker).


The day after that, I was at Bible study and chatting with a friend of mine who has been praying for our marriage, and who has been an encouragement. As she listened to the latest events, she told me, "Three years ago, my husband was you, and I was your husband. The same thing happened almost exactly. I gave my husband every reason to leave me. In fact, I tried to make him mad enough to leave me. But he refused to leave, and insisted on loving me. Then, one day, I woke up, and I wasn't angry anymore. I couldn't even summon up anger toward him. I went and apologized to him. And now, look at us."


Wow. When God calls us to the plate, He gives us the right equipment. And a wonderful team that supports us, and prays alongside of us.


We just have to be brave enough to get off the fence, and step up to the plate. Even if it looks like the odds are against us. Because God is for us. And that is all we need.


Blessings,


Gwenn

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-posted by Gwenn M.  # 10:54 AM  6 Comments

 

Aug 24, 2008

Stinky fish, or violets?

As I said in my first blog for The Christian Woman, I'm going to stick my neck out and talk about the crash of my 20-year-marriage. For those of you just tuning in, there was indeed a crash, but there are survivors. My husband and I are still together, but we are definitely the walking wounded.

Before I dive into the details, however, I want to state that my goal is to honor my husband in these blogs. That will not always be easy, because in any marriage crash, the two people involved have usually said or done things they are not proud of. However, I hope to focus more on my downfalls and try to keep my husband's part in the drama as high-level as possible. I don't want to embarrass him in any way.

Both my husband and I can point to the exact day when everything began to go downhill. It was my birthday, and my grandmother had just died that morning. My grandmother and I had been very close, and I was her last surviving relative, and heir. I live in the Seattle area, and she lived in Oceanside, California. A little over a year earlier, I had moved her out of her home into an assisted living facility in Oceanside, emptied out her house of 25 years with the help of some old friends who lived in the area, and put it on the market.

I could not convince Grandma to come up to my neck of the woods and live in assisted living, so in the ensuing year, I flew down to visit her about every 3 or 4 months. She was 90 years old, and my previously energetic grandma was now dragging around a body that simply wanted to fall apart.

After a year, as her health progressed downward, I finally convinced her to move up near me. Once again, I was in the "moving business" and hired movers to pack up her little apartment, and we came up to Washington. She had barely moved into her new digs when she began falling a lot, and I was called to her side on a regular basis. Her doctor and I were practically on a first-name basis. Only three months after she moved in, she fell and broke her hip, and subsequently died in the hospital about a week after surgery.

Grandma died at 5 a.m. on my birthday, after a long week of intense stress, and visits to the hospital. That night, my husband took me out to dinner in Seattle, and as we sat in a very crowded restaurant, with people at tables literally inches away from ours, we tried to talk. I felt the need to unload.

I talked about how relieved I was that Grandma was no longer trapped in her worn-out body. I talked about how I felt like I had been let out of a cage after months of running back and forth between Grandma's facility and my home. My children were 11 and 7 when she died, so I had been busy trying to be a Mom, too. I talked about how my inheritance from my Grandma would certainly give us more freedom, since we had always had to be careful with our money...

With that last statement, I might as well have hit my husband over the head with a mallet. Through much of our marriage, my husband has been the sole provider. He felt that his years of working hard to provide for the family had been nullified with one insensitive sentence that implied what he had done wasn't good enough. I had no idea at the time; I was so wrapped up in my own emotions and exhaustion.

He had good reason to feel that way. My husband has always been an amazing provider. We live in a beautiful home and I have absolutely nothing to complain about. But that one sentence in my husband's mind was simply the last straw of what he felt were years of straws.

It didn't matter that I needed grace that night. Grace is a tough thing to grant when you have just been hit over the head.

I believe when the Lord Jesus told Peter to forgive people 70 times 7, He was speaking specifically about marriage. When you think about having to forgive a friend 490 times, you begin to wonder why you would ever hang onto a loser like that. But when you think about it in the context of marriage, it takes on a whole different meaning. 490 times? Let's see--that's about a year and a half's worth.

One of the mistakes that we have made through our marriage is not granting forgiveness each time one of us has hurt the other. We have piled up each others' unforgiven sins between each other like a stack of stinky rotten fish. Now we have this mountain of malodorous entrails between us, and it just somehow seems easier to stay on our separate sides than to try to climb through the muck.

I am now learning to go immediately to Jesus when my husband hurts me. IMMEDIATELY--before another stinky fish appears. This has several advantages:

--It prevents me from having a knee-jerk reaction and saying something hurtful back to my husband.
--Within a few minutes, I have a peace about it, and the Lord often gives me a different perspective. Forgiveness is always easier when the Lord is involved.
--Keeping my mouth shut and going directly to prayer affects my husband far more positively than anything else I could do or say, because it is very hard for me to be gracious when I am hurt, just as it was for him at that birthday dinner.

I remember reading the following sentence many years ago, and it touched me so deeply that I never forgot it: "Forgiveness is the fragrance the violet sheds on the heel that crushed it."

So, what will it be? Stinky fish, or the sweet fragrance of violets?

Blessings!

Gwenn

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-posted by Gwenn M.  # 7:20 AM  5 Comments

 

Aug 20, 2008

Marriage 101


Greetings!


I am thrilled to be a part of the blogging team for The Christian Woman. I'm a 50-year-old wife and mother of two daughters, 13 and 9. I'm one of those trendy women who chose to have children later in life. OK, actually, God shoved me off the proverbial diving board and into pregnancy at age 36, where I had no choice but to hit the water and become a mother--which I have loved. Then, at 40, we actually chose to have a second child, and after getting pregnant, I remember sitting on the bottom of our stairs when no one was in the house, and blurting out, "WHAT WAS I THINKING?" But of course, our second daughter has been as wonderful and loved as the first. A few years ago, some similarly-aged friends (who also had kids late in life) asked my husband what he planned to do after the kids were out of the house, and without missing a beat, he replied, "Die."


Before taking on the career of motherhood, I was a writer and editor of two different trade magazines, and also had a romance column in three mid-sized city newspapers. It was actually a fictional column with a cliffhanger at the end of each episode, kind of like Harlequin Romance meets Days of Our Lives. The story line was very clean and appropriate--a kiss was the extent of the excitement--but I managed to choose the wrong venue. The three newspapers were distributed in a predominantly Mormon area, and a number of Mormon women apparently thought that the content in the column would surely end up in the gutter, so they called the newspaper and threatened to march on the newspaper if they didn't pull the column. I actually thought that a march on the newspaper would be great press and advertising, but the editor didn't, and so ended my dreams of being the Erma Bombeck of serialized romance syndication. Incidentally, during that period of time, I actually wrote to Erma about trying to get such a column into syndication, and she was ever so kind to write back and encourage me. (If you're too young to know about the wonderful humorist Erma Bombeck, skip to the next paragraph.)


That was in my late twenties, and since then, God has called me to write for His purposes. He has given me a passion to write about marriage, because mine has been anything but easy. In fact, a few years ago, our twenty-year marriage hit a brick wall, and I, for one, was blindsided. I began to realize that something was wrong, but after about five months of trying to fix it, I woke up to realize that I had a bitter husband who felt I had disrespected him for years, and taken him and his love for granted. He became increasingly distant, like an astronaut who was floating away from the mother ship, his lifeline severed by...himself.


Since then, we have waged an uphill battle to try to stay together, but the "D" word has been bantered between us so many times that the "M" word has become nearly archaic. Through these two painful years, God has been ever so faithful, and He has showed me many of the things I have done in the past that have dishonored my husband. Many times the Lord woke me in the middle of the night to pray for my husband, and it was at those times that I felt a clear sense that a spiritual battle was raging over us, and Satan knew we were right on the edge of the cliff, and he wanted desperately to push us over.


The devil has not succeeded, and we are still together, but we have a lot of "undoing" to do. There is still a lot of hurt, distance, distrust and defensiveness, but God has shown me in many ways that He is with us and will lead us through, if we will only trust, and look to Him.


I believe the Lord has called me to write about this odyssey, and the truths that I have learned, even while we are still in the foxhole, so to speak. Christian marriages are crumbling at an astounding rate, and I would be willing to bet that the women in these marriages are a lot like I was when at first we hit the wall--absolutely sure that their husbands are the problem. Now, nearly two years later and wiser, I know that I have been a large part of our marriage's crash.


When we married, I was NOT an Ephesians 5 woman. In fact, I had chosen a specific scripture to be read in our wedding, and certainly not Ephesians 5:22-33. NEVER!!! I knew that scripture well, and I avoided it like the plague. But guess what the Lord did? He made sure it was read in our wedding anyway.


On that special day, I remember standing next to Robin (my husband) before our friends and family, and as our good friend Bob began to read the scripture I'd designated for him (or so I thought), out came the words, "Wives, be subject to your own husbands, as to the Lord...and let the wife see to it that she respect her husband." As Bob began to read those verses, my mouth dropped open. When I asked Bob later why he hadn't read the scripture I'd given him, he said he'd lost it, and chose this scripture. I was annoyed at the time, thinking he could have chosen any other scripture but that one. However, it was more than 21 years later that I realized the Lord Jesus had had a hand in that, knowing that I would need to hear those words in my wedding; knowing that respect for my husband would not come easily to me; and that ultimately, it would nearly destroy my marriage.


In future blogs, I will talk about some of the lessons I have learned. I hope that, if you're in the middle of a painful marriage and are seriously considering letting go...please, hold on, even if it's only by a thread. God is faithful, and you will not be disappointed.


"In Thee they trusted, and were not disappointed." Psalm 22:5b


Blessings,

Gwenn

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-posted by Gwenn M.  # 10:07 AM  1 Comments