Gary L. Thomas's Blog, page 52

Love Hurts God the Most

I’m hurting. You’re hurting. Everyone, it seems, is hurting.

While we remain so sensitive to our own pain, let’s pause for just a moment to consider the pain God accepts when he adopts us as sons and daughters.

God knows that answering our cries for mercy and saving our souls will cause him more suffering than ten thousand women in labor.

We will betray him. We will resist him. We will fall away on many levels. He will pursue us, he will discipline us, accept us back, and forgive us.

He will ache as we bring untold misery into our lives through our disobedience because now he is watching a daughter or a son ruin their worlds. Every act of rebellion, every unkind word we utter to others, every self-sabotage is like one more dagger thrust in his side. We’re his children. He can’t stop caring.

Still, he will be patient even as we blame him for the pain we brought into our own lives by going our own way. He warned us. We pretended we didn’t hear. And then we blame him for the fallout.

Still, he loves. Still, he pursues.

Knowing how much pain one sinner saved costs him again and again (not just to save us—that was paid two thousand years ago—but to keep us), it’s amazing our Heavenly Father doesn’t say the quota is met and he can’t take it anymore, won’t pay it anymore. Adopting sinners has become too painful, too costly, it’s overwhelming. He’s reached his end. No more adoptions. No more salvations.

But that’s not what he says; not even close. He says “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved” (Romans 10:13).

Though the pain and cost to him for every saved soul is beyond measure God still calls and still saves and thus… still agrees to hurt.

God hurts for you, and keeps hurting for you, like you have never hurt for anyone else.

When your spouse breaks your heart, when your kids take you for granted, when your parents disappoint you and your friends betray you, you know love hurts.

Just remember, however, that love hurts our Heavenly Father most of all.

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The Common Difference between Single Men and Women

During a recent sermon, I got a few laughs of recognition when I described what I see as a huge difference between Christian women and men who are looking to get married. Of course there are many exceptions, but quite often I see this:

A Christian woman is in a serious relationship with a man when she recognizes some warning signs and red flags. Her first instinct isn’t to “run,” it’s “How can I make this relationship work?”

When I talk to Christian guys, however, it’s often comically the reverse. They are dating an attractive, healthy, personable, funny, intelligent, godly and wise woman who earns more money than they do. When I ask when they plan to pop the question, their response is often, “I can see all those qualities, but what if there’s someone even better out there?”

I don’t know if this discrepancy results from the perceived lack of available, thoughtful, and gainfully employed Christian men, but both Lisa and I have seen it far too often. We knew a couple that had us a bit concerned, wondering if the woman was making too many concessions. As gently as possible, both of us tried to point out what she was going to accept for the rest of her life (many of the things we didn’t think would ever change), but she moved forward.

My heart broke when Lisa explained to me, “Gary, if I could have convinced her that she’d find another solid, decent Christian guy to marry in the next five years, I think she would have broken off this relationship. But she doesn’t think there’s anyone better out there. She thinks it’s either make this relationship work or be single for the rest of her life.”

However it breaks down by gender (again, I’m admitting this is a stereotype with numerous exceptions), these are the two tendencies:

“How can I make this relationship work?”

and

“What if there’s someone even better out there?”

The danger of the first tendency, “How can I make this relationship work,” prior to marriage, is that it may excuse many things that shouldn’t be excused. It’s one thing to help a spouse with whom you have children confront and overcome an addiction. It’s another thing to willingly go into marriage and plan to conceive children with someone you know is going to be fighting (or worse, not fighting) an addiction for perhaps the rest of their life.

It’s one thing to figure out how to deal with more of a temper than you thought your partner had once the honeymoon is over; it’s another thing to go into a marriage fully aware that one misstep can set this person off for a fifteen minute rant. I’ve said this many times: if your significant other seems a little too angry as a boyfriend or girlfriend, he or she will seem much too angry as a husband or wife.

If your natural default position is “How can I make this relationship work?” just be aware of your tendency: are you excusing something you shouldn’t? If so, guard against it. Bring others into your relationship to gain perspective and objectivity.

Those whose tendency is to ask, “But what if there’s someone even better out there?” often have a distorted view of marriage. They tend to be a little more selfish, and they frequently fail to understand that a great marriage is about building something more than it’s about finding someone. Making a wise choice is the starting line, not the finish line. You’ve got to add intention, purpose, chosen intimacy, etc.

In fact, there are likely hundreds of people with whom you could build a God-honoring and even happy marriage if you’re willing to work at it. Some choices are certainly wiser than others, but no person is the “complete” package, in the sense that for the rest of your life you risk finding someone with a set of strengths that look very attractive in comparison to your current partner’s. Comparing a new infatuation (which launches neurological blindness) with a more mature relationship isn’t fair, though. It goes back to thinking marriage is about finding someone instead of building something together.

By the way, if your hesitancy is based on thinking you need to choose the “right one” so that you can have an “easy” marriage, just talk to some married people. No marriage is ultimately “easy.” Two sinners living in one house creates sparks: “As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another” (Prov. 27:17).

Instead of wondering whether there’s “someone even better,” spend your time considering whether you’re with a person of faith whom you respect, are reasonably attracted to, are compatible with in the most important areas (read The Sacred Search for what these are) and possesses the necessary relational skills to keep growing a marriage. If those qualities are present and growing, you’re well on your way to a wonderful marriage and a wonderful life. You’ve found a perfect God, so you don’t need to find a perfect mate. The key to happiness is learning to embrace a life of worshipping Jesus rather than desperately pursuing another human being.

Knowing your tendencies is helpful so that you can guard against the natural weaknesses all of us carry. It may sound contradictory to put these two against each other because they seem like opposites—one is too quick to pull the trigger, the other is frozen and can’t move their finger if their life depended on it. But notice the difference: one woman moves forward even though there are numerous red flags. One man won’t move forward even though there is much reason to do so. One can’t say “no” and one can’t say “yes.”

The first group needs to pay more attention to the red flags, and the second group needs to give more consideration to the positive qualities. An abundance of problems should cause you to pull back or at least pause, and an abundance of positive qualities shouldn’t be ignored by the off chance that somewhere out there, someone even better is just waiting to meet you. Think of all you’re missing out on by not beginning to build a life together right away.

I’d love to hear from all the singles out there if you think this stereotype holds true, or whether I’ve just gotten a skewed view of what’s happening in the world of singles these days.

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You Can’t have a Healthy Marriage with a Sick Soul

In a book on soul keeping, John Ortberg gets about as honest as any writer I’ve ever read in revealing the petty ways we allow “little” spiritual sins to spoil our marriage. His words are a great springboard for us to discuss how it’s impossible to have a healthy marriage while harboring a sick soul.

“I suppose that the person I have sinned against the most is my wife…I had asked that question many times: ‘How do you know when you’re in love?’ The answer I always got — the answer I wanted to believe — was ‘You just know…’ With Nancy I just knew. Except for when I didn’t. Except for when she did something that bothered me, something that didn’t fit perfectly with my idealized, romanticized notion of what it would mean to have the greatest relationship ever. When she would do something I didn’t like — when she disagreed too vehemently or I felt as if she was getting too directive — I would feel something turn cold inside of me. I would distance myself from her by making less eye contact and touching her less and speaking a little coldly.”

This is marvelous writing in a marvelous book (Soul Keeping: Caring for the Most Important Part of You), and I’m hoping John won’t mind the copious quotes since I’m also hoping this will help sell a ton of his books.

Unfortunately, I recognize way too much of myself in John’s account (maybe that’s why it resonated with me so much), particularly during the earlier years of my marriage. That coldness I felt, which led me to respond with “less eye contact and touching her less and speaking a little coldly” sends (sorry for the pun) chills up my spine because that was me. I wasn’t verbally or physically abusive. That would have been too obvious. I’ve never used a swear word talking to Lisa and I’ve never even said something intentionally to hurt her. But I was good at withholding warmth. I’m ashamed of that. I hate it, looking back, but that’s what an immature person in marriage does.

John Ortberg continues:

“On the night of our rehearsal dinner, which was supposed to be all music and magic, she did or said something that I did not like (and that I no longer have any memory of), but I remember with great clarity sitting in the car with her late into the night. In tears, Nancy said, ‘If you don’t want to marry me, say so.’ Love, anger, withdrawal, coldness, pain, guilt, melting. All this at a level too deep for my knowing. I had to keep two incompatible thoughts in my mind: ‘I am a good person’ and ‘I want to inflict pain.’ So I had to separate them from each other; I had to disintegrate my mind. This pattern became so embedded that my will couldn’t stop it. We honeymooned in Wisconsin. A few days into our marriage, she moved toward me romantically, but I withdrew behind a book. I would intimate to her that I did not want sex, even though really I always wanted sex. But I knew my coldness would hurt her a little. My sin crept into my sex life.”

The problem of marriage is the problem of unformed or ill souls relating through unhealthy responses. It’s not primarily about communication, finances, conflict resolution or in-laws. It’s about our sick souls. Even when we really desire something like sex, we’ll deny ourselves to make our spouse pay.

I counseled a couple where the husband also did this. Ironically, they had been fighting about him wanting sex more often! When his wife made herself more than available and even initiated in a provocative way, he remembered something she had done earlier in the day and thought he would make her pay by turning her down, even though he had wanted sex for a really long time.

He so wanted her to hurt that he was willing to hurt himself even more. There’s a little bit of the kamikaze pilot in all of us when it comes to marriage. Sick souls make sick decisions even when those decisions take a pound out of our own flesh.

Ortberg continues:

“Sometimes if we were with other people and she said something I didn’t like, I would get a little distant and polite with her and make a little more eye contact and grow a little warmer toward whomever we were with. My mind was conflicted with thoughts of love and thoughts of bitterness; my feelings were split between intimacy and coldness. My will would move away from her in anger until things got really bad and she cried and I would feel guilty and move back toward her. My face and the tone of my voice could create the effect on her that I wanted without ever being totally open about the deeper recesses of my mind and will. Sin was in my anger. Sin was in my deception. Sin was in my body — the way I would use my face to both conceal and to hurt.”

John correctly identifies that the key issue keeping him from loving his wife was sin. It wasn’t that he didn’t understand her as a woman. It wasn’t that he hadn’t learned her love language. It wasn’t that they were so different he didn’t know what to do. John knew exactly what to do, but a sick soul kept him from doing it.

“Nancy wanted us to see a counselor. We did for a few times that first summer, but I did so quite grudgingly. And then no more after that, not for many years. I had a doctorate in clinical psychology because I believed other people needed help, but not me. Sin was in my pride. Sin was in my stubbornness. Marriage is revealing. If only I had eyes to see the sin in just about every area of my life. . . . This dance of withdrawal and approach continued on-and-off for fifteen years. It was not the only dynamic in our marriage; we genuinely loved and enjoyed each other. But withdrawal was always at least beneath the surface, hibernating until the next painful episode. And then it got much worse. I had been colder longer and meaner than maybe ever before. Nancy got back from a two-week trip, but I still did not thaw. I remember picking her up at the airport and still being politely distant; I can remember our eight-year-old daughter at the airport trying to push the two of us together for a hug. She knew that we were pushing apart. Children always know more than we think. That night Nancy told me that she could not do the dance anymore. She wasn’t going anywhere. But this dynamic was not about her. It was trouble inside of me, and I would have to work it out somehow.”

John didn’t “fix” his marriage by going to a marriage conference or reading a marriage book. He decided to tend to his soul:

“This began a year of anxiety and depression, of counseling and journaling, of little steps and painful talks and looking at the ugliness inside myself that I had never known was there. The lost soul that I had gone into ministry to save was my own. I called Dallas [Willard] and flew back to Box Canyon. We went for a long walk and a long drive. I tried to describe what was happening with Nancy and what I was learning about my own need to be seen — and to see myself — as someone other than who I really was. Dallas’s wife, Jane, joined us for a while; she works as a counselor and a spiritual director. She drew a little diagram that I have to this day, illustrating how certain people view themselves as either the inflated superior being or the worthless empty person no one could love. I began to feel my deep lostness. As I unburdened myself to Dallas, I began to understand another soul truth: Confession really is good for the soul. The soul is healed by confession. Sin splits the self. It split me. It meant I tried to pretend in front of Nancy; I tried to pretend before the church that I was a better husband than I was. Sin divided my will; I wanted closeness, yet I wanted to inflict pain when I felt hurt. As long as I keep pretending, my soul keeps dying.”

If the marriage books and conferences aren’t working for you, take a step back, follow John’s example, and tend to your soul (of course, in the case of abuse, the problem isn’t your sick soul—it’s the sick abuse coming from your spouse). It is only out of a healthy soul that we can build a healthy marriage.

 I’m not suggesting you put the problems in your marriage on a shelf and forget about them. Instead, you’re simply becoming stronger spiritually so that when you take up the problems again, you’ll have new power, new insight, and renewed motivation. Working on your soul is like cross-training for your marriage—it may not seem specific to the sport, but it increases fitness all around.

How do you become more spiritually fit? John’s book out of which these quotes were taken (Soul Keeping: Caring for the Most Important Part of You) would be an excellent place to start. He mentions Dallas Willard, whose books Renovating the Heart or The Spirit of the Disciplines would be fine follow-ups. Some of my own books related to soul building would include Thirsting for God, The Glorious Pursuit, and Holy Available.

Trying to build a healthy marriage with a sick soul is like trying to build a fire without any oxygen. It’s just not going to take. A healthy marriage begins with healthy souls.

Thank you, John, for your honesty, your vulnerability, your wisdom, and your faithfulness to keep pursuing God and your wife so that we could benefit from your story decades later.

The post You Can’t have a Healthy Marriage with a Sick Soul appeared first on Gary Thomas.

The Worth of a Woman

 

If you’ve been a longtime reader of this blog, you know I don’t typically speak out on topical issues, news items, or politics. There are plenty of places you can go to for that kind of information, written by people much more in the know and more capable of immediately writing about late breaking events, scandals or controversies.

The way my brain works (slow, slower still, and then come back and rewrite), I shoot for what could be called “timeless truths.” Blog posts should hold up and be true regardless of who is in the White House or what pastor did what thing in what church, or what denomination invited what speaker to what convention.

One timeless issue we have been facing is the way women are viewed and treated, especially by men in the church. Just as important is how women are viewed and treated by other women in the church. A woman fully alive to who she is called to be in Christ makes for the best wife, the best friend, the best sister, and the best servant of Christ.

So this week I’m going to excerpt a bit from Loving Him Well: Practical Advice on Influencing Your Husband. While trying to set women up to have the most influence they can have in their marriage and on their husband, I stress the need to first ground themselves in their identity in Christ—that we matter not because someone chose to marry us, but because God adopted us. That we have security not because someone else contributes to the family income but because God has promised to meet all of our needs in Christ Jesus. That we have worth not because our spouse is still attracted to us and interested in us, but because God calls us “chosen and dearly loved.” Once we know who we are in God, we are better able to handle the inevitable hurts and pains of being married to an imperfect spouse in an imperfect world.

What I set out to show in Loving Him Well is how the Bible affirms women in a way that was quite radical for the time in which it was written. Because some passages seem to suggest husband and wives share different roles in marriage, there are those who see the Bible as an accessory to the oppression of women, when in fact, even the Old Testament became an agent of radical change in a world that viewed women as children or property.

For example, the Old Testament stepped outside its cultural milieu to insist that women mirror God’s own character and image just as fully as do their male counterparts: “So God created man in his own image, he created him in the image of God; he created them male and female” (Genesis 1:27). Right from the start, we learn that women and men together mirror the image of God. Since God is above gender, males alone (or females alone) fail to adequately represent his character and image.

Just as tellingly, the admonition to shape this world and even to rule over this world is given to women just as much as it is to men: “God blessed them [the man and the woman] and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth and subdue it. Rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, and every creature that crawls on the earth’” (Genesis 1:28, emphasis added).

Women are not told to sit passively on the sidelines and cheer for their husbands as the men run the show. On the contrary, from the very beginning, women share God’s command for humans to rule, subdue, and manage this earth. They are co-regents.

This strong, affirming view of women continues into the first book of the New Testament, with the inclusion of women in the genealogy of the Messiah (a literary act that breaks with the tradition of the first century). Yes, there is Abraham and David and Joseph — but there is also Rahab, Ruth, Mary, and Bathsheba. Who would expect such a thing from a very patriarchal and even misogynistic culture? It took both men and women to set up the human events that led to the birth of the Messiah. God chose women of diverse personality and status to build the human line that ushered in the Savior of the world.

Rahab, of course, was a prostitute. Bathsheba may well have been raped (when the king calls for you, consent isn’t an option). Ruth was a Moabite, a tribe whose genesis came from a grotesque act of incest, and it was her taking action (“Let me go to the fields” she pleaded with Naomi) and bold proposal that set up not just the birth of King David, but the human ancestry of Jesus as well.

Including each one of these women in the hallowed ancestry of Jesus is God’s way of saying that even if you’ve been sexually abused or come from a horrific background, God still has a plan to use you mightily.

Jesus came into this world through a woman; not a single male had anything to do with the immediate conception or birth of our Lord. Mary, a woman, is the only human who contributed to Jesus’ DNA.

Jesus also elevated women in his teaching. In Mark 10:11, Jesus astonishes his disciples when he tells them, “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her.” Why was this astonishing? According to rabbinic law, a man could commit adultery against another married man by sleeping with that man’s wife, and a wife could commit adultery against her husband by sleeping with another man; but no provision stipulated how a husband could commit adultery against his wife. Jesus was telling those first-century men, “Your wife has equal value in God’s sight. It is possible for you to sin against her every bit as much as it is possible for her to sin against you.”

And let’s look at Jesus’ death. While one male disciple betrayed our Lord and the others cowered behind locked doors, some very courageous women dared to watch Jesus’ final minutes on this earth. Mark goes out of his way to emphasize the scene at the foot of the cross: “There were also women watching from a distance. Among them were Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James the younger and of Joses, and Salome. In Galilee these women followed him and took care of him. Many other women had come up with him to Jerusalem” (Mark 15:40 – 41). In Jesus’ most trying moments, he was supported by many women. Modern readers might read right over this narrative fact — but in the first century, this was a startling truth and a challenge to any false view of male superiority.

But perhaps the boldest statement came after Jesus died and was raised from the dead. According to ancient Pharisaic law, a woman’s testimony was inadmissible in a tribunal as too untrustworthy. Only men could give witness. So when Jesus rose from the dead — the most important event that has ever occurred or ever will occur — who was present to give witness and testimony? Women! Jesus pointedly uses women, whose testimony could not then be heard in contemporary courts of law, to proclaim his glorious resurrection.

This elevation of women at all points in theological pronouncements, historical accounts, and practical teaching should astonish us, given the male-oriented culture in which the Bible took shape. It should form the way we respect our wives as women and teach our children to honor their moms with the respect given them by God.

We don’t have to tear down the Bible or men to lift up women; the story of God’s redemption took millennia to unfold and is even yet unfolding. What matters most is that women understand who they are in Christ, and that their husbands and fathers and sons also let their thinking be shaped by Scripture’s arc.

As much as the above Scriptures challenge me however, I still have to confess that few things have motivated me as a man more than having God reiterate to me that Lisa is his daughter and I’m to treat her accordingly. As a father with three children, including two women, this image shapes, corrects, inspires and challenges my every interaction and thought in marriage. The more I respect my wife in particular, the more I respect other women in general. I don’t want any other man sexualizing my wife, making her feel uncomfortable, or putting her in the miserable position of spending nine hours a day in a creepy environment or find some other place to work—so I’m going to go out of my way to not do that to someone else’s wife.

It would break my heart if a son-in-law was harsh or abusive to a daughter; that motivates me to be encouraging and gentle with Lisa.

It comes down to this: if we would look at people as God looks at them, and treat men and women the way God calls us to, all these news items would be resolved. They’d never happen to begin with.

I have great respect and appreciation for those who push necessary conversations, who bring abuse to the surface, and who have the fortitude and demeanor to enact change. The world needs activists and prophets, and I thank God for them. We need servants who cry out, “This is wrong.” We also need some, and I hope this blog can be such a place, to cry out, “This is right.”

Treating all women, but especially our wives, with respect and dignity, is right.

 

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Seize the Season

My wife and I are joining my extended family this week for a cruise to celebrate my dad’s upcoming 90th birthday. It’s a special treat for Lisa and me to have all our kids and daughter-in-law together, within walking distance.

Most of you reading this post have your kids with you every day, and it’s a bit difficult to truly appreciate something that is always there. But perhaps you can let an empty nester look back so that you can make the most of this blessed (but temporary) season when your children are at home.

If I could say anything to myself twenty years ago, it would be, “Gary, raising children is a season. It won’t last forever.”

I always knew that, but it didn’t drive my heart, even though there were occasional glimpses.

I was away on a speaking trip once, walking through a mall, when I saw a little girl run up to her dad, his arms laden with packages.

“Daddy? Will you carry me? My legs are tired.”

The young father sighed, moved all his packages from one hand to the other, and scooped up his little girl into one arm.

That’s when it hit me: when was the last time I had carried one of my children through the mall because their little legs were too tired to walk?

I couldn’t remember.

How I wish someone had told me, “Gary, this is the last time you’ll get to do this. Take a mental snapshot of this moment. Relish it. Taste it. You’ll never experience it again.”

In a desperate attempt to recapture what was lost, I returned home and asked my then twelve-year-old daughter, “Kelsey, can I carry you through the mall one last time?”

You can imagine how a twelve-year-old girl would respond to that.

One day you’re looking for a changing table, a crib, a clean diaper bag, becoming familiar with the smells of baby powder and Desitin; the next day you’re buying a bed that looks like a car, or decorating a room to make it look like a castle; then you’re purchasing shin guards or ballet slippers or a violin; one month later, it feels like you’re actually talking about whether to buy or rent the graduation gown (never buy).

And then it’s over.

The house goes quiet.

The backseat of your car is actually clean: no Cheese-its; no sippy cups. No fast food wrappers or sweaty uniforms. In fact, you can go 5,000 miles without anybody ever sitting in the backseat.

I wish I had known that all those vacuum jobs were signposts of abundance, as if I was depositing ridiculously large checks in a bank account of rich memories. Sign the check, deposit. Vacuum the car, remember why it got dirty.

I wish I had done that.

I wish.

It’s hard to believe, but there was a time when we just wanted to get Graham to pee into a toilet bowl.

My wife had tried everything, but Graham preferred the diaper. Lisa read about a brilliant idea and we decided to test it. I drew a picture of a fire on a piece of toilet paper, threw the toilet paper into the bowl, and yelled, with great urgency, “Hey, bud, come put out the fire!”

Graham took one look at that fire and did what a fireman has to do…

Is it possible to miss potty time?

Yes, it is.

One day, we clapped because Graham finally peed in the toilet bowl. Today, he’s getting an MBA from Harvard.

I love it that I can call Graham and discuss Plato’s Symposium. I appreciate that he knows far more about investments than I ever will. But part of me still misses a little boy just learning to “put out the fire.”

Don’t let this season slip away. Seize it. Every day of it. Early church father John Chrysostom offers much wisdom when he tells ancient husbands, “Show your wife that you value her company and prefer being at home to being out.”

It’s a good sign if you can’t wait to get home; it’s a bad sign if you’re finding more and more excuses to stay away from home.

I’ve seen both husbands and wives, at various points in their lives, find creative ways to get out of the house. Everybody needs some time away once in a while. But when you prefer to stay out of the house, that’s a problem. You’re missing something very special.

If God offered me and Lisa three months of luxury accommodations and an unlimited budget to explore Europe, or one weekend back in our tiny townhouse when the kids were all younger than ten and money had to be counted by the pennies (and we drove a car that died every time we took a sharp right-hand turn), we’d both take the weekend with our little kids, without even hesitating.

Young parent—this is a rich season. It’s tiring. It’s messy. It keeps you awake, but someday, sooner than you can believe, I bet you’d give up a luxury vacation just to get one of these weekends back.

Seize this season. Remember it. Let it wash over you and treat these days with your kids like the golden treasures that they are.

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Gray Divorce

Jordan looked shell-shocked.

I knew him to be a gregarious man with a great sense of humor, accomplished, confident, almost intimidating (but only because of my insecurities, not because of his arrogance or manipulation).

Yet he sat next to me, swirling in a mental and emotional fog. “I don’t want to teach the Sunday School class anymore,” he said. “I just can’t. I’ve got to process this.”

Jordan was in his forties, but his parent’s marriage was breaking up, and it was tearing him apart. “They were the last couple I ever expected to go through this; how can I have any confidence in marriage now, including my own?”

My good friend, Dr. Steve Wilke, did a doctoral dissertation on the impact of divorce on adult-aged children. His conclusion? Divorce could be even more devastating to adult-aged children than to young kids—and Jordan’s real-life story was proving it.

Here’s how an adult child of divorce, Jen Abbas de Jong, explained it to me: “If you’ve almost completed your jigsaw puzzle so that there are only a few pieces left and someone comes in and turns the table over, tearing your puzzle apart, do you feel better or worse that the puzzle was almost finished? You feel worse, don’t you? And that’s what it feels like when you’re about to launch out as an adult and your parents get a divorce.  Part of the reason the divorce is so painful is that everything you were raised to believe about marriage–and perhaps used as the basis of your marriage–has changed.​”

The AARP, NPR, the Chicago Tribune, USA Today, and the Washington Post, all run periodic stories about “gray divorce,” couples breaking up in their fifties. It seems that many couples have the notion that they’ll hang together until the last child goes off to college, but on the way back from dropping their youngest child at the campus, they stop at the lawyer’s office to begin divorce proceedings.

We’re fooling ourselves if we think breaking up our children’s home will ever not be painful—even if they no longer live in it. Instead of trying to “minimize the damage,” why not take advantage of an opportunity to maximize the impact? At my son’s wedding rehearsal dinner, my wife counted up my son and daughter-in-law’s parents and grandparents years of unbroken marriage and came up with 310. Isn’t a legacy like that worth striving for?

Becoming empty nesters is actually the worst time to consider a divorce. You’ll have far more energy to rebuild a lonely marriage, more time to work through issues, and usually less stress to attack the marriage. You’ll have more freedom to rediscover sexual intimacy, more time and money to start doing more recreational stuff together—movies, taking walks, and going out to eat. The empty nest years should be seen as a season of tremendous promise, not doom. If your marriage is gasping for air, this is exactly the season where it will be easiest to resuscitate it.

Much of the cause behind gray divorce stems from the fact that couples have lived as strangers for years. They think they’ve become estranged because there’s something wrong with each other rather than the simple fact that the relationship is starving. It’s often a “software” problem, not a “hardware” problem. Instead of getting a new marriage we can invest the same time and energy into rebuilding the old one.

This is a warning to younger couples: don’t let this happen to you. In my book A Lifelong Love I warn of couples who have a lifetime of shared tasks but no shared intimacy. A good marriage is something you make, not something you find, and the hope behind that belief is that you can choose to re-make a marriage at any stage. Don’t overestimate your willingness to put up with a sub-par marriage “for the time being.” When the time is over, you just might stop “being” as a couple.

For those of you about to become empty nesters: what I’ve found is that the initial patterns and routines of an empty nest are crucial. Your marriage will be in a state of flux for a few months, but it won’t be much longer than that before it settles down into the “new normal”—the same old alienation, or a new sense of companionship, purpose, and intimate relating.

Lisa and I consciously decided to do more together than ever before when we became empty nesters. Lisa is now with me more often than not when I travel. We take more bike rides together. We’ve settled on a few favorite television shows. We’ve discovered another empty nest couple that lives just two miles away and have begun new friendships. And we’ve figured out that when the house is empty, you can “go for it” whenever you want to. The clock doesn’t matter. We miss being active parents, but our relationship has never been stronger, closer, or more intimate.

For your own happiness, and certainly for your children’s, use the empty nest years to rediscover each other, build a deeper legacy, and a more intimate marriage. Instead of killing an estranged marriage, choose to rebuild it, reshape it, and rediscover it. Wouldn’t you rather leave an even more inspiring legacy rather than send your adult children reeling with the news that their childhood home no longer exists?

The last child leaving home needn’t be seen as the “finish line,” but rather the starting line to a new intimacy, a bigger legacy, and even the best years of your marriage. 

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The Great 30 Day Marriage Experiment

Are Jesus’ words worth trying out?

Seriously: do you think he has sufficiently proven himself to you to the point where you owe it to him to believe he knows what he’s talking about?

If so, let me suggest a thirty-day marriage experiment rooted in Jesus’ new commandment, given in John 15:12:

“This is my command: Love one another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this: to lay down his life for his friends.”

N.T. Wright describes this love as the “self-giving of an entire life, minute by minute, day by day, year by year…What Jesus is describing goes deeper than any self-seeking, deeper than any self-serving. It simply wants the utmost possible for the beloved, up to and including the point of giving its own life.”

Have any of us ever truly tried to love our spouse like this, upping the level of our focus so that we desire to love our spouse minute by minute, day by day, with the goal of doing the “utmost possible” for the one we love? Or do we simply write off Jesus’ words as an impossible ideal that shouldn’t be allowed to trouble our minds or prick our consciences?

If unleashed, this minute by minute, day by day seeking the best for our spouse would lift our focus from our disappointments and frustrations and re-center them on something we can actually do—lay down our life for our spouses.

Why just thirty days? It might sound too exhausting to say you’re going to focus this intensely for the rest of your life, but what if we said we’d like to try this for the next thirty days and see how it goes?

This “minute by minute loving” would address so many areas of life in general. For example, in order for a husband to be able to focus on his wife like this, he’d have to get control of any bad habits that are draining his energy and diverting his focus from his family. His temper doesn’t serve his family, so that has to go, too. And he’d have to stay aware of what’s going on at home, so for the time being, even some cherished hobbies may need to be put on hold. By focusing on what’s so right, he’ll lose so much of what’s wrong. I daresay, he’d become an entirely different kind of man.

Women who embrace this call to love their husband minute by minute and day-by- day, focusing on their husband’s welfare, wouldn’t have time to gossip about others. They will be too busy looking for and implementing creative ways to encourage. Rather than be distracted by office politics or so-called “binge-worthy” shows on Netflix, they will be moved to re-engage their minds to think about how to please their husbands when they get home. This can free them from so much life drama that seems to demand our attention but ends up mentally and emotionally draining us.  

Before someone complains that their spouse isn’t fulfilling his/her role as a husband or wife, can they look at this list and ask, “Am I minute by minute and day by day making sure I don’t get side-tracked by social squabbles, don’t get addicted by personal pleasure, so that I can devote my time and energy to excel at loving my spouse?”

This love is urged on us by no one less than Jesus, yet how few of us actually ever pursue it?

When couples ask me for help with their marriages, they rarely are pursuing such a love. I don’t hear, “How do I help her heal from the wounds of her past?” “How can I understand him better?” “How can I bless her?” “How can I support him more?” Instead I hear, “Can you fix this about him?” “Can you get her to do this?”  They want a problem fixed. They want to be happier. They want the other spouse to treat them better. These are understandable motivations, but they are still inferior motivations. They address the symptoms, but not the disease: we don’t pursue the kind of love Jesus tells us to pursue.

The “new commandment” given us by Jesus is that we love as He loved. That’s what it means to be His disciple.  It’s a little shocking how few of us have ever honestly or earnestly tried to love like this. Trying to begin by loving everyone like this might be too much; but don’t you think God would be pleased if you decided to start by loving his son or daughter (your husband or wife) this way?

Here are some practical questions to ask if you’d like to launch this 30 day experiment for your marriage:

Is your attitude, “Why doesn’t my spouse love me better” instead of “how can I excel at loving my spouse?” If so, think of how silly it would sound for Jesus to say of his disciples, “I do miracles for them, I teach them, I feed them, I heal them, I cast demons out of them, but what do they ever do for me?”
Are you fighting to keep your addictions and desires under control so that you are free, spiritually, psychologically and physically, to devote yourself to loving your family?
Are you minute by minute and day by day laying down your life for your spouse, regularly thinking about his or her welfare?
Are you growing deeper in your walk with God so that you have more of Jesus’ empowering presence and ennobling truth with which to bless your family?

The experiment to start loving as Jesus loved, to actually begin taking this command seriously, may not be accomplished in a month (or ever, fully); but its pursuit will start to impact our marriages from the very first day it is tried.

Normally, I can’t keep interacting with comments on older posts, as there are just too many with which to keep up. However, for this post, I’d like us all to stick around for the next month or so in order to hear how it goes when it’s tried. If you end up with a personal testimony of how this “experiment” blessed your marriage, please come back and share it with all of us.

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The God Who Sees

After having escaped cruel and harsh punishment, pregnant without any support from the father of her child, Hagar felt helpless and alone. She didn’t have a single earthly friend. Grown up enslaved, she had been owned, ordered about, abused and forced to have sex with a man she didn’t love in order to bear a child for a woman who had contempt for her.

This is about as low as life gets. It might seem a bit strong to call what happened to Hagar “rape,” except for the fact that she had no possibility of refusing her master’s and mistress’s orders.

If you’ve been owned, raped, beaten and abandoned, it’s not surprising that you would come out of that experience not just thinking that the world isn’t fair, but that God isn’t fair. At the very least, you might think he is blind or unfeeling.

So it’s touching and moving and profound when God visits Hagar, assures her of His own protection and blessing, and this simple woman responds by naming God “El-Roi,” the God who sees (Genesis 16:13).

Just knowing that God saw her gave Hagar the strength to return to her abusive mistress. “God sees me,” she surely said to herself, “So even when I am not treated fairly, I’m not alone.” God essentially told Hagar that while people plotted to make her miserable, He had plans to bless her beyond all belief. She felt powerless and forgotten, but God promised her she would be remembered and the powerful ancestor of a people so numerous “they cannot be counted” (Gen. 16:10).

In the same way, God may not remove all our difficulties. He may ask us to persevere in a deplorable situation or marriage without promising that the evil people in our lives will suddenly change (I’m not suggesting physically or sexually abused women are called by God to stay in their homes—Hagar’s was a different time and a particular situation. When women can get away from evil and toxic treatment, they should get away). His only promise may be, “I see what’s going on and I have chosen to bless you in the midst of their cursing.”

Will we accept God’s promise of blessing even when it must come wrapped with the hatred and mistreatment of others?

William Gurnall, the seventeenth century Anglican clergyman who wrote the classic, The Christian in Complete Armor, helps bearing the cross sound a little more realistic when he urges believers not to look at the cross but to look at Jesus who bids us to bear the cross. The beauty of Jesus overwhelms the ugliness of the cross.

In fact, Gurnall surprisingly gets a little earthier than that. When God bids us to pick up the cross, we should have the same attitude as a lover taking us by the hand saying, “Come with me.” Our love for God should be so strong that we would rather follow Him into a painful situation than live in comfort without Him.

If it is necessary for us to persevere in a situation in which others disrespect us, take us for granted or just plain ignore us, looking on Jesus is our best form of self-defense. If I think, “How can they treat me that way?” I’ll start to hate them. If I think, “Why am I putting up with this?” I may start to hate myself. If I look to El-Roi, the God who sees, I’m able to either endure the mistreatment with a holy spirit or grow the courage to confront and leave it. Either way, it’ll be because I’m responding to the God who sees instead of reacting to the person who hates.

Perhaps more than in any age in history, today’s church is plagued with “fair weather followers,” utterly devoid of any notion of even looking at, much less carrying the cross. Yet Jesus made it as clear as possible when he said there is no Christianity without the cross: “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me” (Luke 9:23).

In spite of this clear instruction, modern believers frequently assume that they have a “special contract” with God obligating him to remove all opposition and hurt, based in part on the verse I hear misquoted and misapplied more than perhaps any other verse except for “Judge not lest you be not judged”: “For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future” (Jer. 29:11).

Is the removal of all opposition and hurt a realistic request this side of eternity?

I said in a sermon once, “I wish I could stop everyone from being mean to you, but I can’t. But I can point you to the God who chooses you when others reject you, who loves you dearly when others mistreat you (c.f. Col. 3:12), and the God who sees you when others ignore you.”

God’s blessings are so rich, personal obedience is so powerful a force in the Christian’s life, the joy of fellowship with God is so real and animating, that just knowing God chooses us, sees us and loves us dearly is all we need to keep moving forward.

Can you survive in a lonely marriage? Can you keep parenting a rebellious child? Can you find joy with an apathetic spouse? Is there freedom when your vocational situation feels oppressive? The answer is “yes” if you know God chose you, sees you and rewards those who remain faithful, and if you draw your worth and fulfillment from the fact that God has called you to do this rather than someone else is forcing you to do this.

Keep looking at Jesus, not at the cross.

The key to living in a world with toxic people is relating to worshipping, and spending time throughout the day finding your refuge in El-Roi, the God who sees.

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Sympathy or Empathy? A Key to Sexual Satisfaction in Marriage

Do you have sympathy for your spouse, or do you have empathy?

It’ll show between the sheets.

Here’s the difference between the two, as described by Les Parrott, who has written a wonderful (soon to be released) book entitled Love Like That.  Sympathy means that if you are standing on a dock and see someone drowning, you throw out a life ring. I imagine ninety percent of people would do that. Empathy means that you’d throw out the life ring and then jump into the cold water to help them put it on.

It’s a lack of empathy that leads to so much sexual frustration in marriage. I have tried to help wives understand what it’s like for younger men in regards to sexual temptation and desires. I’m now in my fifties, and I can tell you there’s a big hormonal difference between someone my age and a young husband. Shaunti Feldhahn and Julie Slattery both seem to get this. The way visual cues can set a man’s brain whirring in this day and age requires a good bit of empathy from younger wives.

Having written, that, I’ve also said in many talks that “obligation sex” is a short-term strategy that doesn’t satisfy or work long-term (Sheila Gregoire has blogged a lot about this). But empathetic sex—when you really and truly care about your spouse, have compassion for their vulnerability and struggle, and respond out of love (not guilt, nor the desire to just get him to shut up already)—not only serves your spouse but builds up your own soul.

Here’s the thing: one (not the only) of the differences between “obligation sex” and “empathetic sex” is spiritual. It’s in the heart. It’s all about motivation.

The empathetic wife feels for her husband and jumps into the cold lake with him saying, “You’re not going to go through this alone, not without my arms around you to help you stay warm.”

The empathetic husband says, “I know you’re tired and I’ll do all I can to help. I also promise to make sure this sex isn’t just about me. You need to feel good, too.”

The gratitude I feel for my empathetic wife is enormous. Wives, there’s only a certain season when you can make this investment in your marriage, when your husband truly needs it most. Giving someone a piece of bread and cheese after they’ve had a full meal and aren’t really hungry will elicit a polite thanks. Giving someone a piece of bread and cheese when they’ve been fasting for three days may create a lifelong memory.

Just as younger wives need tremendous empathy for the plight and struggle of younger husbands, so young husbands need tremendous empathy for the exhaustion so many young wives feel that makes sexual activity seem like a chore. Few things try a person’s strength more than having a baby and toddlers in the same house. Add employment to the mix and you’ve got a prescription for survival-mode-thinking.

Empathy means “jumping into the lake” and doing the house work that needs to be done: changing the diaper, cleaning the toilets, making sure your wife gets some fun time out of the house time, and occasions to exercise (if she desires and values that). And when sex does happen, you make sure she feels so good she can’t, at the moment, remember anything bad.

“Sympathy” means you simply do the dishes one time, hoping that will lead to sex that night.

Good luck with that strategy, by the way.

Here’s the incredible empathy Lisa has demonstrated to me: In February, during my busiest speaking season, I came down with the flu. It was awful. During one major event (1500 people, and the church had been advertising it for months), I literally laid down on a couch until I got up to speak, and between sessions went back down and lied down again. Lisa became alarmed when she saw my face turn red and sweat beads grow on my forehead about 2/3 of the way through the last talk, but by God’s grace I made it through.

That night I started to get the chills. Lisa leaned over and held me close.

“What are you doing?” I protested. “You’re going to get sick!”

“Aren’t you cold?” Lisa asked.

“Yes.”

She then held me tighter. “I’m going to do whatever I can to get you warm.”

That’s empathy. That’s cherishing. That’s “jumping into the lake.” That creates in a man the kind of heart that would do anything for her.

I’m still amazed Lisa didn’t come down with the flu. To be fair, she did seem to have a few “off days” but only a very mild case. Of course, she attributes this to her immediate self-prescriptive daily dose of elderberry syrup (Lisa looks at the chemical-based Tamiflu as only slightly better than a frontal lobotomy).

Empathy, like cherishing, is all about the particular. Not every husband lives with the same hormones. And there may be guys in their fifties very angry with me saying I shouldn’t suggest it changes, as it hasn’t for them. I don’t mean to put people in boxes. I have a close friend who has told me pornography has never even been a temptation for him. It’s not something he has had to defend against or fight; he just never faced the allure. So, every husband is different. Maybe sex once or twice a month isn’t that big of a deal or burden to your young husband. But if he’d prefer it once or twice a week, he won’t feel cherished when it happens once or twice a month. That’ll feel like sympathy and pity. He’ll treat the occasional act of intimacy as a life ring thrown out to a drowning man just to get him to shut up. It might almost create resentment instead of gratitude.

A cherishing marriage and a Christian marriage should call us to empathy, to jump in the lake with our spouse whatever their need may be and bring them out.

Let me state at the end here that when I write a post challenging men, it tends to get lots of shares and positive comments. Every time I write a post challenging wives in any way, my assistant (a woman) knows she is going to have a difficult time dealing with the hate mail and the hate comments. Some wives are so frustrated with how their husbands are failing, they don’t want to hear one correction about how they may lack empathy.

Out of empathy (!) for my assistant then, let me make clear that I’m not telling abused wives they simply need to have sex more often with their husbands and everything will be better. This is not a post for wives who need to be saved from their marriages. It’s a post for wives and husbands who want to grow their marriages with empathy. And when I have more space to address this, like during an hour-long talk, I stress to husbands how sex has to be about giving and putting our wives’ desires first.

This is a short (and therefore limited) blog post making one point: let’s pursue empathy toward our spouse, the attitude of jumping in the lake with them instead of just throwing out a life ring, especially when we think about sexual intimacy. It’s a matter of the heart, and it’s one of the cornerstones of a cherishing marriage.

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The Ebb and Flow of Physical Attraction in Marriage

 

Professional counselor Debra Fileta offers some helpful advice this week for those who no longer find themselves attracted to their spouse. What does that do to the sexual relationship? How should we respond? Deb combines much real-world experience (working with numerous couples) and biblical insight to offer a workable plan. I hope you enjoy it, and consider ordering the book out of which this excerpt is taken: “Choosing Marriage: Why It Has Start with We > Me.

 

The following article is an adapted excerpt from Debra Fileta’s brand new book, Choosing Marriage , and is used by permission ( Chapter 8, Sex Marks the Spot: From Infatuation to Adoration )

Have you ever felt a lack of physical attraction to your spouse?

I asked that question in a survey of over 1000 married people. I was astounded to find that half admitted struggling with a lack of physical attraction toward their spouse.

The ebbs and flows of physical attraction are a normal part of the marriage experience. And to me, they are not concerning because a good marriage is made up of so much more than the physical. In those moments when physical attraction may find itself on the back burner, what holds a strong marriage together is every other attraction two people have built along the way. The magnetic force of commitment, time, and experience all wrapped up into one can bring a couple together in a way that no one but God could think of.

Maybe some of you are in a stage of life where you have lost sight of the many things that hold you and your spouse together. Maybe you’re struggling to find an attraction, and it’s starting to have an impact on your sexual relationship. I counseled a young man who was having a hard time finding that physical spark toward his wife. He found himself dwelling on the physical attributes she was lacking, comparing her to the other women he would see. I shared with him three big picture themes I address with couples who are dealing with a lack of physical attraction, and I want to share them with you as well.

Your Mind

When it comes to our sexual lives, the things we give our time, our thoughts, and our energy to are what will grow, while the things we neglect to invest in will naturally wither. Our sexual palates are shaped and molded based on what we’ve been exposed to in the past, as well as what we expose ourselves to along the way. The more we fill our minds with junk like pornography and explicit movies and novels, the more we’ll be enslaved to those unrealistic sexual expectations, and in turn, sabotage our most intimate relationships. As it’s often said, junk in equals junk out.

But let me be clear. This is not just about disciplining our minds by saying no to overt trash, but also about learning to discipline our minds even when faced with the day-to-day opportunities for lust and temptation.

As the young man in the story above began to eliminate the bad and concentrate on the good, his attraction toward his wife began to grow anew, and his desire for her began to take shape all over again.

One thing I especially love about the Song of Solomon is the way the couple spends time “concentrating” on the good in each other. Both the lover and the beloved spend verse after verse going back and forth, simply describing in detail the things they love about each other.

Imagine if we apply that same drive and focus, that same “concentration,” to the way we view our spouse? I mean, what would happen if we consistently zoom in on their strengths, talents, and character, and speak them out loud? What if we simply appreciate them for who they are, rather than dwell on who we want them to be? This doesn’t just apply to our physical attraction and sex lives; it applies to every aspect of our marriages. Concentrate on the good, eliminate the bad, and you’ll find your marital connection achieving heights you never imagined.

Your Body

Another important step toward rekindling physical attraction in marriage is taking inventory of your physical health as a couple. We often apply 1 Corinthians 6:20 (“Honor God with your bodies”) to our spiritual and emotional decisions, but fail to apply it to our physical decisions as well. What we eat and drink as well as how we invest in our physical health and well-being are all decisions that can be used to honor God with our bodies, or not. But not only are we honoring God when we choose to invest in our personal health; we’re honoring our spouse by giving them the best version of ourselves.

This is so much more important than simply trying to achieve a certain weight or a specific clothing size. It’s not about that at all. It’s about health, and wholeness, and learning the discipline of striving to do the best we can with what we’ve been given. Something about taking responsibility for our health in this way is truly appealing and attractive, because it shows we care. Our physical health and well-being are a gift we give to ourselves as well as to our spouse.

It’s important for each one of us to take inventory of where we are with how we care for our bodies and the impact it may be having on our sex lives. A few of us might be able to say we eat well and exercise frequently. But most of us have room for improvement. There’s no better time than the present to take those next steps in getting your physical health to a better place. Work with your spouse to set achievable goals, integrate exercise into your time together, and create healthy menus. Keep each other encouraged and accountable as you move toward a place of honoring both God and each other with how you care for your bodies.

Your Heart

At the end of the day, the best thing you can do for your sexual relationship is to get your heart right. Sometimes in marriage, a lack of attraction has absolutely nothing to do with the person standing before you, and everything to do with your own heart.

Ongoing attraction has far less to do with the desirability of our spouse and far more to do with the condition of our heart.

Maybe you’re holding on to bitterness or resentment. Maybe your spouse is doing something that’s bothering or hurting you, but rather than communicate, you’ve chosen to hold back. Maybe you’ve allowed the seed of unforgiveness to take root in your heart. Maybe your sexual history is creeping its way in and having a negative impact on your intimacy. Or maybe you’re playing the comparison game, holding your spouse up to a measuring stick of something—or someone—else, by which they were never meant to be measured.

Is anything inside of your heart keeping you from feeling a meaningful attraction toward your spouse? If so, it’s time to recognize it, acknowledge it, and then take the necessary steps toward overcoming it. Even in the bedroom, this kind of attitude will be the only thing that can take your sex life from me to we.

From Infatuation to Adoration

On the day of your wedding, you will find yourself at the absolute peak of infatuation. You might find yourself disappointed at the imagery that it’s only downhill from there. But that’s absolutely not what I am saying. The fact that infatuation fades is only disappointing for those of you who believe infatuation is the best of all emotions in marriage. I’m here to tell you that it’s not. Not even close.

  If infatuation is fueled by the mystery of the unknown, adoration is fueled by the intimacy of the known.

The best is yet to come. There’s something far more significant than infatuation: adoration. If infatuation is fueled by the mystery of the unknown, adoration is fueled by the intimacy of the known. It’s the beautiful connection between two people who know each other deeply and love each other still. It’s the indescribable feeling of having your heart, mind, spirit, and body on display, yet knowing that you’re loved fiercely. It’s being aware of the flaws within your spouse, yet choosing to love anyway. Adoration isn’t fueled by emotion; it’s fueled by choice. And no matter how exhausted, disappointed, frustrated, or insecure you are, adoration always makes a point of raising the needs of your spouse higher than your own. It always chooses one thing and one thing alone. It always chooses marriage.

My prayer for each of you reading this book today is that God will move you past the superficial emotion of infatuation and challenge you to live in a place of deliberate adoration. And that in the process of bettering your sex lives, you will find something even more valuable: the bettering of your heart.

This article is an adapted excerpt from Debra Fileta’s new book, Choosing Marriage: Why It Has To Start With We > Me , and was used by permission. Choosing Marriage is available May 1st, wherever books are sold!

 

Debra Fileta is a Professional Counselor, national speaker, relationship expert, and author of Choosing Marriage: Why It Has To Start With We > Me and  True Love Dates: Your Indispensable Guide to Finding the Love of Your Life , where she writes candidly about love, sex, dating, relationships, and marriage. You may also recognize her voice from her 200+ articles all over the web! She’s the creator of the  True Love Dates Blog , reaching millions of people with the message that healthy people make healthy relationships! Connect with her on  Facebook  or  Twitter !

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