Exclusive Preview!
“I hate you!” Jason screamed at Elise. “I hate you and what you’ve done to our family! I can’t stand to live here anymore.”
What now??
Enjoy this EXCLUSIVE PREVIEW of the first chapter of my new book – The Marriage Renovation…
Chapter 1. The Perfect Mirage
“I hate you!” Jason screamed at Elise. “I hate you and what you’ve done to our family! I can’t stand to live here anymore.”
Elise reeled back, stunned. She couldn’t believe what she was hearing from her husband after all these years. How had it come to this? He blamed her for falling short with the kids and the house. She blamed him for always working. How could they ever recover? After years as best friends, lovers and confidants, both feared it was over. How would they get to the bottom of all that had piled up between them?
She remembered those early years—like a long lost fairytale…
“Love can sweep you off your feet and carry you along in a way you’ve never known before. But the ride always ends, and you end up feeling lonely and bitter. Wait. It’s not love I’m describing. I’m thinking of a monorail.” Deep Thoughts with Jack Handy
GREAT EXPECTATIONS
The modern wedding extravaganza—with flowers, attendants, gifts, cake, reception, and every possible extra shoved into it—has practically taken on a life of its own. Glance at a bridal magazine or search “wedding planners” and see what pops up. Even those who choose the simplest vow exchange do so against the backdrop of the cultural epic wedding.
Our great wedding expectations only point to our great marriage expectations. Romeo and Juliet stir a deep longing for romantic bliss; they echo a memory of Adam and Eve as they walked in fellowship with God. All this and more reflect the beauty God had in mind when He gave us marriage.
On the other hand, marriages implode daily, and couples find themselves distanced or even divorced—most never even knowing why. We’ve witnessed the disasters, and we may begin to wonder if marriage isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
But add in the Christian teaching on biblical marriage, and we are positively schizophrenic. Surely, if we can just follow the guidelines well enough, it will go the distance—even though we’ve seen tragic results in great Christian couples. We just need to work a little harder.
This creates a kind of love-hate relationship with marriage. We tell our hearts, “Of course marriage won’t meet all my needs,” but that heart has been steeped in the dream of happily ever after. So we silently bargain with God: I will do everything as well as I possibly can, and You will protect my marriage… please?
Rob and I had started with The Perfect Marriage. A match made in heaven. We were kind, tender-hearted and crazy about each other. Over the years, we faced severe challenges—financial crisis, extended family discord and a child-molesting babysitter—all challenges from without. God brought us through it all spectacularly, side by side, as partners.
Then, after twenty-some years and five kids, we fell. Hard. Anger and resentment overwhelmed us. Despite the fact that we’d grown in Christ for decades, gone to conferences, read books and taught others, we were disturbingly unequipped to solve our issues.
We knew every biblical teaching on marriage, yet we were free-falling down a cliff.
I thought that if our marriage collapsed, our children… and we… would be destroyed. I told my grown daughter of our struggles and she burst into tears. “If your marriage can’t make it, there’s no hope. If you and Dad can crash and burn, anyone can.” She was right. I knew that if those many years of loving intimacy could end in a heap, my kids would lose faith in marriage altogether. So would we.
Our Years from Hell, as I now call them, were a frightening jungle of anger, pain and resentment. God dismantled us down to our component pieces and then rebuilt us, in a complete marriage renovation. This book is the result of that painful breakdown and reassembly.
God plans to go deeper into your issues than you ever thought necessary. He’ll shake core beliefs about Him and about you. You’ll have to decide whether to claw to keep what you have, or open your hand and let Him rearrange and rebuild.
As much as the perfect person is a pretense, so the model marriage is a mirage: it just doesn’t exist. The less shocked we are that He actually has some serious changes planned for us, the more we can surrender all the pieces to Him… rather than watching Him pry them out of our cold, dead hands.
THE HOUSE GOD GAVE YOU
Here’s the picture. God has moved you into a beautiful home in the historic district of your city. Each house there is unique. The mortgage is fully paid—you don’t owe a dime. There’s one catch: you must allow Him to come in and renovate whenever He wants. It’s part of the deal.
Not only that but He’s going to rifle through those bags you brought—the ones with the stickers on them that say, “Great Expectations.” What’s in the bags? The dress clothes you saw in that epic movie you loved. Shoes from the seminar your church did on marriage. Jewelry like the interactions you’ve observed in others. And pajamas you brought from your family of origin. And I’ll tell you right now, you overpacked.
God wants to sort through your baggage and toss some things—throw out the disrespect you learned from your mother, dismantle that cynicism from dear old dad, and redesign your approach to conflict. Believe me, the longer you go on, the more disheartening those nasty little habits become. But God has a custom home in mind, and He alone knows the blueprint.
He wants to transform us into something beautiful.
The problem is, we’ve been lied to about marriage. We believe that it is about doing everything very, very well. And if we do very well, He will give us a good marriage. (We believe this in our Christian life—do things well so nothing bad will happen to you.)
But I’ll tell you a secret.
God hardwired marriage to short-circuit when we aren’t plugged into Him. Even the brightest, most promising couples, who start out strong and happy, experience power failure because their eyes are on doing well instead of on the journey God has planned. God does this out of the goodness of His heart, because He wants us to know His power.
“If you put first things first, you get first things and second things thrown in. If you put second things first, you lose both first and second things.” C.S. Lewis
As I was finishing this book, I described it to a young engaged couple, friends of the family. I explained that God took us through our own marriage renovation as I was writing it. The young man asked me to tell him about it, what led to the breakdown, and what God did. I knew exactly why he asked! “You’re asking so you can prevent your own renovation after twenty-five years, aren’t you?” I asked him. He smiled and nodded. Of course he wanted to avoid it. So did I! But here’s the deal.
We cannot prevent a Marriage Renovation because we cannot predict the direction in which God will grow us—we must simply follow Him wherever He leads. Good counseling helps. A good friend, pastor, sabbatical, insight can all help. But in the end, God does things all in good time, in good order, in His plan.
We need a Renovation because of that darned baggage. We need it because we live in a world of hurts that requires a Savior to help through.
In her devotional Jesus Calling, Sarah Young wrote: “Do not be ashamed of your emptiness. Instead, view it as the optimal condition for being filled with My peace… Talk with Me about your struggles and feelings of inadequacy. Little by little, I will transform your weaknesses into strengths.”
As I read it, I realized God had been doing this all along. The areas I considered strengths, He exposed as devastating weaknesses. As I laid them out before Him, He transformed them, over time, into His strengths in me.
The waterway near our home is lined with trees wrapped in little white lights. At night, the water twinkles with reflected light. Once a year, a maintenance crew takes those lights off each of the five hundred trees and rewraps them. What a lot of work. But if this doesn’t happen, the tree will grow around the lights. My immediate thought: is it worth the trouble? What if they didn’t do it? Could they go eighteen months instead of twelve?
Then I realized the parallel in marriage. God will rewrap our understanding as we grow, so that the beliefs we had as new Christians do not begin to cut into us. The clearcut ideas we had starting out, when marriage was a theory, turn out to be multifaceted.
How much should we depend on each other without being over-dependent? How does a man exercise authority and also die daily for his wife? How does a woman use her unique gifting in a way that fits with her husband’s life? These are only a few of the many questions that may look clearcut until you actually have to live real life through them.
FOLLOWING CHRIST
If you have followed Christ longer than a month, you have noticed it is not about smooth sailing. It is about being conformed to Christ’s image, which comes through hardship. You may have tried everything you know, but in the end, only true dependence on Christ—not “Churchianity”—will lead to peace.
*CHURCHIANITY: putting our lives together for curb appeal, based on performance and obedience. Includes “acting like a Christian” or “doing Christianity.” Also known as: a “Twinkie Christian”—sparkly and cute but full of white fluff that will kill you.
Many Christians (and church teaching) are devoted to this pursuit, and these good efforts are like filthy rags. [Isaiah 64:6] We have it all backwards: we focus on doing, when God wants us undone. We put it together when He wants us to hand Him the pieces and let Him build something extraordinary. The only thing that counts is dependence on Him. Our very lives are about being conformed to the image of Christ, [Romans 8:29] as God breaks up the old (those things we’ve come to depend on) [Ezekiel 14:5-6] and reveals something new. [Isaiah 43:19]
If you’ve been married any time at all, you’ve noticed that marriage is also not about making each other happy. Marriage is about being conformed to Christ’s image—and marriage brings out our very wounds and selfishness that will do it! Only life in Christ (first things) will produce the life and the marriage (second things) you’ve always wanted. Marriage is a safe place to heal, but also is the pressure cooker that reveals our need to be healed!
So how does this dream house become condemned property and more important, how do we get it back?
That will take the rest of the book to answer. But you’re in the right place, and I believe that by the end of our journey together, we will have the foundations to restore joy and intimacy. You may be new in your marriage and you’ve never have had a major disagreement. Or you may be considering divorce. Or perhaps you are somewhere in between—it’s not terrible but it’s not great—even if you’re disgruntled that marriage is not all it was cracked up to be.
Wherever you stand, I reach across the pages to say, so much more is available to you. I’m with you, I’ve crawled through the trenches on my hands and knees. God has broken me in places I didn’t know I had places, and He’s healed me as I never thought possible. Let’s take this journey together.
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The Marriage Renovation is now available for pre-order at a special discounted price.
Filed under: Abiding In Christ, Love, Marriage
