22 Years and a Million Miles

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"I need to tell you what I was really doing before I met Jesus, my wife," I said, terrified that she might walk out of my life when she heard the whole Truth.

I went on to tell my wife of the full extent and every detail of my past addictions to drugs, alcohol, pornography and my habitual lying. She knew much of it, of course, but not the extent to which these bondages had controlled my life until 6 months before when I had finally and truly surrendered my life to Christ.

She sat on the bed, looking me in the eye as I shared who I had become over the years since my childhood, and since the first time we had met some 9 years before. When you're asking someone for forgiveness for such grave injustices, such dark sins against them, you look at their face intently. You're looking for any twitch, and facial expression that might indicate how they're taking what you're saying. But my wife just looked at me calmly and listened to what I was sharing. Her countenance never wavered.

When I was finished, I said, "I truly believe that this is everything, and I need to ask you to forgive me." She looked at me as I will never forget, and I realized before she ever spoke that she had truly and from the bottom of her heart already forgiven me. She said... (Click on the "Read More!" link below) "My husband, I never prayed that you would stop doing any of those things. I only prayed that you would come to know Jesus, and that you would walk with Him for all of your days."

She then showed me computer disks that contained her daily prayers, prayers that she had typed into her computer as she prayed, prayers she offered on my behalf every day for almost 7 years. I read on the screen and saw that she had prayed exactly what she said she'd been praying for all those years. And I was stunned by the magnitude of her faith in God, and of her forgiveness for me.

And so, surrounded by a love like that, I took the hand of my wife and walked with her and Jesus.

Yesterday, we celebrated our 22nd wedding anniversary, but it is not the date of our wedding that we celebrate. My wife and I celebrate 22 years and a million miles.

We celebrate the Journey which He first purposed for us before the foundations of the universe. We celebrate the lessons learned together, the wrongs forgiven each other, the moments experienced as one, and 22 years and a million miles that we have shared with Christ and one another.

We celebrate living in a present moment that is the product of every step of that Journey.

We celebrate the knowledge that, for as long as we have breath, we will never be divided from one another. For God has allowed us to live within a temple made one out of two by His Holy Spirit. No one else treads there but us and God. No one else is allowed. Ours is a sacred bond lived out in a sacred place.

Looking back, we realize that the degree of the cloistered, spiritual intimacy that my wife and I share is directly proportionate to the "miles" we have walked together. Every mile has had a price and a blessing. Every mile is etched with vivid meaning and color upon our collective memory. Every mile speaks to us from within that collective memory as a testimony to His grace and mercy, and to the love which He alone has placed within us for Him and one another.

And so, I share with you today that, being one with Him and with her, I am the very least of this equation. Deserving nothing, I have been blessed beyond compare by both of them, because they desired to give to me. Deserving rejection, I have been made one with both of them, because they desired it to be so.

I give testimony of that love to you this day with these words. I have those words for you.

But toward my God and my wife, the capability of words passed long ago. The capability of words has faded with the miles, melting away into something fearfully wondrous in its depth and magnitude.

For them, I no longer have any words.

Rather their deep looks into my deep, and they just know.

Today, look again, my wife, and know.

Two Made One

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Tomorrow, I will be present at the wedding of a wonderful couple, and they will become one flesh. No, really. In that moment when they are pronounced as husband and wife, God will do something. And they two shall become one.

Please enjoy this posting of a parable about that oneness that God so cherishes between a husband and a wife. (Click on the "Read More!" link below)
In the beginning, you see, she was like many of her friends who were also young Christian wives. She would sometimes bitterly complain about her husband’s mistakes and flaws, whether perceived or real.

But then one day, a slightly older, wiser Christian wife took her aside. Lovingly, she told the young wife that she would have to change her attitude for the good of her marriage. “When you are bitter against your husband,” the older wife said, “You must look at him as God’s son, not as your husband, and you must pray and ask God to help His son with his problems.” The older wife explained that looking at things this way would give the young wife peace.

This was a wonderful revelation to the young wife. She took the older wife’s words of wisdom to heart and practiced them. Her marriage prospered. But she found after a while that, even though she was praying in this new way, her heart was again becoming bitter toward her husband.

She struggled for some time, not knowing what to do. Then, one day, she was praying for her husband. “You need to help Your son, Father,” she prayed. And God said to her, “You shouldn’t talk that way about yourself.”

Puzzled, and thinking that she may not have heard Him right, she again prayed, “Father, I mean that You need to help Your son.” And again God said to her, “Daughter, you shouldn’t talk that way about yourself.”

Becoming somewhat frustrated, the young wife prayed, “No, Father! He’s the one with the problem. You need to correct him!” God paused, and then quietly spoke from His Word to his daughter.

“For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall be joined unto his wife, and they two shall be one flesh.” (Ephesians 5:31)

“You are complaining to me about yourself, daughter“, God said. “You shouldn’t talk that way about yourself, because I love you today, just as you are. And I love you enough to not leave you that way.”

From that day forward, the young wife prayed differently, having learned at the feet of her Heavenly Father. From that day forward, she prayed for both herself and her husband in one breath, for she knew that God had made them one.

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In Genesis 1:26(a)-27, the Bible tells us “And God said, Let us make man[kind] in our image, after our likeness,” “So God created man[kind] in His own image, in the image of God created He [mankind]; male and female created He them.”

So man and woman, together, are the image and likeness of God.

So important was this oneness to God that He even gave the man and the woman one name, Adam. "Male and female created he them; and blessed them, and called their name Adam, in the day when they were created. (Genesis 5:2)

We are told that “men and women are just wired differently” or “husbands and wives just can’t understand each other.” Yet if God has truly made a man and a woman, in essence, the two halves of His image and likeness, there is something we must consider.

Unless the left half of God argues with the right side of God; unless the right side of God “just doesn’t understand” the left side of God; all these claims of insurmountable differences between Christian husbands and wives are incorrect.

If you are a married person of faith, I hope that when you finish reading this writing you will look across the room at the very special person with whom God has made you one. I hope you will show them just how much you cherish that.

And I hope you will pray for them and yourself in one breath, because God has made the two of you one.

Example Speaks For Itself

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A couple years ago I wrote about my friends. They were the perfect couple. The husband and I roomed together in college nearly 40 years ago. While I struggled to make C's, he breezed through with all A's. After graduation while I was going through my hippie phase and hitchhiking across the country, he was going to medical school. And later when I was trying to get my construction business off the ground and I could barely afford to put food on the table, he and his wife were building a house that I could only dream of one day owning. And finally, when it seemed that all we did was referee our kids who were constantly fighting with one another, they raised four daughters whose worst sin was calling someone dumb in a fit of anger one day at school.

But his wife, the mother of the most perfect family I know, wrote us last year to say that her marriage was in serious trouble. Her husband, my friend for the past 40 years, was having an affair. At that time she said they were getting counseling and hoped to heal the rift in their marriage, but apparently it didn't help them. Last week she called to say they had separated and it looked like their 30-year-old marriage won't survive.

Yes, I know that a lot of marriages end up in divorce, but not this couple. They had everything going for them. They both came from good families who really cared for one another. They are deeply committed in their faith. They have no financial worries that can destroy even the strongest marriages. And when I say their kids were the ones that everyone would compare to their own children and ask, "Why can't you be like their girls?" that is no exaggeration.

So what went wrong? The obvious answer was the husband's affair, but like all marriage problems, the root causes are often far more complex than that. So, my wife and I did what we all do when our friends are hurting - we drove 200 miles to see them, to talk with them, to try to help them through their crisis.

What we learned was that their marriage was not nearly as perfect as we thought, even from the beginning. The husband said when they were first married and he was struggling in medical school, he thought about dropping out and going into real estate, but his wife made it clear that she had married a doctor, not a salesman. "I can't tell you how bad that made me feel, like she didn't even care about me," he said.

And she said that he spent more time with his patients than he did with his family, and that made her feel like he didn't care about her.

Both said they have felt all alone, married but living separate lives all these years.

I wanted desperately to have some insight into their problems, to be able to offer them some amazing bit of advice, to be able to help them somehow magically break through 30 years of hidden hurts and loneliness, but there was nothing I could say. I just listened.

Later that day when we were all driving back to what was now just the wife's house, on the busiest road in town, my car just stopped running, backing up traffic behind us for blocks. So I put on the emergency blinkers and called 911, and for the next hour all four of us stood there, stuck in traffic 200 miles from home and waited for the tow truck to arrive.

My and I didn't think we said anything special, but when we left our two friends that night they both thanked us for what we said to them on the side of the road about their marriage.

"But we didn't say anything about marriage there," I said. "We mostly talked about where to get the car fixed."

"That's what we mean," they said. "You didn't get angry or blame each other. You just talked about how to work out the car problem together. We've never done that, but maybe we can try that now."

Tony Hall, who spent 24 years in Congress and is now the chief United States spokesman in the world fight against hunger, once said that he would rather see a sermon than hear one. I think that's what our two friends were saying. For most of the day my wife and I talked and talked and talked with them about how to treat one another, but it wasn't until they actually saw it lived out in my wife and I waiting for a tow truck in the middle of a busy intersection that they actually heard us.

Like the commercial says: "Tow truck - $100. Car rental - $150. Transmission repairs - $300. Helping two friends get back on the right track - priceless."