Well, it's Thanksgiving week again. Things have certainly changed over time. I remember when Thanksgiving was a two-day school holiday, now my son has the whole week off. My college daughter is home as well, with the whole week off. I have no idea who thought of this but I, at least, am against it. I am sitting at work.
Anyway, it is Thanksgiving week. Another holiday. Are you ready? Isn't it odd that "are you ready" becomes the big question? Do you know what you are going to do for Thursday? Where will you eat? What will you eat? You must have a plan, right?
How often do you have to plan your Thursday weeks in advance? That's what holidays do for us.
Will it be turkey? Or goose? Or beef? Enquiring minds want to know.
It would be useless to tell you to relax about Thanksgiving. If you are nervous now, you will not stop being nervous because I tell you to relax. If you are not nervous, then you do not need my advice on holidays.
Let's do this, at least. Try to spend some of the extended days off with your children (if you have children) and try to spend some time with your husband as well. Do not let the worries about Thursday ruin your Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday. Keep some lid on all the stress.
And if you are not worried, then good for you. This is just another holiday. If you can have turkey, fine. If not, fine. Spend some time with your family and spend some time actually being thankful.
The key here is simple: do not let the holiday make you crazy. If you are yelling at anyone because of the holiday, you are already in trouble. If the day for giving thanks becomes a day for being angry, then you are in trouble. If someone forgets to bring what they said they would bring, relax.
Let's make a simple goal. Let's have a Thanksgiving without anyone yelling at anyone. Let's have a Thanksgiving with relaxation and, well, some thankfulness.
And cranberries. We must have something with cranberries.
G.K. Chesterton is not as well known as the others we have cited this week, but he was a great writer of the 1900's. Consider the following quotation from Mr. Chesterton:
I have known many happy marriages, but never a compatible one. The whole aim
of marriage is to fight through and survive the instant when incompatibility becomes
unquestionable. For a man and a woman, as such, are incompatible.
If you have been married very long, you have probably reached much the same conclusion. When we marry, we often think that we are "compatible." Our entire idea of marriage and romance appears, these days, to be based on compatibility. We have "eHarmony.com" and such businesses, promising to find us someone with whom we are compatible.
Whatever the usefulness of that current trend, the reality is that men and women are incompatible, as years and years of experience show us. Ultimately, the marriage of two people requires many changes and many times of discouragement. Sometimes, you reach a stage where you are certain that your marriage was a mistake and you are tempted to leave.
That is the point that matters. It is not a sin to think about divorce, but you have to survive such thoughts. You must, as Chesterton says, "fight through and survive" the moment when you are tempted to despair. The marriage that has not reached such a stage is still developing.
Marriage, we are told, is God's gift to us, that it models God's relationship with His people, that it is a source of joy and happiness. These are things we say at wedding ceremonies.
But, ultimately, marriage is about changing who you are and what you do in order to be one with a different person. Marriage is always about surrendering yourself to something greater than yourself, to sacrifice yourself.
The Moment of Incompatibility, that moment when you have to confront the fact that you have to be committed to your husband despite your own desires, that moment when you have to give up something important to you, is the key to the question of whether you love your husband.
The Excellent Wife lives a life committed to her family, not to herself, and thereby she makes her life greater than it could otherwise ever be.
You do not leave because you are incompatible, you stay because you are a Wife.
One of the most common little complaints we often raise is that we married the wrong person. At some point, in most marriages, one or both of the partners have the strong sense that they might have been happier marrying someone else (or even remaining single). Too often, this attitude continues or is communicated to their spouse, leading to even more problems.
J.R.R. Tolkien had an interesting take on this attitude. In a letter he wrote in 1941, he says this about marriages:
Nearly all marriages, even happy ones, are mistakes: in the sense that almost
certainly (in a more perfect world, or even with a little more care in this very
imperfect one) both partners might be found more suitable mates. But the real
soul-mate is the one you are actually married to.
It is odd, isn't it, how often our thoughts have no real base. We are, for the moment, unhappy in our marriage and we construct the idea of someone who would have been "better" for us to marry, someone we are sure would have been kinder or wiser or richer or whatever characteristic we currently don't like in our spouse. This is all moonshine and make-believe, of course, but it can be a source of real discouragement.
Tolkien's attitude is the correct one. Of course there are people with whom I may have been a better husband or have had a better marriage, but this is the marriage I have, the one God has allowed for me, and the one in which I am to serve and find meaning and purpose. The woman with whom I sleep is the soul mate with whom I share my life.
If you find yourself discouraged someday, thinking of boyfriends you did not marry or of other husbands who seem better than yours, do not try to talk yourself out of this feeling. Feelings, of course, do not really respond to being "talked to" very well. This is your marriage. You have the chance, and the calling of God, to be an Excellent Wife in this marriage. You may serve (and are commanded to serve) both God and others in your marriage. The man to whom you are married is your man and your soul mate.
I may sit quietly at night and think I should have chosen a different career, or a different house, or a different car, but I have the career I have, the house I have, and the car I have. I also have the wife whom I chose and married. She has the husband whom she chose and married. God has made us one.
So, let your moment of thought pass. Then get back to serving God.
In our look at literature, consider the following note from Mark Twain's notebook:
Love seems the swiftest, but it is the slowest of all growths.
No man or woman really knows what perfect love is until they
have been married a quarter of a century.
An interesting insight, this. It is utterly contrary to what most of us think when we marry. We marry someone "we love" and then, too often, it seems that love dies out. By the time you talk to young husbands of a few years, you often find a true dearth of loving sentiments expressed. There are multiple complaints about her attitude and fewer compliments about her good points. We have concluded, in fact, that the primary purpose of our counseling is to try to "keep love alive" over the years. We are wrong.
The real problem is that we do not know what we have. The feeling we share when we marry is barely worthy to be called love in any sense. It is pleasant and motivating and quite often tied to a strong physical attachment, but it is seldom deep. It is easily offended (consider how seldom a wedding is a joint plan by bride and groom) and tends to be very self-centered. The first few years of marriage are often a testing, where each side tries to determine how to hold its own prerogatives over the other.
But Twain is correct. Love as the Bible teaches it, love as history knows it, takes time to grow. We marry to make ourselves happy, but love is about making our spouse happy. We marry because of what we want, but love focuses on what the other wants. We seek our own way and our own desires, but love seeks the desires of the other.
Love takes time to grow. You cannot yank a plant out of the ground, it grows by nature, and so it is with love. You can go to seminars and read books and take surveys, but love grows by the nature God has given us, and it takes time.
Do not despair because the early excitement and breathlessness has gone out of your marriage. Rather, embrace the growth of true love, a love of service and self-sacrifice and caring about the wants and needs and happiness of another person.
It is the kind of love we all want, even if we don't understand it. The command to wives is to love their husbands.
How are you doing?
Okay, Holmes never married. But the whole point of the stories was that he had a deep and subtle knowledge of human actions and behavior and used that knowledge to solve mysteries, both big and small. In one of his small mysteries, he makes an interesting deduction. Looking at an old hat left by a visitor, he concludes (among other things) that the wife of owner of the hat had "ceased to love him." This leads to Dr. Watson's questions, of course, including this exchange:
Watson: "But his wife -- you said that she had ceased to love him."
Holmes: "This hat has not been brushed for weeks. When I see you, my dear Watson,
with a week's accumulation of dust upon your hat, and when your wife allows you to
go out in such a state, I shall fear that you also have been unfortunate enough to lose
your wife's affection."
Remember that Holmes is a fictional character, of course, so no such hat ever existed. What is important for our purpose is that the wife's role in her husband's life was so well understood that the author (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle) knew that this was a valid line of reasoning. He knew, as well, that his audience would agree with this reasoning. No loving wife would allow her husband to go out with a week's accumulation of dust on his hat.
How far we have fallen from those days of understanding love. It was self-evident, to the people of the time, that a wife who loved her husband wanted him to do well, to look well, to be cared for. She cared about him in a very real, practical fashion that manifested itself in many small acts of charity and goodness. She brushed his hat. She would never let him go out looking unloved because he was, in fact, loved by her.
How things have changed. Men no longer receive such care from their wives at all. We no longer wear hats, but we see men going out with wrinkled shirts and such. The attitude of wives today is that "he can take care of himself" and she tends not to really care about him in that way at all. Holmes could not draw his conclusion in our world, where almost no wife loves her husband in that practical way.
We have, for some reason, decided that love is about "how we feel" and not about "what we do." This is false, of course, as Christ makes clear in the Good Samaritan story. The good Samaritan does not "feel" anything in the story, he just does things for the good of the injured man. This, Christ tells us, is love.
To love your husband does not mean to feel a certain way, but to act a certain way. The Excellent Wife cares for her husband (just as the Excellent Husband cares for her). She cares for him practically, in a manner that makes his life better. She brushes his hat.
When your husband leaves your house, is there anything to tell the world (or him) that he is loved? When he comes home, does the home make clear that you love him? If you are a stay at home wife, your home does (in fact) tell him how you love him. A messy home means that you may feel "love" but that you do not live it. Piles of laundry tell him that you may profess love, but you will never understand it or make it a part of his life. When he walks in and you ask him about supper, then you do not really love him in the sense that God means at all, or in the sense that we all understood in the 1800's.
Women will say: "but he can take care of his own stuff." This is true, but then why did he marry you? And why should he stay with you, if he is to do all his own "stuff"? What is your love worth if it just leaves him to himself?
Would Holmes, today, looking at your husband, be able to tell that you loved him? Can your husband tell?
In judging our lives, we need sometimes to step out of our current cultural ideas and consider how things were in earlier times. As husbands and wives, we believe there are eternal truths that we can rely on in our marriages. We do not look to modern writers for all of our wisdom.
One of the most interesting steps is to look at what people used to think about marriage and compare it to our ways of thought. I recently watched a documentary on the drive of Horatio Nelson Jackson, the first man to drive across the United States in an automobile. His drive was in 1903 and the documentary used photos he took along the way and readings from his unpublished letters sent to his wife. He deeply loved his wife, as is evident on every page, and she loved him. Their life story is fascinating, even apart from his famous drive.
On the drive, he wrote her a letter on their anniversary, in which he recalled the four years of their marriage. In describing how wonderful those years had been, he said something very simple. He said that she had done "everything to make [him] happy."
I wonder how many young husbands of today could say that about their marriage after four years, or after any time at all. I find almost no woman who manifests this attitude when talking about marriage today. Too many women today think the purpose of marriage is to make the wife happy, not the husband.
There are several reasons for this idea, but one of the major reasons is that we have ceased to think of marriage in those terms at all. Women are taught to expect that their husband will "make them happy." He should "just be happy to be married to me," women will say. He should "appreciate what I've given up for him." He should "be happy to do what I want to do," they will say.
The old joke continues to arise. You know, where the husband wants to go to Movie A and the wife wants to go to Movie B, so they "compromise" and go to Movie B. It is a joke that gets a laugh from any group of men because they believe that is how things are today.
It should not be this way. Yes, it is true that he has taken the job of husband and is, therefore, to be very focused on your welfare, but you are also to be focused on his. You are to do everything to make him happy, not just sit and let him make you happy. You are to be his wife.
Remember the word in Proverbs 31 about the excellent wife:
The heart of her husband trusts in her, and he will have no lack of gain.
She does him good, and not harm, all the days of her life.
In other words, she does "everything to make him happy."
If your husband wrote a letter today, describing his last four years with you, would his letter be as filled with love as the letters of Mr. Jackson? Love, ultimately, is not about how you feel in your heart, but how you act in your life.
How much do you love him?
It is amazing how our lives change, isn't it? We marry and begin what is a very nice, calm life. We have a spouse and a home and, usually, a job, and things are pretty good. We have quiet evenings with the person whom we love. We go to bed when we want, get up when we need to, eat quiet meals with the person we love most in the world. Life is good.
Then, the first child comes.
Suddenly, everything changes. Everything. You are no longer "quiet" in any practical sense of the term at all. There are no quiet meals like before, because you cannot take the time to fix a meal and sit down and eat it, because naps are not long enough. Both of you lose sleep. You are constantly interrupted by baby stuff (crying and feedings, at first, playing and crying later). Your life becomes more stressful, your sleep is less consistent, and every suddenly becomes harder.
This is the "Ratcheting Up" part of your life. It is humorous (as an old guy) to hear young couples talk about "looking forward" to when their life will "settle down," usually something they think will happen in a couple of years. Trust me, it doesn't settle down that quickly.
As your child grows (and more children come), you just keep Ratcheting Up. Two children is an entirely different existence than one child, and the third child (when they have you outnumbered) is yet another experience. (For us, the third child was the greatest challenge of our four children.)
Ratcheting Up is a very difficult lifestyle. The level of noise in your house increases, the level of things you have to do increases, your home's cleanliness decreases, your time with your husband decreases. You find yourself constantly concerned with today and tomorrow and the future (which school will your child attend? what lessons will they take?). You listen to radio shows and read books and blogs and hear dozens of people offering contradictory advice.
Vacations are not, really, vacations for you. They are "Family Vacations" which means they are children's vacations. An occasional weekend away (with friends or family keeping children) is wonderful, but doesn't really stop the Ratcheting Up.
Two Thoughts.
First, do not let the Ratcheting Up destroy your life. Keep a handle on things somehow. I can tell you, being an old guy, that almost all the lessons you pay for and take them to will have no permanent impact on them. Most of the "busyness" will not really make their lives better. Keep some control on this whole structure. You do not have to do everything. Keep your closeness to your husband. Find a friend with whom you can exchange child care and have some time off. Keep your children on a schedule that keeps you as rested and alive as you can manage. Do not forget that you are one with your husband, not with your children.
Second, it ends. I am now in the Ratcheting Down stage of my life. Children are grown and growing. My eldest is married and in her own Ratcheting Up stage. My older son is in the Army, living across the country from me. My younger daughter is in college. My youngest child is a junior in high school. We are Ratcheting Down. The other day, I came home from work and sat down in my living room with a cool drink and a book and read for a little while. That is not something you get to do much with children all over the place.
We constantly talk about "stages" and "phases," so take a minute to know where you are. If you are Ratcheting Up, then hang on and keep going. Don't let it get you down or wear you out. If you are Ratcheting Down, take some time to relax and enjoy being young again, a loving couple with one child (or no children).
And, in either case, look at your husband and realize that you have many years together. Invest a little love in that relationship today. It will pay off.
My five year old granddaughter has a new "favorite" saying. Whenever something happens she doesn't like, she says her "heart is broken." It is a little drama queen thing and is kind of cute.
But she has to grow out of it. Think about how many adult women have the same drama queen approach to conversation. One of the natural tendencies of women is to use language in a way that seems very dramatic to men. They say their husband "never calls" and "always stays at work" and other such dramatic statements, which are not literally true at all. They do not mean to be exaggerating, because they are really just expressing how they feel at the moment.
Last night, I visited a girl in a hospital, a 2 year old girl, whose heart really was broken. She had holes in her heart which had to be surgically repaired and there have been many complications. She sleeps (under heavy medication) in a Pediatric Intensive Care Unit.
Suddenly, my granddaughter's phrase doesn't seem so cute to me. We are often very dramatic in our language because, to be honest, there is not a lot of real drama in our lives. We may say "our heart is broken" because, to be honest, our heart has never actually been broken. We exaggerate little things our spouses do because they have never done anything really bad at all. We reach for exaggerated language to describe common things, to try to make them important.
But this little girl's life is filled with real drama. Her parent's lives are filled with real drama. Her grandparents live with real drama. The PICU is filled with children and parents whose lives are amazingly dramatic.
May God free us from our false drama.
Sometime this week, sit down and think about your life. Think about what is good in your life. Do not think about how one room is a mess or how some things don't work, which are little things. Put aside the whole drama queen thing for a little while and realize how good things have been.
Then, sit down with your husband. Take his arm or his hand and tell him how much you love him. Tell him how glad you are for the life you have together. And then kiss him.
You might be surprised how good it is to take a moment and realize what a great life you really have.
As you look around the internet on the subject of marriage, you will find an amazing amount of material. Even if you limit yourself to the question of being a wife, you have plenty of places to look. There is an abundance of information out there.
Trouble is, information is just information. There are websites with lots of cute things you can make to decorate for holidays. There are web directions for scrapbooks and outings and photography. There are plenty of different ways to record your family activities and to create "memories" in the form of paper records or videos.
There are pages on almost everything.
Why? Because we are not good at being husbands and wives. We begin, as everyone begins, with the idea that we know just what to do. We think that we have it all under control, having observed our parents and having learned stuff from what we have seen and read. Then, we get married and find out it doesn't work that way.
The old saying is that people who thirst are not satisfied by reading about water. In the same way, people who want to be excellent wives are not satisfied by reading about being an excellent wife. You have to do something. Today is the best day to do something.
Here is a quick thing that would mean more than you might imagine. Were you aware that women tend to be amazingly negative? Women do not feel this way, but men do. Women have an amazing ability to be negative about even the most positive things.
Here is what I mean. If a child cleans up his room, his mother's most likely response is something like: "That looks so nice. Don't you wish you kept it this way more often?" Negative. Instead of being happy about what he did, you remind him of earlier failures.
If a husband says to his wife that he hopes their fourth child does well at college, she might say "yes, it would be nice to have one do well," thereby insulting the other children and being negative again. Why do you have to refer to others when you are talking about one?
Women do this constantly. It is as if they have "schoolmarm" written on their hearts and just cannot miss a chance to point out someone's error or something wrong somewhere.
Men learn not to speak to their wives at all, just to avoid the negativity. I can tell a friend about my success at work and he will be happy. I can tell my wife and she will mention what a nice change it is. She is negative, he is positive.
The problem with the negativity is that it always involves insulting someone and always involves putting down the other speaker. Men complain about this frequently when you speak about marriage. They love their wives, but they cannot stand the constant negativism.
So, decide today that you will think before you speak and that you will speak positive things. Decide that when something good happens, you will be happy about it happening and not sad about all the times it did not happen. Decide that building up with your words is better than tearing down.
Two important Bible directions on how we speak:
In Proverbs 12:18, we are told "There is one whose rash words are like sword thrusts, but the tongue of the wise brings healing." I have seen the rash words of negativity cut like a sword thrust through the pleasure of a child or of a husband. Rash words are never wise words. Think about what you are going to say, and speak as a healer not a cutter.
In Proverbs 16:24, we are told "Gracious words are like a honeycomb, sweetness to the soul and health to the body." Gracious words are not words of negativism but of building up, of joy, of assistance and help to others.
Do one thing today. Make your language a source of grace and healing. Put aside your sword thrusts, your rash words, and your negativism. Love your husband in your words.
Here it is, Thursday again. I have no idea how we got here. Seems like it was just Thursday yesterday, but I am assured this is not the case. A whole week has passed.
When I was a child, I had the idea that time went on forever. It seemed like each week took forever to go through. A "month from now" comment was like a promise of the end of the world. Now, it seems like a commitment to tomorrow.
I think most of us, when we are young, think that we are busy. We are sure that we "do so many things" and "have to think about a lot of things," but we are wrong. Children live in a world of almost no burdens, certainly no burdens comparable to your current burdens. Time does pass slowly, but for only a short time.
What have you done in the last seven days? Is your husband a happier husband than he was seven days ago? Have you been a better wife? Have you gotten rid of some problems and habits you would like to get rid of? Have you learned something new? Have you done anything?
A week has passed. A whole week. I know a lot happened in that week. I taught two classes (you can find them at www.graceforlaw.com). I spoke to many people, I attended a hearing, I prepared some paperwork, but, right now, I don't feel like I did any of it. The days pass so rapidly.
Take a moment, today, to stop and think. First, take a good look at your last week and the things you accomplished. Maybe you spend a few minutes with a teen-age son who finally was in the mood to talk, Maybe you spent some quality time with your husband. You did something in those seven days.
Now, think about what you did wrong. If a camera had filmed you for seven days, how did you do? Were you supportive,positive, loving, helpful? Were you bitter, short-tempered, angry? Were you loving to you your husband? Were you kind to others?
Finally, think about the days ahead. How will they be? Who will you be?
A week has passed. It is hard to believe. How many more will you have? You never know.
Make this one a good one.
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