the most challenging question i have ever been asked about my marriage

"Love without sacrifice is like theft."
Nassim Nicholas Taleb

"Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her."
Ephesians 5:25 

This week I celebrated my twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. They call this the Silver Anniversary. But for all we have been through, it feels platinum for me. People don’t often stay married for a quarter of a century these days. 

It has been noted that celebrating an anniversary is more significant than celebrating a wedding. Weddings are magical and wondrous times. The bride in white, the groom in a tux, heart-rending music, and joy-filled receptions. Whole industries have sprung up around "the big day." Drone footage, sparklers, Instagram honeymoons, it's honestly kind of magic. But learning to celebrate the sustaining of a marriage is just as important as marking the start of one.  

Though it may not move you to tears, the tired couple straining to fit a nice dinner into an exhausting schedule may be an even deeper form of love. Saying vows in the middle of a celebration is one thing, keeping them in the middle of a weary life is another. Keeping our commitments should be celebrated as much as making our commitments. 

So to mark our 25 years, I took Christy back to where we met and fell in love, Toccoa Falls College. TFC sits on a magical campus in the middle of the North Georgia Mountains. It has a waterfall higher than Niagara Falls and is a breathtaking setting for needy and naive freshmen to fall in love. I took her there because I wanted to rekindle whatever flame we had lost through the long and difficult years. I wanted to go back on our silver anniversary to get the silver linings we needed to move ahead.

While walking the campus, I began to reflect on the hundreds of pieces of advice I have heard over the years about how to thrive in marriage. I’ve been given book recommendations, listened to sermons and been to weekends away. Much of it has been helpful, but it wasn’t any of these things that kept coming back to me on that trip. The thing that kept coming up is a question a mentor asked me in our early years of planting our church in New York. These were years in which I worked too much, was gone too often, and let languish the things that once gave me life. The question was simple but potent.

"Is your wife thriving BECAUSE of you or IN SPITE of you?"

God has used this one question more than any other to challenge and confront me over these many years. When we get married, we assume that we will be a deep source of love and joy for each other, but as time goes by, expectations go unmet, selfishness settles in, and we start to realize that the people who know us the best become the ones that can wound us the worst. 

As a result, we can be tempted to stop fighting for each other’s hearts and start fighting for our rights. And these can tempt us to route our needs and desires around those we are called to love the most. 

To be clear, I’m not talking about having an affair here (though tragically this often happens), but I am just talking about the slow realization that to get our needs met we have to route them around our partner, not through them. 

So how do we help our wives thrive? 

Ephesians 5 is remarkably clear: Nourish. Cherish. Wash. Sacrifice.

Nourish. All of us need an ongoing source of encouragement and care in our lives. Someone who will pay attention to the inner longings of our heart, nurture our calling, tend to our wounds, and feed our dreams. Be this for your wife. 

Cherish. I was at a men’s retreat several weeks back and I heard a man say this potent line. "Because women are so rarely cherished, they often settle for being occasionally desired." The more women age, the more they can feel insecure. There are impossible beauty standards to keep up with, a society obsessed with youth, the pornification of everything, and the pressure of both work and home. So it's important that your wife knows that you love her for who she is, not just who she was. Cultivate joy and gratitude for the woman she has become and the thousands of choices she has made to do life by your side. 

Wash. We live in a world of lies. Jesus said the truth will set us free. Gently remind your wife of who she is in Christ. Wash the lies of performance and shame away with the comfort of the gospel and the affirmation of your love. We live in a culture of accusation and critique. Speak with a voice of affirmation and hope.

Sacrifice. Jesus died for his church. That’s the standard for us. He never demanded; he always modeled. The word used for love in this passage is derived from agape. This is not the raw sexual attraction our culture assumes, but the steady, sacrificial giving of yourself for the thriving of another. We should constantly be asking what we can give up on behalf of our wives, not what we can get from them. To be honest, as husbands, we should be judged by how sacrificial we are in private, not how well we perform in public.

REPENTANCE AND REPAIR 

The reason I have never written a book on marriage is because I still have so far to go. Still so much to learn, still so much repentance and repair. There are huge sections of our years together when I was driven, selfish, and, to be honest, sacrificed my wife’s heart for myself. But I am grateful for her patience, the mercy found in the gospel, and the kindness of my wife’s heart. 

So, I want the next 25 years to be different. I want them to be full of wisdom and wonder, patience and tenderness, and more sacrifice and love and care. I am resolved to love and serve my wife so that she thrives because of me, physically, spiritually, mentally, and emotionally, not in spite of me. There is no external ministry more important than that.

Madeleine L’Engle once wrote, 

"The best I can ask for is that this love, which has been built on countless failures, will continue to grow. I can say no more than that this is mystery, and gift, and that somehow or other, through grace, our failures can be redeemed and blessed."

Redemption and blessing, mystery and gift. That sounds a lot like the love of Jesus. That sounds like the kind of thing a wife will flourish because of, not in spite of.

Hoping for a vision of sacrificial love to be stirred in your heart this week.

Thanks for reading.

Cheers.

Jon.

P.S. I have a fuller expansion of this idea in a sermon here.