Four Years of Marriage…

“So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore, what God has joined together, man must not separate.””
‭‭Matthew‬ ‭19‬:‭6‬ ‭HCSB‬‬

An older friend asked me a couple months into marriage what I thought of it. Being single for many years (before marrying) makes people ask you stuff like that. I remember responding quickly but honestly: “it’s the most challenging AND rewarding thing I’ve ever done.” I could tell by his face and smile that my answer would likely always be those same words. He had been married long enough to know…Marriage is always hard work and when you put the time in, can also be extremely rewarding.

Four years into marriage and my heart echoes this again and again.

We smile and admit that our four years of marriage have been riddled with unknowns and difficult challenges. In fact, some have told us we’ve squeezed 10-15 years worth of trials into four. For starters we’ve moved over a dozen times, have spent 10 months of our marriage living out of a suitcase while we waited for a more permanent home, and have weathered some significant health challenges after Noah’s birth which required two major surgeries for me. It has been a time of growth in tension. Bonding through tears. Prayer in the face of uncertainty. Hope in the middle of fearfulness. Trusting when we couldn’t see the end result. 

Marriage is hard work. It’s two very different human beings with different personalities, different backgrounds and different upbringings coming together and learning to become their own family with a unified front. 

One of the biggest things I’ve noticed about marriage is that everything else you do will fade in comparison to how people see you in your married context. It makes me wonder about 1 Corinthians 13…you can do a lot of things that are amazing in life. You can be successful in business. Have an amazing ministry. Own a great house. Even have good kids. But if your marriage isn’t something Godly to behold…no one will want what you have. They won’t want to follow you.

Tim and I were both in full time ministry as single adults so we knew marrying would mean another target on our marriage. Marriage in itself is a target for the enemy who hates what God created it to mirror. However, being in ministry AND marriage is a double whammy. I think we knew the price and talked about it ahead of time…but nothing prepares you for the immense pressure that comes when you stand on the edge of uncertainty, problems and physical challenges and need to choose to trust the God Who gave you each other. And how do you trust someone who you are still learning to know and understand? What do you say to your spouse when you watch him handle crazy financial pressure from unexpected medical bills? Or how do you walk through random and rare physical trials that leave one of you in tremendous pain and the other one having to suddenly be the caretaker for both you and your son? What do you do when you learn you have to move in 20 days, have no place to go and have a 4 month old baby all the while still battling physical challenges?

How do you stay honest with the pain and the weight of it all and grow TOGETHER versus let it tear you apart?

In all the craziness, we’ve been able to do ministry together several times in prison or at events for ex-offenders and their spouses and/or families. What do they watch more than anything? Not how flowery we are with our Scripture knowledge. Not if we can answer their many varied questions. Not what we look like or what credentials we have in our back pocket. More than anything, they watch our marriage.

So I’ve seen how this covenant between the three of us: God, Tim and I, has the greatest potential to reach the world. When we live it right, it’s our biggest spotlight on the Gospel. When we live it wrong…no one wants our Jesus. Lived right, others see how a Christian marriage is supposed to look radically different than those of the world…not living separate, selfish lives but instead being in unity and upholding the name of Jesus together. I’m not saying that you can’t have different ways you minister to people as a couple. That’s the beauty of being a team and having your own strengths and weaknesses. But I’ve seen several couples in ministry who don’t have a clue about what their spouse is involved in. Pastors who are so unconnected to their wives that you would literally never guess they are married…like roommates who aren’t sharing life emotionally.

I’ve met youth leaders who have their own world that their wife and kids aren’t part of.

I’ve met couples who do ministry at church or other parachurch ministries who are so distant from each other, come and go at different times to their ministry meetings and are like two ships passing in the night.

I’m not being judgmental. Hear me when I say this: it’s the most natural thing for a married couple to drift apart and live separate lives. This is the way we will eventually go if we don’t work at it. We will easily shift slightly each day until we wake up hardly knowing the person we sleep next to. It’s the path of least resistance.

Tim and I have talked about this very thing- that we have to choose to FIGHT to stay on the same page. To know what each other is feeling and thinking and struggling with. To know how to serve each other and parent together and put each other first. We have to choose this. Every. Single. Day. And the one day we don’t we start drifting. It will happen if we don’t fight for our marriage.

People often ask me how in the world Tim and I can handle being together as much as we are. We are married and live together PLUS we work together. In fact, the first two years of our marriage the ministry offices shared our house with us…so Tim was home for every meal and could walk down the hall to see us or even look across the room from the office to the kitchen where I was making dinner. Some people can’t understand how we weren’t at each other’s throats all the time. We were rarely apart.

All I can say is we’ve walked through some hellish things already in our marriage and we’ve learned to walk through them together. As a team.

I remember a time when I was so sick with our first pregnancy that I could barely get out of bed except to vomit regularly and then head back under the covers. Tim would check in on me often bringing electrolyte drinks on ice with a straw, coaxing me to eat whatever sounded good…which was typically something like macaroni and cheese. 🙂 When he got home from work he would make dinner, do dishes and start the laundry. Eventually I got more accustomed to working while extremely nauseated so was able to live a slower life for the last 4-5 months of pregnancy. Still vomiting almost every day, but learning to cope with it better.

During that time, we ministered together in prisons and ALWAYS the women especially were watching us like hawks. They saw me speak up front and then run to the back bathroom to throw up. They saw Tim compassionately take care of me…making sure I drank often, putting my feet up on a chair and steadying me with his hand when I was standing for long periods of time. Those glimpses into our marriage far outweighed our words about love, trust and faithfulness. They SAW what it looked like for a man to serve his wife and for some of them, it was the first time they had ever met a man like that.

You’ve heard “actions speak louder than words”? A Godly marriage might be one of your loudest ministries to the world. It may just be the biggest way you can showcase the Gospel to a dark place where true love is absent and selfishness runs wild.

Four years of marriage isn’t long in the scheme of things. But it’s long enough to know that it is the most challenging and rewarding thing I’ve ever done. Beautiful and hard. And so, so worth it.