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Pride Comes Before the Fall
Married life brings it fair share of troubles.
For those of you who may be single, let none of you be persuaded that finding a mater is the solution to all your troubles. The loneliness that single life can bring is troublesome, yet the challenges a married person faces tend to be far greater than anything posed to an unmarried person. I say this not to shame anyone or to belittle anyone, but to bring up a key truth. Any approach to marriage that does not include humility as a central ingredient to success probably does not speak of marriage accurately. For those of you who are single, take heed and do not approach marriage headlong assuming yourself to be sufficient for the task. Instead, hope and pray that you may be made ready for the responsibility when it becomes availble to you.
For those of us who are married, the same warning applies. The courtship-a seemingly outdated term, but one for which I have particular fondness-of Laura and I proved to be a whirwind romance. We met in June of 2000, started dating in August of the same year and married less than a year after we first met. Though we met many hardships along the way, our love for each other was apparent to all. Indeed, our wedding itself blessed many, for 'celebration' describes the proceedings accurately. Many were astounded at the look of joy that crowned my face, a man whom many would a characterize as depressed throughout much of his life. At the reception, rather than sit at the table of honor, we tripped the light fantastic and wore out our rented shoes on the dance floor. Truly, I would say, it was an idyllic scene, promising much joy to come.
However, it did not take long for troubles to crop up after the big day had passed. The first two months, rather than an extended honeymoon, proved troublesome. Happiness did not reign in our home. Indeed, the most outstanding lesson we gleaned from this time is that we can be terribly selfish people. This, I must say, occurred despite our love for each other and our desire to serve each other in love. Our commitment to walk humbly before God, as Christians, too often did not translate into walking humbly before each other in marriage. We bickered and fought and failed to experience the intimacy with each other we so desperately longed to achieve.
Temporary peace and joy arrived after we finally departed on our honeymoon two months after the wedding day. Much of the problems that arose during our first two months melted away in the face of 10 days in a sunny climate. This relative tranquility lasted for the better part of a year and the pregnancy that began in September 2001 only added to our joy. Various financial struggles and battles with inlaws reignited passions and led to periodic flareups in our relationship after the baby was born in June 2002. Many of these troubles kept arising even after we had supposedly dealt with them and we decided to find a better solution than temporary peace.
After much prayer and consideration, we made a few decisions that had as its ultimate result our move from New York to Colorado. Indeed, the move helped in more ways than I can relate in this short article. Laura had struggled with work and life as a mother and I had labored through job after job that failed to excite my passions and energy. We became too dependent on our parents and feared losing our influence over our child's development due to reliance on parents for day care. To solve this, we needed to have Laura stay home with our daughter and any other children. How we would do this in New York we knew not, but we committed to the step without truly dealing with the consequences beforehand. We set a date for my wife to leave her job and resolved to stick with it, but another solution came to us in the meantime and we moved out to a small town in Colorado.
Suffice it to say, the move has made a tremendous impact in our lives. Much of the stress and tension that afflicted us in New York City melted away in the more laid back surroundings of rural Colorado. Laura reveled in the opportunity to spend time with our child and I took advantage of the chance to pursue a different career with great thankfulness. Many of our problems seemed to be behind us.
As is often the case, trouble crops up when we are vulnerable to it. The three of us succumbed to colds all at one time, we struggled with lack of sleep, and the immediacy of our second child's arrival one month from now pressed on us. We battled with stress and physical ailments and finally with each other. One morning, while trying to set up our son's room in preparation for his birth, Laura and I had a fight more brutal in many ways than any we have ever experienced. At first, we gave in to our anger and frustration and threw words at each other that pierced and caused the other to bleed. I do not wish to minimize the harshness of the fight, so I will tell you that I thought of just leaving, running away for a few days at least, at the height of it. As far as its content, it basically involved financial decisions and my own reluctance to spend money on something. Our difficulty installing new window treatments in our children's rooms only added to the frustration and led to my wife's anger with me for refusing to hire someone to do the installation.
To our great good fortune, the fight did not persist, but ended several minutes after it began. How did it end? In a word, humility. One of the great stumbling blocks to any relationship is the desire to be right and to be seen as right. We often stubbornly insist on the correctness of our decisions, attitudes, and ideas to the detriment of our relationships. If we say a word in anger, we may regret the word but refuse to admit that we were wrong because to do so involves humbling yourself before another. To admit fault makes one vulnerable and most of us hate vulnerability. Even if we believe we are right, it often behooves us to submit our right to be correct out of love for another. In the particular case of the fight mentioned above, I still believed that we could not afford to pay for professional window treatment, but conceded the issue to my wife. If one thing we tried did not work, we'd pay to have professional do the work for us. This concession melted my wife's anger and led to reconcilliation. After all, I thought, what is money compared to happiness in the home? The money would come, but unless I dealt with the problem I had created at home, it would be worthless, for peace and unity in marriage is worth more than any earthly treasure.
In essence, then, I suggest that one of the keys to lasting unity in the home comes through humbly submitting to one another. While this may sound simplistic to those experiencing tremendous marital difficulties and it certainly does not replace professional marriage counseling, I have found that many problems in my own marriage can be solved simply through giving up our right to be correct. Is it more important to be right or to have peace in the home? For my wife and I, we choose peace in the home. Pride often gets in the way of harmonious relationships and needs to be combatted whenever it raises its ugly head. Fortunately, it's not a one way street, but when one person is willing to bend his or her neck in an argument, it often serves as an example to the other. Laura's concessions in previous arguments, for example, encouraged me to take a similar step in our recent fight. Obviously, those facing more severe difficulties need something more than the advice contained here, but I can only hope these small words of mine help no matter what the situation.