Marriage

Baggage

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This is from my post on Going Deeper, a blog dedicated to reflections on our church’s weekly messages.

In Rudy’s message on Sunday on The Christian at Home, he spoke about the baggage we bring into our family life. If you will pardon the pun, I think this is a mixed bag! Baggage is what we carry with us when we go someplace, in this case on our life’s journey.

Often we think of baggage in negative terms, the dysfunctions and unhealthy tendencies we bring with us into any situation. You might think of it as that shirt that isn’t really your color, or those jeans that really are ready to be converted into rags or those smelly shoes. But I would hope that most of us also pack some decent looking stuff in our bags when we travel, kind of like the qualities of temperament, the talents, and gifts, and perspectives that make us attractive and interesting to others. As I said, for most of us, our baggage is a mix of good and not so good stuff. And that’s what can make marriage and family life hard–or good!

What makes it hard is when we resent others for a good quality that they have that we feel we lack, or when we criticize the faults of another that we don’t struggle with. I suspect there was some of this kind of history between Cain and Abel that we read about in 1 John 3:11-12. Both our good and our bad baggage can be a source of conflict with others in our family in these kinds of situations. And sometimes it really can get bad! If you are in what seems like an unsolvable conflict, don’t keep fighting. Call “time out” and get some help–a talk with a pastor, or counselor. It is a sign of strength and not weakness when you can admit you need help.

The baggage we bring can be good as well. If you are a husband or wife, there had to be some pretty good things in the baggage of the other–or else you are a lousy chooser!  In some coaching training I had, we learned to make five good comments for every critical comment. It is funny how we tend to get it the other way around. I wonder if in marriage and family life it would make sense to try to affirm five things we appreciate about the other person each day, and apologize for one shortcoming of our own and, on most days, skip the critique all together!

At the same time, we are not always aware of our negative baggage. It is God’s mercy that we have families! Seriously! You remember the first time you tried to go to school with mismatched clothes and mom told you to go back and change? Sometimes, we can really get in trouble when we take our dysfunctions into public. Usually, there is some member in our family, often our spouse if we are married, who is trying to help us see our negative baggage. I don’t always like it, but often times my wife will save me major grief by pointing out something I’m not seeing in a social situation, or warn me against my tendency to “sermonize” when it would be better to keep my mouth shut and listen!

What I think is going on is that God has given us all good baggage that can both complement (and compliment!) the good things of others in our family. Also, if we are willing to face that we have some stuff in our bags that really doesn’t look (or smell) good on us and let others help us see that, we can save ourselves from grief  and make life more pleasant for others. That’s the kind of home I want to live in.

Review: Resilient Ministry: What Pastors Told Us About Surviving and Thriving

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Resilient Ministry: What Pastors Told Us About Surviving and Thriving
Resilient Ministry: What Pastors Told Us About Surviving and Thriving by Bob Burns
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I’ve watched pastors burn out and drop out. While it is a privilege to shepherd God’s people, it is also just plain hard and demanding work. You don’t do pastoral work, you are a pastor. In some sense, you are always on. The project of this book is to explore what is necessary for pastors to burn on, not burn out. And it is pastors in fact who developed the content of this book as part of a Lilly research project in which pastors were gathered in Summits that explored the keys to sustaining pastoral excellence. Out of these summits five key factors emerged:

1. Spiritual formation: resisting the temptation of workaholism by building rituals, maintaining accountability, growing through hardship, and practicing spiritual disciplines.

2. Self-care: resisting the pressures of work and fostering spiritual growth, emotional self-awareness, relational depth (particularly helpful here was identifying who can pastors share with), and intellectual and physical self-care. Self-care, the authors point out can actually be self-denial as one refuses to heed the siren calls of ministry to tend to the self in a way where you are able to bring the best to those you serve.

3. Emotional and cultural intelligence. Does one understand one’s own emotions and is one aware of the emotions others are manifesting? Likewise, they explore how we all work out of a cultural context and a growing awareness of both one’s own cultural identity and the cultural differences we encounter among those we minister is critical to ministry success in a culturally diverse world.

4. Healthy marriage and family life. Normal life stresses marriages. The ministry lifestyle means one may never feel off the clock and spouse and children get the leftovers or are often the dumping ground for pressures of ministry. Sometimes this may lead to conflicting loyalties or even abandonment of one’s family to ministry. There is the question of who ministers to the spouse. There were a number of practical recommendations in this section ranging from setting aside intentional time together and pursuing shared hobbies to annual marriage “check-ups” with a therapist.

5. Leadership and Management. The authors described leadership as “poetry”, that which captures the imaginations and has systems in place to channel the energies of people. Administration is “plumbing”–modeling, shepherding, managing expectations, supervising conflict, and planning.

The book concludes that it isn’t enough to have summits that recognize these themes or even to make resolves to change. Negotiating these changes with spouses and church leadership and finding continuing support from cohort participants is necessary to consolidate these insights. It seems to me that this may be the most critical insight in terms of pastoral transformation in the whole book.

The book includes appendices with various tools, the most helpful of which may be the emotions checklist, which helps one give a name to the emotions one feels (especially helpful for men). I would recommend this book as a resource to pastors, others in ministry, and to church or ministry leadership, who need to understand the stressors and key factors to pastoral success in order to support their pastors.

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Love That Lasts

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We celebrated Valentine’s Day over lunch today, since I’ll be working tonight. It included a stop at Half Price Books where my wife found a missing volume for a cook book series she collects. Made her day! (By the way, it is Booklovers Weekend and they are giving 20% discounts on everything if you receive or sign up for their emails).

This was our 36th Valentine’s Day, so I thought I might reflect on how we’ve made it this far in married life and can still say we are in love. Not that every moment has  been lovey-dovey. Ruth Graham, the now deceased wife of Billy Graham was once asked if she’d ever contemplated divorce. Her reply was something to the effect of: divorce never, murder frequently! My wife would probably be justified in similar thoughts! So how did love last for us?

Love image

1. We were blessed with good role models. Our parents on both sides had “until death do you part” marriages. They weren’t perfect and we watched them work, however imperfectly, through the tough spots. Between my siblings and me, we have over 100 years of marriage. Our parents must have done something right. At very least, they demonstrated what could happen when you decided that quitting wasn’t an option.

2. We kiss first thing every morning and try to go to bed every night without unresolved issues between us. The apostle Paul wrote, “be angry but do not sin, do not let the sun go down on your anger.” My wife says she is not passive-aggressive, but rather just aggressive! That’s been good for me–in my family we tended to keep things a bit more bottled up and then just exploded. So we do get angry sometimes, and have to work to hear each other out. I’ve spoken the words, “I’m sorry, I was wrong” on many occasions. We try to get to the place where the last thing we do is kiss (and mean it) at night.

3. We’ve sought to guard our hearts in the sense of not giving to another the affections that belong only to our spouse. We’ve seen love grow cold between spouses and also seen affairs spring up when an attraction becomes a flirtation then becomes an infatuation, and finally an affair. Speaking and showing love daily helps stir up the fires. Setting boundaries with the opposite gender and speaking often in positive terms of our spouses with them helps.

4. Looking back at some of the hard places we’ve gone through, I think of hardships as God’s forge that has made our love deeper and more enduring. Cancer, caring for parents and losing them, and our own experience of parenting from those early sleepless nights through the college years called us to listen, to pray, to serve each other, to recognize and put to death our inherent selfishness.

5. Perhaps at the bottom of all, our marriage has lasted by the grace of God. I think again and again as I witness young couples give their marriage vows of what audacious promises we are making to each other! Perhaps being loved by a God that will not let us go and that went to all lengths to woo us challenges us to cry out for and imitate that kind of love for each other. And perhaps because we know the love of such a God, we don’t look for each other to be “god-like” lovers. That relieves a good deal of pressure!

Last night, we heard an artist, Joe Anastasi, who has painted portraits of the homeless in our city (here is a YouTube where he talks about his work). What was amazing in viewing his paints was how he captured something of the depths and dignity and soul of people we often avert our eyes from. I was reminded again how there are depths and wonders in every human life that it takes a lifetime to discover. One of the wonders of marriage for life is that we have the time to truly explore the depths and wonder of another person, to cherish and nourish and celebrate that with each other through the various seasons of life. I’m so glad to be on that journey with the one I love, and for the grace and protection of God who has given us nearly 36 years so far. Happy Valentines Day, my love!

(For more thoughts on this thing called love, see my post from earlier this week, Love Stories.)

Review: Man And Wife

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Man And Wife
Man And Wife by Wilkie Collins
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Wilkie Collins is known as one of the fathers of the mystery with The Moonstone and The Woman in White, both of which I would recommend. In this work, Collins also shows himself as a master of suspense while engaging in some pointed social commentary as well.

The suspense (and much of the commentary) is built around the Scottish marriage laws of the time, which recognized “irregular marriages” in which men and women, who wittingly or not, represented themselves as married were indeed married under law. The plot develops around Geoffrey Delamayn, who has gotten Anne Winchester “in trouble” and is compelled to meet her and marry her at a Scottish inn. Delamayn conveniently has to return to London because of an ailing father and sends the friend whose life he saved, Arnold Brinkworth, who is engaged to Anne’s best friend Blanche Lundie, to carry a message to this effect, a message which becomes very important and is the object of much scheming subsequently. Arnold arrives to find that to allow Anne to stay at the inn, he must represent himself as her “husband” even though Anne resists this. They stay in separate rooms and he leaves the next morning. This becomes the pretense Delamayn uses to escape his marriage obligation in order to marry a wealthy widow. Unfortunately the contention that Anne and Arnold are “married” only becomes known after Arnold marries. First we are in suspense as to when this will come to light. Second, we are in suspense as to the outcome and whether Blanche’s uncle and guardian, Sir Patrick Lundie, will be able to vindicate Arnold and his marriage to Blanche. And finally, we have the suspense as Delamayn plots against the life of Anne, compelling the help of mysterious Hester Dethridge. All this develops at a leisurely pace over 600 pages in this edition, yet this never seemed dragged out to me–a testimony to Collins art.

The book serves most significantly as social commentary on the state of marriage laws that may both entrap people into unwanted marriages and subject women to the brutality of unloving husbands who can seize property and endanger their lives without legal recourse. Although these laws have been changed in the U.K. as well as the U.S., women still live at the mercy of men in many parts of the world without legal protection of life or property.

Collins also engages in a critique of the culture of athleticism that emphasized the development of body at the expense of the formation of mind or character, represented in the character of Geoffrey Delamayn. Delamayn neglects his education to train for athletic events which both make his reputation and break his health. This doesn’t sound very far from the world of collegiate athletes in big money sports like basketball and football today.

Altogether, I thought this was a great read both at the level of suspense and for the issues it raises that are still with us today.

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