them. It was all should and little how.
There are, however, a number of excellent books on marriage, including those by Cameron Lee and by Les and Leslie Parrott. All three know what they’re talking about. Cameron is a well-known family life educator, minister, and the author of a fine book published in 2015 by the Fuller Institute for Relationship Education: Marriage PATH: Peacemaking at Home for Christian Couples. Les is a clinical psychologist and his wife Leslie is a marriage and family therapist. Of particular interest is their recent, Saving Your Marriage Before It Starts: Seven Questions to Ask Before—and After—You Marry.3 They have also produced companion workbooks, one for men and the other for women, and developed a widely used online questionnaire.4
Tim Keller, in collaboration with his wife Kathy, wrote the best theological treatment of marriage: The Meaning of Marriage: Facing the Complexities of Commitment with the Wisdom of God.5 They are unwavering in their understanding of marriage as having been instituted by God, and, like this book, theirs contains a good deal of self-disclosure. It is also practical. He was the founding pastor in 1989 of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City; its weekly attendance now exceeds 5,000. His books and sermons are impressively intelligent and filled with penetrating insights into the nature of Christian faith.
Developing the Necessary Skills
Successful marriage requires specific skills, and these skills are acquired through appropriate and earnest practice. You may be born with a certain aptitude, the capacity to acquire a particular ability, but without diligently undertaking the right kind of practice you will rarely if ever develop it. And—here’s the kicker—whatever baggage you and your spouse bring into your marriage is invariably going to get in the way of developing the very skills you both most need to make it fulfilling. Under the negative influence of this baggage, you’ll engage in the wrong kind of practice and only strengthen behaviors that will often be the opposite of those that would enrich your marriage. Such practice merely reinforces bad habits.
Concert pianists practice precisely. They play the right notes and only the right notes for any piece they are trying to master, even if this requires moving through its measures at glacial speed. Not until they have acquired the desired habits will they pick up the pace. Why? Because they do not want to program themselves to play the wrong notes, ones they might be inclined to play during a performance when they feel under pressure.
The challenge in marriage becomes how to prevent your baggage or your spouse’s baggage from getting you to say or do what you shouldn’t and, so, further solidify bad habits. This requires you to learn how to work through that baggage, which is what, in large part, I will try to show you how to do.
Some people have so much baggage—from childhood, their families of origin, past relationships—that they rarely perceive what their spouses do objectivity. Their vision is distorted, as if what they see passes through a set of lenses that alters their perspective. Innocent comments are interpreted as slights. Suggestions are heard as correctives. Compliments are taken as insults.
Guess what? To one degree or another, we all have perceptual distortions, and we are most prone to them in the heat of conflict.
No book or workshop is going to fix all the distortion. We are flawed—every one of us—and our flawed nature is the breeding ground for misperception. The best we can do is to decrease and perhaps minimize our distortions.
As I will show, there are ways to do this. There are also ways, within limits, to reduce your spouse’s tendency to distort. I will share them in the service of helping you and your spouse avoid joining the relationally dead.
The Nature of Christian Marriage
Christian marriage, at its core, is a covenant. Because the identity of a Christian is ultimately defined by a personal relationship with God through Christ, a spouse who’s a Christian symbolizes and reflects Christ in that covenant. This doesn’t change simply because a spouse, in some way or other, falls short of being God’s ideal representative. We all do, and we redefine ourselves as in Christ every time we fall on our spiritual faces, get up, dust ourselves off, and start over again. If we are married, this means continuing to honor the marital covenant into which we’ve entered. Here’s the difference between a contract and a covenant:
A contract, at its simplest, is an exchange of promises supported by what attorneys call consideration, something of value. You promise to fix my roof and I promise to pay you a thousand dollars. Contracts, to be enforceable, must be concrete. They have to specify in detail what is being exchanged for what, and by when. There’s always explicit accounting. Both parties, however polite they may act on the surface, are more or less aware of their relative positions in the transaction, and therefore of who’s ahead and who’s behind. A large number of contractual marriages take place every weekend between people who see nothing spiritual in them. Regardless of the glow that may surround their marriages, such unions are rooted in the secular and are likely, therefore, to remain contractual.
A covenant, by contrast, is not an exchange of promises but the establishment of a relationship. It is not, “I will do something for you, and you will do something for me,” but rather, “I will be something to you, and you will be something to me.”
Many marriages between Christians unfortunately begin as covenants but deteriorate into contracts. This can happen quickly or be the result of a slow erosion of the psychospiritual soil in which the marriage was initially planted. Other marriages take place between Christians who do not grasp the covenantal significance of marriage. These begin as contractual arrangements and never manage to take on the character of a covenant.
Within any marriage, there’s always going to be some accounting. Frail as we are, we lack the ability to be perfectly covenantal, which is why the Old Testament is filled with human failure. God is faithful. We are not. Always, to some extent we’re going to lapse into keeping score, but within a marriage that’s more covenantal than contractual, such score keeping will remain rough and approximate. In thriving marriages, husbands and wives do things for each other all the time, so often that it would be impossible to keep accounts.
How many times would I have to bring Anna coffee in the morning to equal her making me an omelette? I’ve never asked myself that question, and I’m sure neither has she.
When two people marry, it’s as if they agree to merge two companies, or better yet, to combine two worlds, two planets. Each world is characterized by unique thoughts, feelings, beliefs, values, and attitudes. In some mystical sense that is profoundly biblical, the two have the opportunity to create a third world, an idea we’ll return to in chapter 12. This new world will never completely engulf their individual ones, nor should it, since they will always remain distinct persons. Yet, to the extent that the world they jointly create is ever expanding and continually evolving, their marriage will be rich and fulfilling. If it fails to expand and evolve, the marriage will be impoverished.
The principal aim of Staying One is to help you and your spouse move increasingly in the direction of living out a covenant, of together creating and continuing to create a rich conjoint world, one that because of its emerging nuances will prove endlessly interesting and rewarding. To get everything out of this book, and in the process strengthen your marital covenant, I ask that you engage actively with the material by carrying out the prescribed activities. This will require you to write things down. The publisher produces a separate workbook for this purpose.
Actively Participating
When you read the chapters, try to imagine that we’re chatting by a fireplace in a living room. Often, reading a book is like
