Marriage Tuesday…a postscript

yesterday elicited some interesting comments. let me clear up some things.

although i believe that things have changed a lot during my life on the timeline, i was not romanticizing the past in yesterday’s post.

wanda and i have an incredibly different and deeper relationship than either of our parents had. we learned much from the mistakes and shallowness of our parent’s marriages.

the past was not problem free. the church…at least my church experiences… has always been at the center of the hypocrisy. just in the five church families i have been a part of in my 56 years, our talk of righteousness and personal purity and holy living was consistently undermined by secret sin and public shame:

…a deacon who molested his daughter

…a young senior pastor who got a 16-year old girl pregnant (his own pregnant wife and little boy lived with us while she put her life back together and moved on without him)

…an eleven year old girl in my youth group got pregnant and the whole middle school group got to experience the nine months with her. talk about losing your innocence!

…one night at high school bible study (in the early 80’s) i ask about thirty kids to count up how many divorces they had in their immediate extended families (parents, siblings, grandparents, aunts and uncles). we stopped counting when we passed 120.

…nearly every young couple i have ever counseled before they got married has gone too far sexually. they might not have technically had sexual intercourse, but nearly all of them have blurred the lines. that was true in 2002, 1982, 1962, and i suspect it was true in the decades before that. so exactly where does that sin line get crossed, anyway?

…i have known church leaders my whole life who have bullied and abused their wives in the name of being the head of the household. sick.

…my entire ministry career has been filled with pastor contemporaries, partners and role models who made their own wives compete with a full-time mistress…the church they pastored.

…this is going to sound incredibly harsh, but the reality is that if it weren’t for absentee dads, poor parenting, shallow or broken marriages, and marginally christian moms and dads…i would never have been able to spend 36 amazing years in youth ministry. how’s that for irony?

…rather than teaching a simple, humble, and practical way of living life, the modern american church has been more often guilty of promoting a life of opulence, financial mismanagement and personal prosperity in the name of god. is it any wonder that marriages…even christian marriages…have so much struggle with financial issues?

honestly, this list could go on and on. truth is, people…church people…non-church people…all of us…are imperfect, broken, fallible, hypocritical messes. we say one thing and we do another. we all live in closets. we hide our own sins and call out the sins of others.

we always have. i presume we always will.

there is no doubt that this ultra-modern age of technology has made things more difficult. but has not created the problems that shred the fabric of marriage and family. it merely magnifies the problems that have been there all along.

if you know me, i’m anything but a glass-is-half-empty kind of guy. i don’t see life on a slippery slope into the abyss. i still see much hope and good and potential for amazing marriages and great kids and healthy relationships.

i still hear the call for god’s people to pray that his kingdom will come right here…right now…on earth, as it is in heaven.

my marriage is a slice of heaven. yours can still be, too.