A Marriage Miracle

I met Sofia at a recent writer’s conference, and from a few comments she made (after I’d told her I was engaged to Ivan), discerned that she would have valuable insight on how to work through marriage struggles to build a healthy relationship. “Write a blog post,” I urged her. “Tell my readers your marriage story.” And so she did.

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1 Corinthians 13:4-8: Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.

Tommy and I have been happily married for 16 years. My young husband fulfilled all my criteria: a God-fearing man (check), intelligent (check), funny (check), responsible and diligent (check), honest and trustworthy (check), and a leader (check). We were 25 years old when we tied the knot, and I envisioned our marriage life would be a pretty smooth ride.

You can almost hear the foreboding tunes in the background. Something would obviously and eventually go wrong. People with marriage wisdom and experience know that the sanctification process has just begun when they see newlyweds grinning happily, walking down the aisle.

In marriage, we have two sinful people intensely interacting with each other while being intimately vulnerable. Sinful desires and selfish behaviors colliding, reverberating energy that hurt one another. If we don’t process our pain properly, and if we’re still harboring unhealed wounds from the past, the cumulative pain can be so unbearable.

We might have the biblical understanding, objectives and principles of marriage, but not necessarily the maturity and the capacity to carry it through. Each of us has our unique jagged edges and we need to endure the painful process of rubbing and scraping against each other. Through this continuous process, our sharpness and roughness were made smoother and we both became better life-partners.

The good news is we are not all bad; there’s still goodness and love within each of us. If we steadfastly stand and hold on to the source of love in the midst of intense emotional pain, God’s love and power will encompass us. He grants us peace and gives us the capacity to choose love again and again beyond logic and comprehension. Love becomes not only emotional but also intentional.

My husband is a strong leader, and he always tries to do the right thing, another plus point. Everything was rosy and dandy whenever we agreed on the same things, which (thankfully) was most of the time. But if and when I didn’t agree with him, he would get very frustrated and feel betrayed because his own wife could not see eye to eye with him.

Sometimes I would give him the benefit of the doubt. I just followed and agreed with him, but I still couldn’t fully support wholeheartedly. I couldn’t articulate well the reasons. “It’s just a woman’s intuition thing,” I would explain. Yet he would see it as my lack of faith in him, or even as a rebellion.

Of course, whenever he felt this way, the home atmosphere would not be peaceful and everybody would be antsy. I would have uneasy feelings throughout the days. I would feel suffocated and sometimes fantasized living life as a single mom, breathing the air of freedom. By God’s grace, He always reined my wandering thoughts back to His words.

Looking back, I would say what my husband did to me was teetering the line of spiritual abuse. The definition of abuse here is the misuse of something. Let me clarify, my husband was innocent of any malign intent; his intention was good and true. He believed as a good husband and leader of the family, he needed to lead all of us on the right path, sometimes by ‘force’ if necessary.

What my husband did was spewing out Bible verses at me to convict me and demanding me to repent. He’s very good at analyzing and judging the workings of people’s hearts. He can intuitively describe and pin-point where my struggles lie and the underlying sins I harbor. I knew there was a part of me still in the wrong that needed to be made right, but the way he did it caused resentment to build up within me. If I didn’t change my thinking or behavior right away, he grew very frustrated and took it as a form of stubbornness.

Changes in our marriage didn’t come overnight, but it has surely been a more than wonderful change. The Lord is the mastermind of the transformation in our marriage. On one occasion a few years ago, God gave me a vision of a big stone that flew away from my heart. Interestingly, my heart actually felt lighter afterward. Since then for some unknown reasons, I am not easily offended by my husband. Even when he does things I don’t agree, I can continue to have the power and strength to love him genuinely.

I think the big stone represented bitterness and resentment towards my husband, and God had taken away that big stone from my heart. Keep in mind, I am not the kind of person who receives visions. In fact, that might be the only incident I can remember vividly. My experience just goes to show how ‘ordinary’ miracles happen to ordinary everyday people.

For my husband, the changes happened several months after I received the vision. The in-depth study of the Sermon on the Mount by Jesus and verse 1 Peter 3:7 was the turning point. God revealed to my husband that Jesus’ style is neither imposing nor forceful. God respects and appreciates our free will. God gives us space to think and make decisions with all the resulting consequences.

My husband realizes that truth needs to be married and delivered with love; truth can never be intact in the absence of love. Obedience that is based on force, guilt trip, emotional pressure, will never amount to true obedience and will be unlikely to breed love. God knows that, which is why God never forces. God invites, convicts, nudges, reminds, asks, but never forces. We own our decisions and consequences.

1 Peter 3:7: Husbands, in the same way be considerate as you live with your wives, and treat them with respect as the weaker partner and as heirs with you of the gracious gift of life, so that nothing will hinder your prayers.

Nowadays, our marriage feels like an easy breeze. There is space now, space for us to disagree, space for my flesh to struggle with my spirit, even space for my heresy to fester for a time (before the Holy Spirit helps to extinguish it). Whenever there’s an area of sin in my life that I am still wrestling with, my husband will sit beside me, try to understand my pain first, hash out my trail of thoughts, articulate what might be the set of beliefs underneath, figure out what the Scripture says about this, and pray with me.

I am very grateful the turning points led us to this place. It sure felt we could easily go in the other direction. God has rescued us. He soothed our pains, salved the broken parts, and took away the trigger points. We thank the Lord now for uniting us in the beginning and continuously knitting our marriage path in the beautiful pattern of love and sacrifice, pain and forgiveness.

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Sofia Tjiptadjaja lives in Indonesia, a wife of a wonderful husband and a mother of two tween girls. Her passion is to encourage women to attain a biblical vision of wholesomeness the way God uniquely designs each woman. Her writings and free e-book Discipleship for Women are available at www.wholesomewomen.org.

Photo by Mayur Gala on Unsplash