Beyond Ordinary: When a Good Marriage Just Isn't Good Enough (11 page)

It is the moments when we embrace the downward turns in marriage that God gives us the marriages we had dreamed of; not because he has changed our spouses, but because we are allowing him to change us. In those challenging moments of embracing the Dip, we learn to lean on God rather than trying to be god. We allow God to remake our expectations and to transform our vision of who God is, who we are, and who our spouses are. Ordinary marriages go to great lengths to avoid marriage valleys, yet it is often in the valleys that God meets us and sets us up for extraordinary.

QUESTIONS

1. Messiah complex or reverse messiah complex: Which best describes your role in your marriage?
   
2. Are you a scorekeeper? If so, what specific areas in your relationship do you tend to keep score of?
   
3. What conditions and expectations are there in your marriage? Are they reasonable?
   
4. What was a time your marriage faced “the Dip”? Did you embrace it or avoid it? How might your marriage be different if you had taken another path?
   

As I (Justin) write this chapter, only a few weeks remain before the second biggest day in Indianapolis Colts history. The biggest day in Colts history was the day they drafted Peyton Manning. That was the day the Colts became contenders. It was the day people started respecting our team. It was a beautiful day. The second biggest day in Colts history will be the day they decide whether they will waive Peyton Manning because they don’t believe he can play at the level he once did, or whether they are going to pay him the twenty-eight-million-dollar bonus he is due to keep him on the team.

As a fan not just of the Colts but of Peyton Manning, I think to myself,
How did it come to this?
I remember people lining the streets in subzero temperatures just a few years ago to celebrate the Super Bowl victory that Peyton brought to our city. I remember watching as the children’s hospital in Indianapolis was renamed the
Peyton Manning Children’s Hospital because of the investment he made both financially and with his time. Every week there seemed to be a story on the news about all that Peyton’s PeyBack Foundation was doing for underprivileged kids in the city. Not only can I not imagine Peyton playing for another team, I can’t imagine him being part of another city.

As a fan, I don’t think of Peyton Manning as being under contract with the Colts. It’s like he’s a part of us not because he is paid to be, but because he chooses to be. It’s like he’s in covenant with the Colts, the city of Indianapolis, and the fans. Yeah, he signed a piece of paper, but his allegiance seems to transcend contract. It’s like both he and the Colts promised to be together.

But that isn’t the reality. Peyton Manning and the Colts aren’t in a covenant relationship; they are in a contractual agreement. Contracts expire. Contracts can be renegotiated. (And, in fact, the Colts
did
release Manning, and he signed a new contract with the Denver Broncos.) But a covenant, by its very nature, should last forever.

When we get married, our vision is covenant. We make promises. We recite vows. We commit to being there for our spouses. We swear to love unconditionally, “in sickness and in health.” We are not signing a contract, with a series of clauses, exemptions, and meticulous details that can be renegotiated and appealed to. We are entering a covenant, born from the love in our hearts, which is unconcerned with particulars. This covenant feels right. This covenant feels holy. This covenant feels ordained. We’re not as concerned with what we get as with what we have to give.

Extraordinary flows from covenant, ordinary from contract. Ordinary isn’t something we choose; it’s something that happens by not choosing extraordinary.

Trisha and I had drifted to an ordinary place in our marriage because we didn’t choose covenant. We drifted to and existed in a contract mentality. When we chose to allow our marriage to be a contractual agreement, ordinary was only a matter of time.

TRISHA:

After three years of marriage, we achieved a dream that took our parents fifteen years of marriage to accomplish: we bought our first house. Kokomo, Indiana, was not only known for being a hub for the auto industry, it was also an inexpensive place to live. We bought our eleven-hundred-square-foot home for a whopping sixty thousand dollars. The carpet and wall color were as old as the house itself, but they were ours, and we loved them. With baby boy number two on the way, orange walls and green carpeting never looked so good.

The fall and winter of 1998 are all a blur. Pregnant and wrangling an active toddler, I took most of that time to unpack and get settled. With our son Elijah due to arrive at the end of March, there was a sense of anticipation in our house. This time we were ready. This time we had the money, time, and space to do things right. This time Justin and I felt a sense of pride because we were “old enough” to be parents.

That spring brought about more than just the birth of our precious Elijah. It brought the first sightings of the Promised Land. Over the next few years, our search for community and relevant ministry would come to fruition. It was here in Kokomo that I could finally sigh and say, “We’ve made it.” Our time in the desert, of Justin’s searching for the perfect ministry, was coming to an end.

As the flowers in our front yard bloomed, so did my heart. After investing in friends and students in our prior ministries, I struggled to fully embrace other people, fearing I would only have to leave them after a year or two had passed. I had promised myself I wouldn’t seek out friends as I had in the past. But my new church would hear nothing of it. I was engulfed by staff and students and even found my kindred spirit. This kindred spirit was everything I wasn’t, but as the saying goes, opposites attract. What we did have in common was that we were both young marrieds in love with our husbands and devoted to our children.

With my kindred spirit’s family, nobody was a stranger, and she
made no exception to this rule when it came to my family. Only three months after our move, her family invited us to Christmas dinner. I was still pregnant and unable to stomach the smell of marinara, so they turned their usual Christmas pasta dinner into one that was free of red sauce. What was likely a small sacrifice for them was a huge push to move me toward fully embracing community. By spring, this kindred spirit had become my best friend, and I loved every minute of our friendship!

One of the ways our friendship grew and solidified was over cupcakes. When Justin and I started at the church, a lot of the women there were pregnant and nearing the date for their baby showers. It was so fun celebrating the births of all these babies, and I was becoming a baby shower expert. But there is one shower I will never forget.

My best friend, who is an amazing cook—unlike me (I had an older sibling to take care of the cooking duties when I was younger)—had asked me to bake some cupcakes for an upcoming shower. She would bake some as well, and we would combine them to make a cake tower. As I entered my best friend’s house, she could tell I was disappointed in my cupcakes’ less-than-appealing appearance. Hers were fluffy and pretty; mine were wimpy and disfigured. After my initial moment of disappointment passed, we laughed at how bad they looked. But she graciously took my contribution and hid them in the inner part of the tower, somehow making the whole thing look
Better Homes and Gardens
worthy.

This was one of my favorite things about her. When I was my worst critic, she was always there to provide an encouraging perspective. I was finally getting to experience the potential of not just being a friend, but having a friend.

I was that kid who loved to do things as a team—and I still am. Personal achievement didn’t give as much of a “high” as accomplishing something as a team. In middle school, our band didn’t have a flag team, so I started one. In high school, we lost our dance coach due to a failed referendum, but I didn’t let that stop
me. I gathered our team, found a teacher to drive us, and we went to camp anyway. Not only did we go to camp, we won a spot to go to nationals, where we eventually placed. Being married to a pastor was no different. Justin and I partnered together to change the world through the local church, and I
loved
being in ministry together.

When I was in elementary school, my cousin Melissa and I sang together at church on Mother’s Day. We stood on top of two small wooden chairs in order to see over the pulpit and sang a song that spelled out
mother
. To this day Melissa laughs hysterically when we talk about it because after the song I yelled into the mic, “Can you tell what word we just spelled?” Fortunately for me, this little burst of comedy wasn’t held against me, and I continued to sing from behind that pulpit until I left for college.

I never wanted to be a famous singer, songwriter, or musician, but what I loved about singing was that I got to sing with my brother. He has one of the purest voices I’ve ever heard. I
loved
being his background singer, and I was content with being just that. Now that I was married and in ministry, I still found myself singing behind a pulpit, even if the pulpits changed from year to year. When we moved to Kokomo, not only did I find my best friend, I also found my voice, not as a background singer, but as a worship leader. Our senior pastor, Mark, was constantly pushing me to lead songs. I didn’t have much of an idea what he meant, but I knew that I loved to help our congregation connect to the song I was about to sing. There is something precious when you get to see a song connect a person’s heart to God’s. Getting to sing a song after I spoke was the icing on the cake. God used Mark and my church family to unlock another passion in me that I didn’t even know existed. The Promised Land just kept getting better.

But I could see a sandstorm in the far distance, and what I had come to learn is that the only place you find sand is the desert. As much as I felt built up by friends and my church family, I felt like Justin never matched their intensity in loving me. My
friends acted like they wanted to be around me. Justin seemed only to want me to help him build his ministry.

Two years into our time in Kokomo, the issues that had plagued Justin in previous ministries were making a comeback. He didn’t feel respected. He had a hard time feeling satisfied. As Justin struggled, the people I had learned to trust became the standard to which Justin constantly compared me. Justin made comments that let me know that in his eyes I wasn’t good enough, and I filed them away in my heart. It seemed that he utilized my gifts only to the extent that they benefited his ministry—until a staff member or volunteer came along who could do it better. Even more hurtful, my best friend seemed to always be the first in Justin’s comparison lineup. My best friend was everything I wasn’t, but that’s what I loved about her, and I knew she felt the same about me. But Justin was quick to criticize the areas where I seemed to fail at home because he saw her do it better. Out of self-protection and in keeping with the spirit of “team,” I said nothing. My self-preservation solidified to the extent that it felt like Justin and I were no longer in a covenant relationship but rather a contractual agreement. Our relationship had become daily talks of negotiations about what we needed from each other rather than offering how we could serve one another. I was settling for ordinary.

JUSTIN:

When I think about my life, I can’t help but regret all the time I wasted in discontentment. This has impacted many areas of my life, but one of the hardest hit was my marriage. Without even realizing it, I started to compare Trisha to her best friend. Why couldn’t Trisha cook like her? Why couldn’t Trisha work part-time like her? Why wasn’t she wired like her? This comparison started out lightheartedly and then made its way into arguments—which would then cause more arguments.

My discontentment went way beyond our marriage, though. It
started in my relationship with God and bled into all aspects of my life. Comparing Trisha to her best friend was not an isolated occurrence. No matter what area of my life I examined, I was discontented.

By God’s grace, we were able to purchase our first house in Kokomo. It was an amazing house, and we had everything we needed. Three bedrooms, a fenced-in backyard, a great neighborhood—yet it wasn’t enough, at least not for me. Two years into our time there, I wanted a bigger house. I wanted a basement. I wanted a man cave. I wanted multiple bathrooms. I wanted nicer carpet. I wanted a bigger yard.

I felt the same discontent about our student ministry. When we arrived in Kokomo, the church was growing and exciting. The student ministry, however, had a healthy core group of students, but it wasn’t growing. Our first Sunday, we had twenty-three students show up—sitting in our five-hundred-seat auditorium. At the very end of the message, I asked them to close their eyes. I asked them to imagine the auditorium we were sitting in filled with students. I asked them to imagine a place where their friends could come on Sunday nights and experience God in a real and fresh way. I told them that God had a plan for their school. God had a plan for their friends. God had a plan for every single student in their lunchroom. God had a plan for every single student in their biology class. God’s plan for their friends hinged on the students’ willingness to partner with God to share his love with them.

What happened over the next year was a total God thing. Those twenty-three students believed what I said. They invited their friends. They owned our vision. They served and shared and invested. Our group of twenty-three became a group of fifty. Our group of fifty became a group of one hundred. Within two years of our moving to Kokomo, we had over two hundred students in the ministry and seventy-five adult volunteers. Students who were far from God came to our church and found grace in a relationship with Christ. We launched multiple small groups and had amazing adult leaders who were investing every single week in the lives of students.

Trisha was an integral part of this movement. Early on, she was our worship leader. As the ministry grew, she trained our students to lead worship. Eventually, we had a student band and several student worship teams. As that need was met, Trisha led a group of freshman girls. She was an amazing small-group leader and had a vision of being with these girls all the way through graduation. We hadn’t stayed at our previous ministries long enough to see many students graduate, and that was a prospect she was passionate about.

As Trisha became more invested in our ministry, I became more discontented. God was blessing our ministry in amazing ways, but it wasn’t enough for me. No matter how many students showed up, it wasn’t enough. No matter how great a service was on a particular Sunday night, we had to top it the next week. No matter how many compliments I was given by the staff or by our volunteers, they weren’t respecting me enough. Maybe this wasn’t the right ministry for me? Maybe I’d be happier somewhere else? Maybe God could use my gifts in greater ways at a bigger church?

Discontentment with our house, our church, and our marriage had made its home in my heart.