Pride, Complacency, and Marriage tagged: , , ,

Pride, Complacency, and Marriage

Posted by in News & Culture

Art Rogers wrote something that has stayed with me the past two days:

I simply desire to express how vulnerable I feel at the news. I have known for a couple of decades now that anyone is capable of anything. Seeing this happen scares me to death.

It ought to scare us all.

The news Art refers to is the moral failure and subsequent resignation of a “high profile pastor”. I don’t know anything about the pastor in question. I had never before heard of him. Whoever he is, and whatever his circumstances, I’m neither shocked, outraged, or surprised. I see between 100 and 150 new clients every year. I would guess about 25% of those are minsters or their family members. About half of that number come for help with their marriages; most – but not all – of those ministerial couples have some form of inappropriate (that’s therapist-speak for sinful) behavior associated with their troubles: affairs, pornography, emotional affairs, and anger seem to be the sins of choice. I work very hard with each of these pastors/staff members to salvage their marriages. Restoration to ministry may or may not happen down the road; my allegiance is to the pastor and his family, not to his ministry. Most of these marriages can be restored; some cannot. Divorce is the end result for some of these couples.

No one – not one minister I have worked with over the years – wakes up one morning and thinks “How can I completely screw up my life and my ministry today?” The path they all traveled sloped gently downhill and in every case one spouse or the other had been traveling that path for a long time.

Some advice you might not hear every day.

Make sure the word “divorce” is in your vocabulary. I can’t tell you how many times I have heard the opposite preached. I think I understand what those pastors and marriage counselors are trying to say. I assume they are speaking to commitment; admonishing others to stop threatening divorce and get busy solving problems and strengthening their marriage. If that’s the case, its good advice. But if meant literally, and I believe it often is, then its bad advice.

The implication is if we don’t talk about – if I don’t even think about divorce – then it can never happen to me. “I’ll never get a divorce” aren’t just famous last words, they are legal nonsense. Every state in the Union has some form of no-fault divorce. The reality is you can find yourself divorced whether you want to be or not.

Putting the word back in your personal dictionary means admitting you can’t read the future, you can’t make your spouse keep their wedding vows, and you can’t take anything – no matter how sacred – for granted.

“Divorce is not an option” is denial in its most basic form. It may not be an acceptable option or a godly option but it is an option. God is capable of always loving, always forgiving, always seeking reconciliation; human beings have limits and if pushed beyond those limits some people will break.

A little fear can be a healthy thing. Not fear in the psychotherapeutic-diagnosable-anxiety meaning but fear as in healthy respect. Marriage therapists refer to this as “constraint motivation”. Passion, commitment, and love pull me toward a healthy marriage. Fear of displeasing God, ruining my ministry, or letting others down constrain me from behaving sinfully toward my spouse.

Becoming convinced my wife will love me no matter what I do (or don’t do) opens the door to pride and complacency. Either one can be the beginning of that long, gentle, downhill slope that leads to moral failure and a loss of ministry.

Pride is the sin most often warned against in cases like the “high profile pastor”. Pride is the steeper of the two paths. Complacency will ruin our marriages and our ministries just as surely as pride although more slowly. Complacency is the gentler, longer path to marital destruction.

Becoming complacent in marriage means we have stopped relating to one another as friends and lovers and have become merely co-managers of a household, co-laborers in a ministry.

Thirty years ago I worked very, very hard to win the heart of that cute, blue-eyed blonde at the BSU. I find that 30 years later I have to work just as hard, some days harder, to keep her heart… to stop complacency before it begins.

Art’s post at 12 Witnesses has stuck with me the last two days because he’s right on target: we are all vulnerable, we are all capable of becoming proud or complacent or both.

Should we fail to recognize how vulnerable we are, we may likely find ourselves looking at the situation from a position that is entirely too uncomfortable.