Exposing Our Unfinished Places

Let’s face it, there’s nothing like marriage to allure us and at the same time make us spontaneously combust with fear or anger at a moment’s notice. In the middle years of marriage, youthful fantasies can give way to painful realities. Mike Mason spoke some of my favorite words on the disruptive power of marriage.

A marriage, or a marriage partner, may be compared to a great tree growing right up through the center of one’s living room. It is something that is just there, and it is huge, and everything has been built around it, and wherever one happens to be going — to the fridge, to bed, to the bathroom, or out the front door — the tree has to be taken into account. It cannot be gone through; it must respectfully be gone around. It is somehow bigger and stronger than oneself. True, it could be chopped down, but not without tearing the house apart. And certainly it is beautiful, unique, exotic; but also, let’s face it, it is at times an enormous inconvenience.

A decorated U.S. Special Forces warrior recently confessed to me, “I can handle any firefight and a three-hundred-man ambush, no problem. My role and objectives in war are clear. It is my life at home I can’t handle — my marriage, my kids, my mortgage. I’m failing. I feel like I live in Afghanistan and I’m deployed to my home in Texas.”

Nothing will expose more of the unfinished places in us than our marriage. Marriage is the most difficult relationship in which to love well, because it is the one in which it is least possible to hide. She’s always there. You can’t blow the whistle, throw a flag, stop the clock. It’s real-time, live-ammo training for the masculine soul. She sees it all — or at least the results of it all.

What if the disruption is actually intended by God as a personal invitation to engage in the very thing that would recover, in time, that which you most deeply desire?


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