“Is that hard work?” I asked him?
“Nope,” he replied, “it’s just work.”
I was 21 years old, and I was the volunteer youth pastor at a church plant in Lapeer, Michigan. Our church didn’t have a building – we met in a school auditorium on Sunday mornings – so our youth group would meet at the pastor’s house. One day I stopped by and the pastor was pulling up carpet in a sun room when I stopped by. He was all sweaty and I could tell he was working hard. The exchange above was the beginning of a conversation that we engaged in as I jumped in to help him. It was a teachable moment that I am sure he has long forgotten, but one that has stuck with me for eleven years now, and will remain with me as long as I live.
Why do I bring it up? Well, just remembering that sometimes things just take work has helped me through many situations in my life, but I was thinking of it today in relation to my marriage. My wife and I have been married for 12 years now, and we have had quite a fun ride as a whole. This past year in our youth ministry our theme has been “Connect” and I have been challenging our students to engage in deeper, more authentic, and more meaningful connections. As I have been walking through this year, the Lord has simultaneously been challenging me in the same vein regarding my marriage. See, I have recognized that all too often we settle for wading in surface conversations rather than swimming out into the deeper waters of communication. We’ve played it safe and/or avoided the scary waters of true authenticity. I am a joker, so when we start getting to the uncomfortableness of realness, I have had a tendency to bust a joke to redirect the conversation back to safety. But God is calling us out into the deep, and that means work.
This past week my wife and I have had a couple of real heart-to-heart sharing times, and I am sensing a breakthrough in our marriage. That talk took work. The solutions that we developed for taking our relationship to a deeper level require work. It won’t be easy, but it will be worth it. We are going to live out the authenticity that we preach and call our students to, and model for our own children and anyone else who observes our marriage what a Christian marriage should look like – not perfect, but covenantly committed to growing together. We’re tired of the status-quo, and we are committed to the work – sometimes fun, sometimes easy, sometimes awkward, sometimes painful, sometimes hard; but at the end of the day, just plain old work – of making our relationship Christ-like.
Pray for us that God would empower us by His Spirit to make our marriage everything He intends it to be.
Kev
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