Marriage (Nov/Dec 2018)

OUT OF MY DEPTH

THE DANGER OF “WINNING” THE DEBATE

THE “LIKEWISE” OF MARRIAGE

BY PHIL WAGLER

I

f you have any experience as a husband, perhaps you’ll understand what I am about to say.

I can recall a number of times in my marriage of twenty-five years when I have made the perfect point in a conversation or debate with my bride. Okay, it may have just been me thinking I made the perfect point, but it was brilliant. I nailed the logic, the facts, the insight was profound, and what I said was entirely grounded in my genuine well-intentioned desires for things to be, well, right. Okay, it may have just been “right” in my own eyes, but I can’t see through anyone else’s, can I? She needed to know what I understood!

As I reflect on those times with my wife — daughter of the King of Kings, co-bearer of the image of God with me, co-heir of salvation, the Spirit, and the grace of eternal life — I am ashamed at how my rightness turned so wrong. It’s not that I abused her verbally or physically, nothing like that which is beyond the pale. No, I crushed her spirit. I very much, though unintentionally, stepped on her. I didn’t understand her, but only what I wanted from, for, or in contrast to her.

Once the elation over my “victory” ended and I came back down to earth, I saw the deflation. I felt the breath get sucked out of our evening together. I felt the yuck in the gut that is caused by relational nausea.

30 SEVEN NOVEMBER / DECEMBER 2018

And, I felt what it did to my own suffered for the good us whom he faith, my own discipleship, my own loved, likewise we who are married walk with Jesus. It was like a great ought to honour the uniqueness, distance emerged in a tragically beauty, and wonder of woman above short time. ourselves and treat them not as Please tell me some other bloke those below us, but as those beside can relate!? us, as co-heirs with Jesus sees us as In 1 Peter 3:7 the old children in our Heavenly apostle writes, “Likewise, Father’s home. And, we are ONCE THE husbands, live with your to do this declares Peter, so ELATION OVER wives in an understanding that our prayers may not MY “VICTORY” way, showing honour be hindered. to the woman as the It all reminds me of ENDED AND weaker vessel, since they Jesus’s parable of the Good I CAME BACK are coheirs with you of Samaritan. The lawyer DOWN TO the grace of life, so that asked Jesus who his your prayers may not be neighbour is; who does he EARTH I hindered.” really need to love. Jesus SAW THE What a loaded sentence responded by showing DEFLATION. for any man! how the Good Samaritan What is the “likewise” loved the weak one. “You of which Peter writes? Well, back in 1 go and do likewise,” commanded Peter 2:21 he had written, “For to this Jesus (Luke 10:37). you have been called, because Christ This is the neighbourly “likewise” also suffered for you, leaving you an of God that upends the world. Many example, so that you might follow guys will go and do this kind of in his steps.” To wives, then, he had “likewise” for a buddy or even an said, “Likewise…be submissive to acquaintance. I wonder if it’s time for your own husbands, so that even more of us to go and do “likewise” for if some do not obey the word, they our wives? may be won without a word by the conduct of their wives…” (3:1). Like Jesus who suffered for us while we were far from God, so wives are to / PHIL WAGLER serves as a mission live in marriage as vessels through mobilizer with MB Mission and lives in whom God was wooing his lost sons.

Surrey, BC with the woman he doesn’t Now, to husbands, he says deserve and the family they have been “likewise” as well. Just as Jesus entrusted with together.