Marriage as Manna, Part 2

Sherri was certain why Frank hadn't yet responded to her calls and texts. She knew he had to be drinking again while he was on an out of town work trip. After all, that's what Frank did many of the weekends when he was home. As for Frank, he was convinced that Sherri's past home life had made her crazy--she overanalyzed and tried to control everything. Especially him. Just like her mom did with everything in her life. Frank believed that if Sherri could straighten out her past, she'd be a lot easier to live with.

 

We tell stories to ourselves, don't we? It's probably more like developing interpretations of what we hear, see, and think we know. Our ability to edit our interpretations on the fly by cherry picking, oversimplifying, and amplifying the choice details of our experience is spellbinding. But are we telling ourselves fake news, or spinning the news we think we know into the reality we're so sure of? Or both?

 

Seems to me we do this internal storytelling naturally because there are truths we want to believe; indeed, truths we're convinced we need to believe. We process life this way because our hearts crave meaning, satisfaction, and justification for thinking and feeling the way we do. To get all of that--and that's A LOT to get--we can come up with some pretty amazing stories.

 

In this short series of newsletters I'm calling "Marriage as Manna," I'm saying that there are some very subtle but significant challenges to staying healthy in a marriage. Waking up to the same person every morning for forty years is something like Israel waking up to manna every day in the wilderness. After several trips around the block, those ancient people, like us, instinctively began telling themselves stories when they didn't like the way their life was going.

 

According to the eleventh chapter in the book of Numbers, many of God's people started telling themselves a story about the manna. They craved something different. They wept about it. They got nostalgic. But boy oh boy, did they do some heavy editing in their storytelling. What would have helped was somebody, or somebodies, to audit and crosscheck their story.

 

One of the common threads that run through troubled marriages in my office is that of isolation from healthy couples. When trouble comes, as it always does, each person within the relationship begins telling one's self an edited story. But with no fact-checkers around to keep the stories straight, each person creates a story at odds with the other. He said, she said. Doing circles in the wilderness. That's where that goes.

 

As a deterrent to, and prescription for, the likelihood of going around and around in your marriage, I'd like to encourage you to value more the communal nature of your Christian faith. Scripture is clear that it's not good to be alone. That includes not putting your marriage at greater risk by isolating its internal dynamics from others.

 

For example, what are we to make of the Lord's Prayer speaking to us not as individuals ("My Father... my daily bread...my trespasses...") but as a group ("Our Father...ourdaily bread...our trespasses...")? What would that do to our relationships if others knew about and had permission to speak into our lives at that level of intimacy? Hebrews 3:13, among other references, gives warrant to the benefits of fact-checking our conflated stories: "Encourage one another day after day, as long as it is still called 'Today,' so that none of you will be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin" (Hebrews 3:13).