Marriage as Manna, Part 1

Monogamy is challenging. And in ways that may not be obvious. I've been thinking lately that marriage can be loosely compared to the manna God provided to sustain His children during their wilderness wanderings. The people of Israel woke up to the same thing every day for forty years. The same thing. For forty years. The manna was God's provision, a gift and a blessing. But His children got tired of it. You and I would, too.

 

So how can a marriage thrive and flourish when you wake up to the same thing day after day? I'm going to suggest three areas of focus to begin with: individuality within unity, viewpoint diversity, and shared Christian spirituality.

 

 

Oneness in marriage is a worthy objective. Couples who are newly in love find this easy to do. Spend any time with a couple in this state, and you'll see them frequently looking at each other, touching often, and able to spend endless hours effortlessly talking to one another. They're all about building oneness, or unity, in the bonds of love. This is perfectly natural. When God provides His children with manna, it truly is a gift. Manna is sweet, "like wafers with honey" (Exodus 16:31).

 

Lurking below the surface, however, is a pernicious activity in the heart through which the lover and his beloved can turn each other into objects worship. "I adore you! When I'm with you, it's like heaven's come down to earth. Our love will last forever!" Those who are needy, insecure, or pleasers are especially vulnerable to this dynamic. What can develop over time is an enmeshment where one person in the relationship is so taken by the other, or by the desire to be needed, that his or her individual voice gets lost in the oneness.

 

Think of it like hoarding-one spouse holding too tightly to the other, hoping for the relationship to satisfy a craving. The needy one will, maybe years, even decades later, eventually wake up and realize she no longer knows who she is. And just like the children of Israel holding on to and hoarding manna beyond God's design, the relationship then turns into maggots and stinks (Exodus 16:19-20). When a marriage gets to this point, there is no relational unity, only two people living in a detached individuality.

 

A distortion to individuality or to unity, either way, turns into rotting manna. The marriage will stink. So what can you do to prevent your marriage from turning into something nasty? One strategy is to practice viewpoint diversity.

 

 

The vast majority of broken marriages in my office share a theme: they have no close couple friends. I mean the sort of couple friends that know your business and are there to both challenge and encourage the marriage. The husband may have his friends, and the wife will have hers. But his friends aren't talking to his wife, and the wife's friends are talking to her husband.

 

The first time I experienced a married couple speaking into my marriage, a man named Jim looked across the dinner table at my wife and asked her how she thought I was doing. That caught me completely off guard. Why didn't he ask ME how I was doing? Because, in that space of trust and transparency, Jim knew my wife wasn't going to pull any punches. I had nowhere to hide. Yes, I squirmed in my seat. Yes, it was a bit embarrassing. But the fruit that has come from practicing that discipline for more than a decade is worth it.