HARVEST HOUSE PUBLISHERS
EUGENE, OREGON
Scripture quotations are from the Good News Translation—Second Edition © 1992 by American Bible Society. Used by permission.
Cover by Koechel Peterson & Associates, Inc.
Cover photo © 2010 Steve Sant and World of Stock
This book contains stories in which the author has changed people’s names and some details of their situations in order to protect their privacy.
BECOMING YOUR HUSBAND’S BEST FRIEND
Copyright © 2010 by Lisa and David Frisbie
Published by Harvest House Publishers
Eugene, Oregon 97402
www.harvesthousepublishers.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Frisbie, Lisa
Becoming your husband’s best friend / Lisa and David Frisbie.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-7369-2921-9 (pbk.)
1. Wives—Religious life. 2. Marriage—Religious aspects—Christianity. I. Frisbie, David II. Title.
BV4528.15.F75 2010
248.8’44—dc22
2010021738
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, digital, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.
Printed in the United States of America
10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 / LB-SK / 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
This book is dedicated to four of the many couples who have shown us what grace, intimacy, togetherness, and partnership are all about. They have lived marriage well.
Our pastor, Dr. Paul Cunningham, taught us about marriage as we began our life together. Our lives are permanently altered because our journey intersected with his. His wife, Dr. Connie Cunningham, taught our early-married Sunday school class. Much of the wisdom in the pages of our books can be traced to Connie’s witty, insightful teaching.
Our close friends Arthur and Mattie Uphaus were tremendous examples for us. Mattie modeled for us the gracious spirit and loving heart of a transformational wife. In almost three decades of knowing Mattie we never heard her utter one negative word, make one critical comment (even in jest), or say any unpleasant thing about her husband. Mattie showed us the power of positive living. Both she and Arthur are now in heaven.
Much of what we know about healthy and godly marriage, both of us learned at home. We each knew that our parents loved God, loved each other, and loved us. Divorce was commonplace among our peers, but we knew that it was not even remotely a possibility for our parents. Through difficulty and stress, in good times and bad, our parents demonstrated the meaning of commitment.
Lee and Marilyn Frisbie, married 58 years at this writing, have taught us many lessons about life and ministry. They have modeled a loving, caring, God-honoring marriage relationship in genuine and helpful ways. They have supported their pastors, led youth ministry across several generations, and ministered to missionaries, seminary students, and others, sharing from lives of faithful integrity.
Lamont and Ruth Jacobson, Lisa’s parents, have shown us what a committed Christian couple looks like up close. They are young at heart and fully engaged in living. We recently helped them celebrate their sixtieth anniversary, which was held in a church they still serve. Ruth is the worship leader in her church, active as ever. Mom and Dad Jacobson love God, love each other, and love us. We admire their energy and enthusiasm!
These are four of the many couples whose inspiring marriages challenged us to follow their wise examples. Although they could and did guide us with their words and their teaching, we learned the most by watching them “do life” together. To this day we reflect on, learn from, and strive to follow the powerful examples of these four couples. As we celebrate 32 years together, we owe a great debt of gratitude to each of them.
As we work to make marriages healthier and stronger, to help couples succeed and thrive, and to help families stay together and be healthy, we are “paying it forward” because we have received so much from others.
To Paul, Connie, Arthur, Mattie, Lee, Marilyn, Lamont, and Ruth, thank you for walking the walk while you were talking the talk. We’re a little bit behind you on this journey of life, but we’re following in your footsteps with joy and gladness.
We wrote this book as we traveled the world, carrying out our God-given ministry of speaking, teaching, training, and counseling. Because of the complexity of our travel schedule, several of these chapters were written in locations as culturally diverse as Balchik and Broken Arrow, as geographically separated as Oahu and Orlando. Portions of this book were written on three different continents and in many different cities, towns, and villages.
From beginning to end, we were aided by family and friends, hosts and guides, an eclectic mix of spiritually minded persons who served as midwives in the birth of this book. To acknowledge each person who contributed to these pages would be impossible, but here is a partial list of hosts and helpers, with our sincere gratitude.
Mark and Emily Schoenhals allowed us to use their peaceful condo in Minnesota for an extended period of research and writing while they volunteered as missionaries in Costa Rica. David Fell and his crew at Stonewood Tea in Oklahoma kept us comforted with green tea and soy lattes while we spent many hours typing sentences and fixing paragraphs. Back home in Southern California, George and the morning crew at our favorite Chick-fil-A kept us fueled for long days of writing and editing.
Our thanks to Mike and Nellie Martin for your warmth and hospitality. We so enjoy your gracious home and deeply love each member of your family. We are grateful also to Sydney Briley and her daughter Lauren. Your fireplace and candles set a perfect mood for writing and creating. Stephen and Kathie Smith, whose effective parenting we have praised in our previous books, welcomed us in rural Kansas. Bright and creative, Russ Hose sent us help and inspiration from his home in the majestic, snowy mountains of Idaho.
Lifelong friends Barry and Pam Stranz accompanied us through the deep forests of Wisconsin and the sparkling clear lakes of Minnesota while we gathered our thoughts and organized the structure of the manuscript. Good friends and mentors Brett and Mindy Rickey hosted and welcomed us in Bartow, Florida. Brett is an energetic leader and accomplished author who is working on his third book. Nearby, we were blessed by the directors and residents of the Florida Holiness Campground in Lakeland.
Rick and Vicki Power hosted us in Honolulu. Whether serving in Beijing or Texas, Kansas or Hawaii, Rick and Vicki have embraced, affirmed, and brightened our journey as authors.
Jay and Teanna Sunberg hosted us repeatedly in Sofia, Bulgaria. The lovely mountain views from their backyard and the refreshing laughter of their children are imprinted permanently in our memories. Jay and Teanna, your home is one of our favorite places on this planet.
Each of these adults and children, couples and families, contributed to the composition of this book. As writers we’ve learned to work anywhere, under almost any conditions, yet we highly value settings where stress is low, hospitality flows freely, and creativity flourishes. Our thanks to these friends and others for granting us places like these!
As always, much of what we know and share flows to us through the inspired teaching and godly wisdom of our home church and its senior pastors. We are forever grateful to Larry Osborne, Chris Brown, Charlie Bradshaw, Paul Savona, Gary Vanderford, J.D. Larson, and the ministers, leaders, and volunteers at North Coast Church. For more than a decade now, you’ve been our spiritual home. You are leading us, forming us, growing us…and we are grateful.
We are daily blessed by our parents, friends, family, and grandchildren. They keep us rooted and grounded in what really matters as we listen and serve, travel and speak, write and counsel.
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part 1: The Challenge: Changing the Heart That’s Mine
1. Fixing You or Finding Me?
2. The Hidden Danger: Unspoken Expectations
3. What You Don’t See in Yourself: Unconscious Pride
4. The Power to Destroy: Unrelenting Criticism
5. When It’s Better to Say Nothing at All: Unhelpful Gossip
6. The Elephant in the Room: Unresolved Bitterness
Part 2: Outcomes: When Changing Me Changes You
7. A Tale of Two Wives
8. Outcomes, Parts 1 and 2
9. Outcomes, Parts 3 and 4
10. Outcomes, Part 5
Resources
About the Authors
About the Publisher
Let’s begin this book together by imagining that we are already close friends. We haven’t seen each other for a while, but now we’re meeting for coffee. After standing in line and placing our orders, we find a seat outdoors and begin catching up.
There’s a lot of small talk, of course. Kids and jobs and the daily grind. We learn about your journey and you learn about ours. But after a while we’re back where it all started—in a close friendship that feels even stronger now despite the passing of time. Before long we begin gently asking each other deeper questions about life.
And because of what we do as marriage counselors, we eventually ask you the same questions we ask people all over the world. They are tough questions, but isn’t that what friends are for? We all need a time and place to tell trusted friends the truth about what’s really going on behind closed doors. We need people whom we can trust to accept us, love us, and keep on being our friends even after we’ve told them deep and unpleasant truths.
So here we are, in the coffee shop, and now we’re asking you, how is your marriage doing? Are you two getting closer and deeper as the years pass, or are you drifting apart? Are you two stronger because you’ve faced problems together, or are you weaker because stress has fractured your fragile union?
We’ve written this book because so many women from so many cultures and nations have told us much the same thing. The women we meet for marriage counseling often begin by telling us about their disappointments, struggles, and setbacks. They often say to us, “This isn’t what I thought marriage would be!”
So how about you? Are you living in the marriage of your dreams, or are you coping with something less, praying that things will get better someday? Like so many weary women we’ve met, tired of all their struggles, have you given up hope for a better relationship? Have you quietly wondered, Is this all there is?
Here’s another way to frame the same question. How would you change your marriage today if you knew you could make a difference, if you knew you could make things better? How would you change your marriage today if you knew God’s power was with you and His intention was to radically transform the structure and health of your marriage?
What can you do—all by yourself—to change or improve your marriage? What are you willing to do?
These are some of the key questions we will explore together in this book.
Maybe you’re ready to move forward, even if it’s all up to you. Maybe you’ve decided it’s time to improve your marriage. You want to work, you want to learn, you want to get some wise counsel, you want to make some positive changes. You’ve decided that together, you and God are going to transform your marriage into the kind of relationship you know it could be, you know it should be, you know it will be. By faith you can already see it happening.
Keep your focus right there—on a bright future for your relationship. Ignore the discouraging voices and listen intently for God’s counsel.
Marriages have become disposable in contemporary Western culture. Many people respond to difficulties and stress in marriages in much the same way they deal with dirty diapers. When things get messy, many people simply throw away the relationship. They don’t try to wash it out, clean it up, and continue working to improve it. That kind of process takes a lot of work! Instead, they discard the relationship and try on a fresh one.
Within the space of just three short generations, the West changed its attitude toward divorce. Western culture, informed by a rich tradition and heritage, once valued permanent marriages and worked to prevent divorce. Today, people in America and Europe quickly accept divorce as an option. Our society has easily adjusted to the idea that relationships are unlikely to last very long and can be disposed of. The change of attitudes is most visible among young adults as they speculate about the likelihood or even the desirability of a permanent relationship.
This cultural shift has been radically transformational. Our communities and churches are filled with fractured families and parentless children. Some people still say “till death do us part” in their wedding ceremonies, but soon afterward they start thinking, If it’s not working, I’ll just start over.
How many of your friends’ marriages have lasted more than five or ten years? Not too long ago, almost all marriages did. But now people are divorcing sooner than ever before. Second and third marriages are dissolving and ending within only a few years. Many people prioritize lifelong marriage much lower than they do their personal (selfish) satisfaction.
But you have a different view of marriage and relationships. Bless you for that!
Here’s a quick example of the culture we’re experiencing now. A good friend of ours was recently treated to a girls’ night out just before her wedding. Her circle of friends, all active churchgoers, all professing Christians, and all females in their twenties or early thirties, had this advice for our friend: “Enjoy those first 18 months or so because that’s all you may get out of this. Your marriage may end before you know it!” Clearly these young adults had adjusted to the idea that marriage was likely to be a short-term experience.
If today’s Christian adults have value systems like that, should we be surprised that the unchurched culture is convinced that marriages are likely to fail? If churchgoers expect marriages to be short-lived, surely those outside the community of faith have made this same adjustment and consider marriage to be fragile and disposable.
In survey after survey, young adults (especially Millenials—those currently 18 to 29 years old) report that their expectations of marriage have radically lowered. Instead of saying, “When I marry, I will be with that person forever,” many now say, “I may try marriage for a while, or I may not.” Because marriage is considered temporary and disposable, it is easily dismissed as an unappealing option.
Increasingly, people consider marriage to be a legal and financial arrangement that makes sense for some people but is generally outmoded. “Why not just live together for a while and see if it works out?” asks Daphne, a teen we met while teaching at a marriage seminar in Eastern Europe. “I think that’s the smartest approach,” she told us confidently.
A lot of teens in Europe, Asia, and North America share Daphne’s perspective. Many young adults begin marriage as if they were putting in a pair of disposable contact lenses. Our culture thinks marriages are temporary and easily discarded. Miracles don’t happen.
But our culture is wrong about that on every level—especially the part about miracles. You’ve picked up this book because deep within, you want to change your marriage, to work on it, to improve it…to do whatever is necessary to make your marriage better than it’s ever been. You’re not bound by the past. Instead, you’re motivated by it. You may occasionally be discouraged by the challenges you face, but you haven’t lost hope because you know in your heart that more is possible, that better days are ahead. You believe that a lifelong relationship is bound to have rough spots and that couples should expect some difficulty along the way. But you don’t believe that just because life gets difficult, a marriage relationship should be thrown away!
Thank you for choosing hope over despair, for choosing to stick together rather than drift apart. You’ve made a choice you can live with and others can respect. You’ve got a lot of hard work ahead of you, but the payoff is worth it.
As marriage counselors, we deal with troubled marriages and damaged relationships every day. It’s at the heart of what we do. After more than two decades of this work, we can tell you this for certain: Deciding to change your marriage instead of give up is a great first step that opens the door for God to work a miracle in your heart and in your home.
This new book is here to help you. Your husband may or may not be excited about making changes. He might be committed to working on your relationship, or he might not be willing to exert much effort. Whether your husband is ready to help or you are trying to change your marriage alone, you have plenty of reason to be encouraged today.
A lot of women in less than perfect marriages have made dramatic changes and established healthy new patterns. Many unmotivated husbands have turned around in their behaviors and attitudes because of the consistent, daily efforts of determined wives just like you.
We say this not as a matter of theory, but because of what we have seen in more than two decades of counseling marriages and families just like yours. We have also noticed that for whatever reason, the wife is usually the one who is motivated to change and improve, and she is almost always the one who takes the first steps.
We’ve written this book for women who want to make a difference, women who are tired of waiting for someone else to be motivated or to start working. With God’s help, women just like you can experience positive and lasting changes in their marriage relationships once they begin to confidently and seriously work on making things better. We’ve seen it happen over and over again, across variables of race, culture, continent, age, and value systems.
Can we promise you a miracle? No. You won’t find a magic formula within these pages or a drug you can slip into your husband’s morning coffee. So why talk of miracles if we can’t promise you one?
Here’s why: We’ve taken the word hopeless out of our vocabulary.
In more than two decades of working with some of the most troubled and difficult marriages on this small planet (including military marriages, clergy relationships, blended families, and marriages of police officers and other law enforcement professionals, ER nurses, and more), we’ve watched in awe as God invaded impossible situations with His grace.
Time after time, after a counseling session that ended with little or no hope, God has gently reminded us of His purposes, His power, and His ability. For God, the most difficult of human relationships present no special challenge. His power is utterly unlimited. It is also absolutely available to you.
So whether your marriage is moderately healthy or highly troubled, you have every reason to hold on to hope. You can partner with God as you make daily changes and create situations in which God can release His power in you, your partner, your family, and your home.
After we’ve finished speaking at marriage conferences or retreats, people often tell us they are excited about their decision to take hopeless out of their vocabulary. “That’s what I want to believe too,” a hurting husband may say to us. “I so desperately want to believe that,” a long-suffering wife may admit.
What about you? If you have thought your situation is hopeless, are you willing to reconsider? Are you ready to allow God’s grace to invade your personal space? If so, we can predict that because of your partnership with Him, dramatic change is ahead for you and the man you married.
How can we be so confident? We’ve watched God work before. We know what God can do and what He wants to do in marriages, and we’ve learned to trust Him. We’ve watched God make healthy relationships dramatically better. We’ve seen God reverse unhealthy patterns in significant ways. We’ve watched God revitalize dying relationships so they could go the distance—and they did.
God is not intimidated by any of the challenges you face in your marriage.
When a marriage is wounded or broken, the wife almost always takes the first step to get help. Wives tend to surf the Web for the names of good counselors, ask friends for referrals, call counselors’ offices, make the initial appointments, and actually show up. Husbands often walk into counseling offices reluctantly and under protest. Veteran counselors will testify that the wife and not the husband is generally the one who seems the most motivated to try to improve a good marriage or repair a broken one.
Every once in a long while, a husband initiates marriage counseling. Noting how rarely this happens, David likes to joke, “And after my coronary event, we’re always glad to help out!”
If men are unlikely to stop and ask for directions while traveling, how often are they likely to ask for help with more intimate problems, including those that happen in marriage and other relationships? It just doesn’t happen very often. Men are not inclined to be proactive about the relational challenges or issues they face. Instead, they often ignore or minimize their problems, responding only after serious damage has already occurred.
A man might not look for help until he experiences a cataclysmic event, such as being served with divorce papers or coming home to an empty house. Until that moment, he may not see the trouble coming, or he may believe that things have been blown out of proportion. This is no big deal, he will typically tell himself until it’s too late. Every marriage has its issues.
When one of the two marriage partners initiates marriage counseling, that one person is almost always the wife. In more than two decades of experience working with couples in crisis, we have rarely watched a male take the initiative and ask for help. Men don’t usually ask us for help until they’re fighting a tough custody battle, trying to win their kids back, or arguing over the distribution of the couple’s many debts. (These days couples don’t battle over assets; they fight about who will be responsible for the credit card bills and the student loans.)
Men often wait until their wives have moved out, the house is completely empty, the kids are missing, and the bills are piling up. Then, confronted by such inescapable evidence of major problems, these men finally get motivated. Until then, most men minimize their problems, ignore the danger signs, and paddle merrily up Denial River.
Men don’t see trouble coming. Somehow they notice it only after trouble has punched them in the gut a few times or perhaps knocked them down.
If it takes a village to raise a child, it often takes a cataclysmic event to raise the attention of a husband and father. By the time a man is ready to admit problems and seek help, the relationship may have deteriorated so far that the couple is already considering or actively seeking a divorce. Only then, well on their way toward a broken marriage, do most men suddenly awaken to the degree of difficulty around them.
Sometimes, the cataclysmic event appears to mark a permanent change. Even so, God may have other plans. We’ve learned not to trust our first impressions, and we’ve also learned that nothing is final regardless of how far along in the process it is.
For Mark and Anita, the life-changing event was history by the time they walked in our office door. They had long since given up on their relationship as husband and wife. They were tired of fighting, arguing, and getting nowhere. They had already decided to divorce. All that remained was the details.
Like many other divorcing couples, Mark and Anita approached us by telling us in their own words, “We want to have a good divorce.” Already well established on the journey to becoming legally divorced, Mark and Anita wanted the experience to be as smooth and stress free for their kids as possible. Their presenting issue was that they wanted to help their children grow up to be normal despite the end of the marriage and the breakup of the home.
By the time Mark and Anita sat down in our office, Anita had been living with her parents in another state for more than three months. She had taken the children, the pets, and most of the furniture and household belongings with her. “The children are doing pretty well overall. They’ve always loved their grandparents,” she said. Anita’s acceptance of her new situation was nearly complete.
In contrast, Mark was unable to make the mortgage payments on their home, so he was making some repairs so he could put it on the market. If the couple had any equity in the house, which was doubtful, they were hoping to split the profits equally. Meanwhile, Mark had regressed to a college-level living experience. He resided in a cramped and messy apartment with three other males, two of whom were also divorced or divorcing. Three of the four guys were also going through job changes or looking for work.
Both Mark and Anita were moving forward according to their own wisdom and counsel, and each believed that the divorce was inevitable. “I don’t love her, and she doesn’t love me,” Mark told us succinctly. “Even the kids can see that.”
Anita agreed with this analysis, through her tears. “It’s been a long time since we were in love with each other,” Anita said as we talked about the couple’s prior history. “For as long as the kids can probably remember, all we’ve done is fight.”
Even in their body language, the tension between Mark and Anita was tangible. Most of their recent communications were short, terse text messages about financial questions or issues with the children. They rarely spoke on the phone.
Just being together in the same place with a calm referee (counselor) was a big step. Yet Mark and Anita were not seeking help with their relationship. That was over.
Mark and Anita had reached a seemingly logical conclusion: Because they showed no signs of love and their children were constantly hearing them argue and fight, the logical move was to split up, figure out the financial issues, and begin to build new lives for themselves.
“We get along better now that we’re not living together,” Anita confided during an early session with us. “So maybe this is meant to be.”
Mark and Anita’s deepest fear was that their divorce would somehow harm or damage their children. Could this be prevented by good planning? Was there a way they could prepare the kids to get through the divorce and have as normal a life as possible?
“Both of us love our kids,” Mark said emphatically. “Even though we don’t love each other anymore, both of us do love our kids. I know Anita wants the best for them, and I know I do too. So please tell us how we can handle this whole divorce thing so that our kids turn out okay.”
Deciding that they had been unlucky in marriage, Mark and Anita still wanted to be effective as parents despite their divorce. This attitude was commendable, but we didn’t give up on Mark and Anita’s relationship simply because they had done so. Frankly, we wanted to see what God’s opinion might be.
Fast forward to now.
Mark and Anita are living together cooperatively and peacefully in their original home. Mark has completed many of the repair projects and hopes to get the rest of the work finished soon. The kids have returned to their school districts and play with their old friends. The couple has cancelled divorce plans. “Sometimes we can’t believe we actually went through all that,” Anita says.
Mark and Anita remain in counseling to improve their relationship, not to work through a divorce. If you catch a glimpse of them at Walmart or sitting in the bleachers for a high school football game, you may see them holding hands or smiling at each other. People looking in from the outside, not knowing the couple’s history, would naturally assume that Mark and Anita are a happily married couple, and they’d be right. Mark and Anita love each other, support each other, and are committed to each other for life.
Today, Mark and Anita are active in a progressive church in their community. During the divorce planning, both had stopped attending their church, though Anita occasionally took the kids to her parents’ small country church. “I wasn’t so sure about God anymore,” Mark confides. “I mean, where was He when all that stuff was happening to us? I kind of quit believing for a while.”
Couples who are divorcing tend to run away from the church and not toward it. Many congregations who support marriages and have resources for married couples have been slow to include divorce care and divorce recovery among their core ministries. To engage today’s culture, the church must realistically assess people’s situations, reach out in compassion, and develop resources to be helpful.
Churches send this message to married couples: “We care about you, and we’ve got programs for you.” The unspoken but perceived message to divorced people is often different: “You may not fit in here because we don’t believe in divorce.”
This may not be the message that churches intend to send. While actively supporting and encouraging marriage, churches need to do a much better job of including divorced adults in their services, small groups, and other programs. Churches need to come alongside stepfamilies and blended families with effective training in parenting, conflict resolution, and more.
Meanwhile, fighting is rare these days in Mark and Anita’s home. Both adults have learned to watch for the signs that relational trouble may be brewing. “We stop ourselves before it goes that far,” Anita explains. “That way we don’t end up saying or doing things we don’t mean. It’s a real change in how we relate to each other!”
We say this carefully, and yet it’s true. In a relatively short time, Mark and Anita have quit saying, “We just want to help our kids get through this divorce okay,” and they now enjoy a healthier marriage than do many of the couples we see in church pews or at weekend soccer games. God invaded and saved this marriage, and He put it on a pathway toward health and growth, giving the couple brand-new tools for understanding each other, communicating better, and sharing the decision-making process.
Mark and Anita’s marriage had seemed to be over, but now it’s over and above the average marriage. And this happened not because they wanted a good marriage but as an unplanned consequence of trying to have a good divorce!
God often does amazing things in situations like these.
Mark and Anita are a living true story with a great chapter ending. But what matters here is that their relationship shows us a process that we frequently observe as we watch God work to heal hurting marriages. The process begins with a genuine heart change in one partner. Gradually, as the honesty and intensity of that heart change becomes visible to the other partner, the other partner also begins to experience a change of heart, perhaps slowly at first. Finally, as God’s grace invades the strongholds and fortresses of hurting hearts, both partners experience radical and lasting change.
Most of us don’t realize that when we begin to struggle in key relationships such as a marriage, we erect some strong walls around our hearts to protect ourselves from getting hurt. This is a natural human tendency and is not inherently evil. Yet as things move forward, we end up relating to our life partners from behind our strong walls of protection. We quit being vulnerable and transparent. (For a further discussion of vulnerability and transparency, you might enjoy reading our recent book The Soul-Mate Marriage: The Spiritual Journey of Becoming One.)
Subtly at first and then much more visibly, we begin to relate to our partners from behind our well-defended walls. Our conversations with them are not tender or broken or open. We’ve decided that to be open isn’t safe, and being tender means being hurt. Gradually a hard shell forms around our deepest emotions, and our interactions become formal, distant, and even businesslike. We speak with our spouses as if we were at war and negotiating a treaty.
We may love our partners, but this love is not visible in tenderness, in openness, in vulnerability, or in other patterns of healthy courtship and intimacy. Instead, our defensive habits reveal a muted hostility that withdraws, waits, and often even prays for change—in the other person. Yet when meaningful change does happen, it often begins in us, not in our partner.
That process—meaningful change in our own hearts and then miracles and God’s power at work in our partners—is what we’ll explore together in these pages.
What about your personal journey? Is your own marriage as far down the road to divorce as Mark and Anita had traveled? Have you thought about it, talked about it, or perhaps even done some planning for it? Has one of you already resigned to the idea that your marriage is over, that it has no future, that the only realistic and reasonable outcome is a divorce? Are you searching for a process that is as amicable as possible in order to spare the kids and work out a reasonably agreeable settlement?
If so, be warned—God may have other ideas. He may begin changing your marriage by changing your own heart and life. He may already be at work to bring you hope and a future. God is like that.
Speaking of your future, it’s the entire reason that we wrote this book. We want you to know that there is hope ahead and that better days are possible.
This hope has at least two parts: genuine change and spiritual growth in your own life, and then, by God’s grace, authentic transformation in your partner. This hope applies to marriages that are mostly okay and to marriages that have been without joy and affection for a long time.
Before you decide to give up on your marriage, give God a chance to work. Let Him begin His work in your own heart (which is where our book opens as well) and then watch as He powerfully stirs the heart, mind, attitudes, and behavior of the man you married. The change in your husband will be God’s work, not yours, yet God’s power will be released and made potent through the changes in you.
If you’re willing to open yourself to God’s insight and wisdom, if you choose to accept God’s counsel about your own motives and behavior, and if you’re hoping to watch God move in your relationship even if it seems hopeless and futile, then you are exactly the reader for whom we wrote this book.
For more than two decades now, we’ve watched God intervene—against all odds and in seemingly impossible situations—to bring His hope and His healing. We are praying that as you read these few pages, you’ll allow God to be who He is and to do what He does best.
Take a moment to look again at this book’s front cover and title. Did you notice that we chose not to promise a quick fix or ten easy steps? Our mission as marriage counselors is to help you move forward toward becoming the best woman and wife you can possibly be. Along the way, we’ll show you how the choices you make can affect your own life as well as your partner’s, and we’ll give you real-life examples of how God is working in marriages like yours.
You won’t find a weapon for attacking your husband or a strategy for manipulating his behavior. We don’t offer new ideas for leverage so you can win a never-ending battle between the sexes. We believe war is highly overrated anyway. We really start cheering when peace breaks out around the kitchen table or in the bedroom.
So, what if peace breaks out in your marriage? And if peace is going to break out in your home, how might it begin? More to the point, with whom might it begin?
We hope you’ll pray, Please, Lord, let peace begin with me. If that’s the approach you’re taking, you’ll find help and healing in these pages as well as a lot of practical, immediately useful advice. The help you’ll find here comes from our experience with hundreds of other wives who have traveled this road before you.
Of course, your man is mentioned in this book’s title also, and we’ll explore together how husbands can and do change their unhelpful behaviors. Change happens! But the change in you and your behavior is most likely to precipitate a change in him and his behavior. That’s not a formula or a secret recipe. It’s simply an observation based on how God has worked in the lives of His children throughout history. It’s the way Scripture describes the dynamic effectiveness of a godly wife as she transforms her marriage relationship in helpful and positive directions.
Regardless of what some advertisers may promise, changes like these don’t happen easily, quickly, or without effort. But let’s face it, is life really that simple? Does any