Sacred Influence (21 page)

Looking back, Ray sees how God used this situation to challenge both him and Jo. “God may frustrate us at times, but we should give him the benefit of the doubt because we know his motivations and intentions are good.”

This may seem like a small point, but I think it’s a profound one: learning to love and communicate with a very imperfect man can teach valuable lessons about how to love and communicate with an absolutely perfect God. Sometimes we
do
tend to assume the worst — not just of our spouses but of God too: “He doesn’t care; he doesn’t see; he’s playing with us.” At the very least, when we know this is never true of God, perhaps it can teach us to show a little less arrogance in our assumptions and much more humility and grace in our attitude toward others.

Personally, I believe this will be one of the greatest challenges that wives married to angry men will face: it’s going to be very difficult for you, if you’re married to such a man, not to look at every new response of his as simply “more of the same.” That’s why forgiveness is so crucial; we need to let go of the past so we don’t keep coloring the present with it. Otherwise, the future is going to look very bleak, indeed. In spite of your past hurt, can you choose to suspend your immediate judgment and try to give your husband the benefit of the doubt?

Spiritual Preparation

There’s another principle we can learn from Jo’s experience: in order to confront anger in your man, you’re going to need to put your own spiritual house in order; otherwise, you’ll likely lack the strength, courage, and perspective to help your husband.

Jo realizes that her marriage is about more than her and Ray; it is also very much about her and God. When you live with an angry man, you not only crave but literally
need
God’s affirmation. Men can be very cruel with their cutting comments; if you aren’t receiving affirmation and affection from your heavenly Father, you’re going to feel emotionally empty and perhaps even worthless — and that will feed into your husband’s response and tempt you to become even more of a doormat. Jo went to God, understood her value as his daughter, and approached Ray from a position of being spiritually loved instead of desperately empty. Had she been spiritually destitute, she probably wouldn’t have had the motivation, the courage, or the will to risk confronting Ray.

So if you’re living with an angry man, please accept my encouragement to spend all that much more time in worship, prayer, and Christian community so that you can soak up the love, affirma-tion, and affection you need for a healthy spiritual life. From such a strong spiritual core, you can face the hurt and frustration in your marriage, as Jo did.

Armed with her standing before God, Jo made it clear to Ray that, while she wanted to understand his frustration, she would not put up with verbal harassment. Because Ray desired a better relationship with his wife, Jo’s tactic worked; he started to see that letting his temper get the best of him was hurting his relationship with Jo and was getting in the way of communicating his frustrations.

“I really wanted, more than anything, to be a good husband,” Ray says. “I wanted to recognize her needs. When Jo stood up to me, it told me she valued herself. So I valued her. It made me understand that Jo is a person with a lot of character; she cares about herself, and I think every man wants that. I don’t think men want a woman they can just run over. We want to value our wife’s character. The way Jo stood up to me revealed a lot of character.”

This goes back to the point made in the very first chapter: respect is vital in a marriage, and not just for a woman toward her man, but also for a man toward his wife. If your husband doesn’t respect you, you’re going to have a very difficult time influencing him in any significant way. And if you don’t respect yourself, you’ll make it that much more difficult for your husband to respect you.

It took time for Jo’s gentle and self-respecting approach to bear fruit, but she kept at it. “The more that I persisted in asking him to lower his intensity, the more he began, gradually, to see what he was doing.”

Remember Dr. Melody Rhode’s concept of “functional fixed-ness”? Men usually don’t change unless their wives give them a reason to change. This requires specific, direct, gentle, and self-respecting communication.

“My husband is so grateful that I stood up to him,” Jo says today. “He actually said that in one of our conversations! When he learned to lower his intensity, he started to like himself better, and he realized he was loving me better. That made him feel so much more like the man God wanted him to be that he was
thankful
I stood up to him.”

Angry men sometimes tell me something they rarely tell their wives: they feel ashamed of how they’ve acted; they hate what they’ve become. In most cases, when you help your husband tame his temper, you’re helping him to become the kind of man he wants to be.

Helping Him Love You

In her role as an inspirational speaker, Jo has met many women whose husbands have cowed them into an “unhealthy doormat mode.” Sadly, sometimes this posture gets couched in religious language and represents a complete misreading of biblical submission. Jo observes, “Women don’t tell men what they need because we’ve been taught that it’s selfish to even think of ourselves. In fact, some of us aren’t in touch with our own feelings enough to even
know
what we need. Schools don’t teach females how to do this — we’re supposed to be strong enough on our own, without asking a man to help us; and many families today aren’t healthy enough to model it, so these women go into marriage ill-equipped to relate to a man who is likewise ill-equipped to love them.”

This “martyr method” of marriage, though common among well-meaning Christian women, shortchanges both husband and wife. Your husband will prosper spiritually and personally by excelling in loving you. God designed marriage, in part, to help both husband and wife grow in character. If you do all the sacrificing, if your husband runs over you, he’s not growing; he’s shrinking, spiritually speaking. He’s becoming lower in character. You may well become a saint after living with such a man for twenty years, but he is going to become increasingly miserable, because, ultimately, any man who treats others poorly begins to despise himself. This might sound backward, but you need to love your husband by teaching him how to love you, because
it’s spiritually healthy for him to grow in
loving you
.

At one time, the thought of telling her husband what she needed would have sounded selfish to Jo, and she would have dismissed the thought. She has since learned that
respect matters
and that a husband won’t truly love a woman for whom he has no respect. Jo realized that if she didn’t respect herself, her husband would adopt that same attitude of disrespect.

Second, Jo realized that a marriage that never addresses the issue of needs ultimately provides little intimacy. Husbands can’t read minds. She understood that if she didn’t tutor Ray in how best to communicate his frustrations in a way in which she could hear them, their marriage would fail to fulfill either of them. Likewise, she needed Ray to understand that she also had certain needs; Ray could focus on changing certain things, even as he had asked Jo to change. Doing so would keep the marriage from becoming condescending and one-sided. An angry husband often acts as if only his wife needs to change. This is a false view based on a lack of respect.

Sharing Needs

Focusing on having our needs met can be selfish, of course, but there’s a way to share needs that builds intimacy and respect. It can even become an act of humility: “I need your help. Will you help me?” Clothed in biblical humility, sharing needs can become an incredibly vulnerable and thereby courageous act that gives birth to increased intimacy. Clothed in demands, sharing needs can become a selfish accusation that builds walls: “How come you never talk to me when you get home? Why are you always ignoring me? Is that any way for a Christian man to treat his wife?”

The proper way to share needs involves having the right
motivation
and using the right
presentation
.

Motivation

Your first goal as a sister in Christ is to help your husband more fully express the image of Jesus. Of course, God calls all of us to do that; it just so happens that in this instance, such a change will make your life more pleasant. If you make gaining a more pleasant life your first aim, however, your husband will likely pick up on that and resist your selfish demand. “She’s not perfect either,” he’ll think, “so why doesn’t she just get off my back?”

Here’s the purest motivation for change: God calls us to “purify ourselves from everything that contaminates body and spirit, perfecting holiness out of reverence for God” (2 Corinthi ans 7:1). You call your husband to change in the context of reverence for a perfect God, not in comparison with an imperfect wife.

Get painstakingly honest with yourself in prayer before you approach your husband. Dig deep into those buried motivations. Are you praying this way because your husband makes your life miserable, or because you’re concerned about how he is grieving God and destroying himself spiritually? Are you motivated out of selfish ambition, or selfless love? I know it is truly difficult to be so altruistic in the face of understandable and legitimate hurt — but that’s what prayer and the Holy Spirit’s comfort, guidance, and empowerment are all about.

If selfishness motivates you, you’re far more likely to give up if you don’t get the immediate response you hoped for: “It’s not worth the hassle; I guess I’ll just have to learn to put up with it.” But if you truly dedicate yourself to your husband’s spiritual welfare, you’ll stick with it and persevere.

Presentation

Ray urges wives who are married to angry men to “use a loving tone of voice and let them know that you really care about them and are committed to them. If you say something the wrong way, you can kill the content. It’s not what you say; it’s how you say it. Tell your husband that you care about his character because you see a good man in him. That tells him you’re on his side. And once he knows you’re on his side, you can use a word picture to show him how his angry response makes you feel.”

Remember our earlier discussion about affirmation? We men feel desperate to preserve your good view of us. When you say things like, “You’re a better man than that,” we want to rise to the occasion. If you belittle us, we don’t hear your words; we just taste the disrespect and want to spit it out. I think of Ephesians 4:15 in this regard: “Speaking the truth
in love
, we will in all things grow up into him who is the Head, that is, Christ” (emphasis added).

Expressing Needs

Jo learned that her reluctance to speak about her own needs in a direct and straightforward manner caused confusion in her marriage. “I realized that when I didn’t communicate clearly, I sounded manipulative and controlling. I could be indirect: ‘Why don’t you do such and such,’ instead of just coming out and asking, ‘Please do this for me,’ and explaining why it was important. The direct approach is so much better; it honors him more and it doesn’t sound controlling or manipulative. It’s just a simple request.”

Expressing needs is certainly healthier — relationally, spiritually, and psychologically — than stewing in resentment and bitterness because the husband (out of willful lack of respect or perhaps out of ignorance) doesn’t seem to get it.

Ray admits that many men have this problem: “I didn’t understand Jo’s needs until she shared them with me. I always used to say, ‘What’s your point?’ or, ‘Just give me the
Reader’s Digest
version.’ But Jo wanted to process everything with me, and I didn’t understand that.”

A case in point occurred when Jo asked Ray to go shopping. Ray became goal oriented. “I intended to go into the shirt department, find a style we liked, check the size, buy it, and leave.” But Jo finally learned to express that when she suggested they go shopping, she often just wanted to spend time with him. Shopping wasn’t about buying anything; it was about going out on a date.

Ray counsels women, “It would be so much more helpful if wives would just say, ‘I want us to go shopping, but I want to use shopping as a way for us to spend more time together and to talk. I really don’t care if we actually buy anything. We may just walk around and talk about what we’re going to do with the patio or how the children are doing. So let’s just relax and not rush out of the store, OK?’ ”

Jo admits that Ray’s desire to change played a key role in their success. But she believes that a principle behind her approach remains true for many marriages: “The more we share with our husbands what we need, the more our husbands can meet those needs. Women often fail to realize that many times, our husbands don’t know what we need; unless we tell them how we want them to communicate with us, they’ll stick with whatever pattern they learned from their father. And if they didn’t have a healthy father, watch out!”

Spiritual Lessons

In addition to changing her verbal presentation with Ray, Jo went through a threefold spiritual process to relate to Ray much differently in her heart.

First, Jo looked into Scripture to see who she was in Christ. The biblical way in which God honors women — and the affirming way in which Jesus treated women — contrasted starkly with the subservient description she often heard applied to women in many churches. “When I looked into Scripture and realized who I was in Christ, I started valuing that. God thinks of me as a person of value, and I needed to agree with him!” She had learned the truth highlighted earlier:
God
,
not your marital status
,
defines your life
.