Every atom of your flesh is as dear to me as my own: in pain and sickness it would still be dear. ~ Charlotte Brontë
For years I did not like my father-in-law, Paul. I endured and limited visits with him. As our children aged, he loved taking them on motorcycle rides in his sidecar. I hated motorcycles and deemed them a scourge to humanity and a fool’s errand. I tolerated his ancient BMW and Moto Guzzi, but I refused to ride on them.
Decades later, Becky and I moved to a small island about nine miles from Seattle that made transit to the mainland a nightmare in certain seasons — unless you had the privilege of being the first on and off the ferry as a motorcyclist.
I ate my past disdain and began to ride.
It was around that time that Becky told me, “If my father dies and you haven’t made some attempt to get to know him and love him, I don’t know how I will forgive you.”
Her words exposed both my insolence and arrogance. I could be civil, if not polite, but I would not let that man have any of my heart.
Several months later, I set out to leave the house for an important meeting and couldn’t start my motorcycle. Becky, feeling my panic and anger, offered, “I’ll call my father and see if he can help.”
I was so desperate I would have taken help from Beelzebub.
I soon found myself listening intently to Paul’s voice through the phone as he graciously and wisely walked me through several issues that might have shut it down. The third try lit up the bike. I sincerely thanked him, and in one simple exchange, our relationship changed. Before long, I was inviting him to join a fishing trip to Montana with a group of good men and allowing him into my heart.
The stories about Paul that we’ve accrued over the years are wild, insane, and hilarious. His was a once-in-a-lifetime drama, equally upsetting and compelling. Over time, I came to love him—and not because he changed. I changed. It is now a horror to consider what might have occurred if Becky had not disrupted me and I had not needed his help with my motorcycle.
The story of my relationship with Paul displays truths that reveal some of God’s purposes for love and can lead us to new levels of intimacy in marriage.
It is only love that enables us to understand and enter the beauty and brokenness of another.
It is only love that gives us access to the suffering of someone who has brought us heartache.
And it is only love that can transform heartache into honor and delight.
What grows the soul of a marriage is the practice of joining in the suffering of the other.
We are not meant to be alone in our suffering. We are called to bear each other’s pain and sorrow and, by doing so, strengthen and deepen the sinews of our love.
It is for this worthy reason that we will spend this chapter looking closely at how we can lament and ache together, specifically as we suffer each other’s humanity, dreams, and death.
Suffering Each Other’s Humanity
Over twenty years ago, scientists discovered in monkeys something they called mirror neurons. Further study revealed that these unique neurons also are present in humans and provide the neural foundation for empathy, giving us the capacity to sense others’ emotions and mirror them.1
When someone smiles, we are apt to smile as well. When a newborn hears another baby crying, they orient their body toward the sound. We feel what others feel; we respond to their distress with our own distress.
Researchers also have found that entering the suffering of our spouses builds intimacy and marital satisfaction.2 This correlates with the neuroscience truism that “what fires together, wires together.”3 What deepens our emotional attunement increases our relational intimacy.
- And if we don’t suffer for our spouses, we will not grow the roots of our love.
A number of obstacles, of course, stand in our way.
First, none of us are naturally inclined to choose suffering. We honestly feel unable to bear even our own suffering; how could we possibly take on more? We tend to avoid the shame that arises when hurt implies the other has failed. The flood sweeps us both away in the waters of hurt, shame, blame, and hopelessness.
Second, a tragic result of our trauma is that we’ve learned to shut down our emotional attunement to our own suffering, which also dulls our capacity to feel on behalf of others.
And third, consequently, we shy away from engaging with our spouses’ human frailty and with our own. This leads us to offer less care than we could and limit the care we are willing to receive from our spouses.
Eight months into our marriage, Becky caught a stomach bug and spent hours vomiting. I held her hair back and made efforts to comfort her. She was astonished that I would stay with her when she was sick, even contagious; she couldn’t recall anyone ever caring for her in such a state. But I’d vowed “to have and to hold” her “in sickness and in health.”
When I get sick, however, I want to be left alone. It is not easy for me to feel awful physically and to bear Becky’s presence and concern. In truth, I do not want my state of frailty to be on display.
Illness keeps us from functioning at our typical level of usefulness. We can’t escape needing care, which can be an intolerable reality. Many of us with histories of significant trauma want to push through illness, avoid resting, and pretend like we don’t need help. We resent care when it reminds us that we are frail.
But we are meant to suffer each other’s frailty — and the stories that have turned our hearts against needing help. Looking at the past can inform the future, shaping the way we will handle friction and suffer together in the days to come.
If we want to write a new marriage story, this is a kind of new goodness, strength, and togetherness we don’t want to miss.
One way to start changing our approach to struggling and hurting is to release some of our previous assumptions and, with curiosity, ask new questions.
- What if I don’t feel that I can bear my own suffering because I am not meant to bear it alone?
- What if bringing my spouse into my suffering will enable me to step into theirs?
- And what if facing our frailty together brings us closer to God and gives us a clearer view of the bigger story we are part of with him?
Let’s explore what moving in this direction can look like.
Groaning for Glory
Typically, when I say something to Becky about feeling hurt, wanting more from her, or suggesting there is a better way to go about a project, her first response is defensive. For decades, my reaction was to fight against her, and we’d be off to the races.
I understand her defensiveness vastly more today than I did even a year ago. I know to expect it when I disrupt her, and I now endeavor to respond with compassion and to enter the groaning of God on her behalf and mine.
It is a profound shift from my natural reaction to her, one built on the foundation of Romans 8.
There is a grand entrance and exit to this chapter in Scripture. It begins with the stupefying statement that
there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. — Romans 8:1
Every fault, every failure, every form of darkness in our hearts melts before the presence of the One who is love.
The chapter ends with the proclamation that nothing can separate us from the love of God, whether it be death or life, angels or demons, or anything in creation (vv. 38–39). It speaks to our deepest fear of abandonment.
We are not alone, nor will we ever be separated from God, even in our darkest failure, doubt, or anguish. We may abandon God, but the Trinity will never forsake us.
These grand promises hold the power to change our lives — but only if we engage with them. As silly as this metaphor is, these promises are like a gift card that sits in our sock drawer, pointless unless we draw from its potential. We have to participate in cashing in on the gift.
Romans 8:17 gives us a picture of what that entails:
If we are children, then we are heirs — heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ, if indeed we share in His sufferings in order that we may also share in His glory. — emphasis added
We are called to enter the sufferings of Jesus. And we do so every time we enter the humiliation of Good Friday and the despair of Saturday on behalf of others.
Continue reading on the blog.
Becky has known humiliation in the coldness of her mother, the violence of her father, the manipulation of boyfriends, the rape by a professor, and through my replication of several of her past emotional traumas. I enter the suffering of Jesus when I enter the stories of Becky’s past.
Beyond suffering her past, I also suffer the future on her behalf, as I long for her to experience what is wholly good and beautiful.
This mirrors Romans 8:22–23:
We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption to sonship, the redemption of our bodies. — emphasis added
We are to groan with the earth, with each other, and with the Spirit as we await our complete adoption as God’s sons and daughters. As intensely as a woman suffers in childbirth, we are to suffer for the earth and for each other, as the Spirit within us groans with words too deep to hear (v. 26).
Most days, I don’t hear the groaning. I just live my life as if I am outside the keening. That is, until the Band-Aid of my distractions is ripped off, and I am face-to-face with death in any of its multifarious forms. Then, I groan. But I often fail to scan the horizon for redemption.
When I am suffering, I am not prone to wait, let alone wait eagerly. I want it changed now. Right now. And if not, then soon. Very soon. But I seldom have such eagerness when I suffer for another.
This is what we do naturally; it is not the “adopted by God” life available to us, as we read in Romans 8. That life involves the stunning promises of no condemnation or abandonment and the peculiar call to suffer with Jesus. To await eagerly our own adoption and our beloved’s adoption. To suffer each other’s long and arduous path for the redemption of our bodies.
What does that look like?
We can consider a simple example of everyday marital friction. During a visit at our daughter’s house, Becky and I were disagreeing about when to leave. As she became defensive, I felt my anger rise. My habitual reaction would be to prioritize that anger and let it fly out at her.
But, in that moment, I made a concerted effort to let it go and, instead, tune into Becky’s emotions and enter her suffering.
I imagined and felt the loss Becky would experience in missing a dear friend’s birthday party if we left later.
I felt sorrow for her that most of her life she’d had to defend herself to survive.
More than anything, I felt a deep, almost inexplicable desire for her heart to one day be free from having to defend herself.
Groaning for her enabled me to change my plans and facilitate an early departure without feeling pressured or irritated.
This is, of course, an infinitesimally small example. If I had been more mature, this would not have been much of an issue.
Anytime I anticipate Becky’s redemption, I am compelled to imagine my own, sparking desire for my own transformation.
When I am forced to face my younger, angry parts, will I groan for them to be redeemed, or will I threaten them with condemnation or abandonment?
Will I feel the eager, intense desire to become more of who I will one day be, or will I justify and defend my current irritation and remain stagnant in it?
These questions are our entry point for suffering our partners’ past and future.
We also are called to suffer our partners’ dreams for earthly tastes of the coming redemption.
~ Dan
1. Christian Keysers and Valeria Gazzola, “Hebbian Learning and Predictive Mirror Neurons for Actions, Sensations and Emotions,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series B, Biological Sciences 369 (1644), April 28, 2014, doi: 10.1098/rstb.2013.0175; Lea Winerman, “Mirror Neurons: The Mind’s Mirror,” Monitor 36, no. 9 (October 2005): 48.
2. Debbie Durand, “Exploring Increased Empathy to Enhance Wellbeing in Intimate Relationships,” California Southern University ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2022. 29328197.
3. Donal Hebb, a well-known neurologist, said: “Neurons that fire together, wire together.” This statement is called a Hebbian law.
Excerpted with permission from The Deep-Rooted Marriage by Dan B. Allender, PhD and Steve Call, PhD, copyright Dr. Dan B. Allender and Dr. Steve Call.
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Your Turn
As believers, we’re called to enter into the suffering of our spouses and to suffer each other’s humanity. The empathy we want and need from our mates they also need from us. That’s part of how iron sharpens iron and we are transformed to be more like Christ Jesus! ~ Devotionals Daily