WE IS GREATER THAN ME: SELFLESS MARRIAGE
“We is greater than me.” I think that is the formula for a healthy marriage. There can be this competition rather than seeing us as truly one.You don’t foresee how selfish you really are until you get married. So how do we deal with our own selfishness? We want to deal with our spouses, but we really need to deal with our own. How do we move from pride to humility?
First and foremost, recognize our selfishness. We need to do an assessment between us and the Lord: “God, just open my eyes. What are the areas that I am holding onto self, elevating self?”
Something else that helps is changing my mentality and seeing the ways that God has forgiven me and what God has done for me. It begins to change my heart to extend that same grace to my spouse.
If we don’t learn to extend grace to communicate in a healthy way, to learn to build those muscles with the little things, when the big things come, we’re not going to be able to handle them. It starts with learning what it looks like to be selfless in the little things.
A lot of Christians are walking around, believing that they are being selfless, when they are actually being passive. Passivity is when you’re not communicating your needs. Passivity is when you don’t know how to say, “No”; and you are just doing things out of guilt, when you don’t want to cause conflict, so you just don't talk about something. That ends up destroying your marriage, because you cannot be passive and not expect the root of bitterness to take hold of your heart and life. You can only be passive for so long until it is going to come out in some conflict, argument, or rage.
Selflessness is thinking of others first, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t communicate what I need. That doesn’t mean I pretend that I’m fine when really I’m not.That actually ends up causing more damage to the relationship than good.
First, it starts with learning to identify your needs. I think sometimes we stuff those needs for so long that it turns into criticism:—“My spouse isn’t helping with the dishes,” “He doesn’t do anything around the house.”
The next question is: “What do I need?” The answer: “You know, I’m feeling burned out. I’m feeling exhausted. I need some help. I need support. When you can figure out what you need, it begins to become about you rather than about your spouse. That’s how we want to approach the conversation. You don’t want to go up and say, “Dave, you’re just so lazy! I do everything around here! You’re not helping.”
But more of: “Dave, I’m feeling burned out,” “I’m feeling exhausted, and it would mean so much to me if…,” because now it is about me. I’m not attacking him. Now, it’s about me and what I need and what I feel versus about him and what he is not doing.
Marriage is not a once-and-done conversation. This is a process, and we are being molded and shaped with each conversation. This is a work in progress:
- So we keep sharing what we need.
- We keep giving clues.
- We keep connecting with one another.
- We keep seeing what the other person needs.
- We keep making deposits before we make withdrawals.
- We keep seeing our role, because that’s the only thing we have control over.
When you begin learning these things, give yourself grace; give your spouse grace. This isn’t an overnight thing. Training for marriage—just like training for a marathon takes a significant amount of time, and energy, and effort, and work. When you begin to do those things, it’s going to start moving in the right direction. “It’s choice after choice after choice; and a lot of them are little.” But here is the trick: when I would know what she needed, I would still feel this selfishness in me, like, “I don’t want to do it.” And that’s where I would be like, “Jesus, change me. I can’t do it. I don’t have the power within me to serve her right now. I know what serving her looks like; she has told me. I don’t want to.”
That’s where the power of the gospel meets us and says, “I’ll give you that power right now.” Little choices like that, piled on top of each other, you have a whole different marriage.You just start one choice at a time to say, “Jesus, I surrender. Give me the power to be the man/the woman You want me to be”; and then walk into that. With my God, I can scale any wall. That’s the key—it’s not just the wall; it’s not just me—but it’s with my God. Psalm 18—like, “I can do this with God’s help,”—whatever that wall is: conflict, or bitterness, or resentment, or exhaustion—God can give me what I need to overcome this into a fruitful, positive, beautiful, grace-filled marriage.
