Chapter One
Entering
into the
Mismatch
The weather was crisp and clear on the day after Christmas
1966 when my friend Pete and I took the train from our suburban
homes into downtown Chicago. We wandered around the Loop
for a while, reveling in the bustle of the city, but then came time for
me to bring him on a pilgrimage that I took as often as I could.
Fighting the wind, we trudged across the Michigan Avenue
bridge and stopped in front of the Wrigley Building. There we
stood, our hands shoved into our pockets for warmth, as we
gazed across the street at the gothic majesty of Tribune Tower. I
can't remember whether I muttered the word aloud or if it merely
echoed in my mind:
"Someday."
Pete was quiet. High school
freshmen are entitled to their dreams.
We lingered for a few minutes and watched as people flowed
in and out of the newspaper office. Were they the reporters whose
bylines I studied every morning? Or the editors who dispatched
them around the world? Or the printers who manned the gargantuan
presses? I let my imagination run wild-until Pete's
patience wore thin.
We turned and walked up the Magnificent Mile, browsing
through the overpriced and pretentious shops, until we decided
to embark on the twenty-minute walk back to the train station.
As we passed in front of the Civic Opera House, though, I heard
a familiar voice beckon from the crowd.
"Hey, Lee, what're you doing here?" called Clay, another
high school student who lived in my neighborhood.
I didn't answer right away. I was too captivated by the girl at
his side, holding his hand and wearing his gold engraved ID
bracelet. Her brown hair cascaded to her shoulders; her smile was
at once coy and confident.
"Uh, well, um ... just hanging around," I managed to say to
Clay, though my eyes were riveted on his date.
By the time he introduced us to Leslie, I wasn't thinking
much about Clay or Pete or the fact that my hands were getting
numb from the cold and I was standing ankle-deep in soot-encrusted
snow. I made sure, however, to pay close attention
when Clay pronounced Leslie's name; I knew I'd need the proper
spelling to look it up in the phone book.
After all, everything's fair in love and war.
FROM FAIRY TALE TO NIGHTMARE
As for Leslie, I found out later that she wasn't thinking about
Clay as the two of them rode the train home that afternoon.
When she arrived at her house in suburban Palatine, she strolled
into the kitchen and found her mother, a Scottish war bride,
busily preparing dinner.
"Mom," she announced, "today I met the boy I'm going to
marry!"
The response wasn't what she expected. Her mother barely
looked up from the pot she was stirring. In a voice mixed with
condescension and skepticism, she replied dismissively: "That's
nice, dear."
But there was no doubt in Leslie's mind. Nor in mine. When
I called her the next night from a pay-phone outside a gas station
near my house (with four brothers and sisters, that was the only
way I could get some privacy), we talked as if we had known each
other for years. People like to debate whether there's such a thing
as love at first sight; for us, the issue had been settled once and
for all.
Leslie and I dated almost continuously throughout high
school, and when I went off to study journalism at the University
of Missouri, she moved there so we could be close to each other.
We got married when I was twenty and she was nineteen. After I
graduated we moved to Chicago, where my lifelong dream of
becoming a reporter at the
Chicago Tribune
was realized. Leslie,
meanwhile, began her career at a savings and loan association
across the street from my newspaper office.
We lived a fairy-tale life. We enjoyed the exhilaration and challenge
of climbing the corporate ladder while residing in an exciting,
upscale neighborhood. Leslie became pregnant with our first
child, a girl we named Alison, and then later gave birth to a son,
Kyle. Buoyed by our deep love for each other, our marriage was
strong and secure-until someone came between us, threatening
to shipwreck our relationship and land us in divorce court.
It wasn't an affair. It wasn't the resurfacing of an old flame.
Instead, the someone who nearly capsized our marriage was none
other than God himself. At least, that's who I blamed at the time.
Ironically, it was faith in Jesus Christ-which most couples credit
for contributing to the strength of their marriage-that very
nearly destroyed our relationship and split us apart forever.
All because of a spiritual mismatch.
A MARRIAGE WITHOUT GOD
I can describe God's role in our courtship and early marriage
in one sentence:
He just wasn't on our radar screen
. In other
words, he was irrelevant.
Personally, I considered myself an atheist. I had rejected the
idea of God after being taught in high school that Darwin's theory
of evolution explained the origin and development of life. I
figured Darwin had put God out of a job! Freed of accountability,
I decided to live purely for myself and my own pursuit of
pleasure. As for Christians, I tended to dismiss them as naive and
uncritical thinkers who needed a crutch of an imaginary deity to
get them through life.
Leslie, on the other hand, would probably have considered
herself an agnostic. While I tended to react with antagonism
toward people of faith, she was more in spiritual neutral. She had
little church influence growing up, although she has fond childhood
memories of her mother gently singing traditional hymns to
her while she tucked her in at night. For Leslie, God was merely
an abstract idea that she had never taken the time to explore.
Without God in my life, I lacked a moral compass. My character
slowly became corroded by my success-at-any-cost mental-ity.
My anger would flash because of my free-floating frustration
at not being able to find the fulfillment I craved. My drinking
binges got out of control a little too often, and I worked much
too hard at my job, in effect making my career into my god.
Despite all of that, our marriage remained stable. Our love for
each other smoothed over a lot of rough edges. When we were
together, we were happy. That is, until everything exploded in the
fall of 1979. That's when harmony dissolved into hostility. The reason:
Leslie announced that after a long period of searching and
seeking, she had decided to become a follower of Jesus Christ.
To me, that was the worst possible news! I was afraid she was
going to turn into a sexually repressed prude who would forsake
our upwardly mobile lifestyle in favor of spending all of her free
time serving the poor at some skid-row soup kitchen.
"Look, if you need that kind of crutch," I said in a snide and
patronizing tone, "-if you can't stand on your own two feet and
face life without putting your faith in a make-believe god and a
book of mythology and legend-then go ahead. But remember
two things: don't give the church any of our money, because
that's all they're really interested in, and don't try to get me to
get out of bed to go anywhere on Sunday mornings. I'm too
smart for that [bleep]!"
Nice guy, huh?
"THIS ISN'T WHAT I SIGNED UP FOR!"
That was the opening salvo in what turned out to be a turbulent,
strife-filled, emotion-churning phase of our marriage. Our
values began to clash, our attitudes started to conflict, and our
priorities and desires were suddenly at odds. Arguments erupted,
iciness replaced warmth, and more than once I let my frustration
and anger spill over into an epithet-laced tirade of shouting and
door slamming.
I can remember when everything culminated on one hot and
humid day while I was mowing the lawn after another one of our
quarrels. My blood was boiling.
"That's it," I muttered as I plowed through her flower bed
in a childish display of passive/aggressive anger. "I don't need this
anymore. This isn't what I signed up for! Maybe it's time to get
out of this marriage altogether."
That was the low point. Our future hung by a thread. Maybe
you can relate to that kind of emotional turmoil. Or perhaps you're
frightened about your own marriage's future because your faith is
driving a deeper and deeper wedge between you and your spouse.
Through the years, Leslie and I have counseled many Christians
who have tearfully told us how their union with a nonbeliever has
increasingly brought them anguish, anger, and arguments.
Once Leslie and I got a phone call at 3:30 P.M. on Easter.
Theresa was crying. "Holidays are always the worst," she said
between sobs. "But today, he really went too far. He's been making
fun of me, saying I'm weak, saying I believe ridiculous things,
saying the church is just trying to get my money. I'm tired of
defending myself. I don't know what to do anymore. Why won't
he just let me believe what I want? Why does he have to ruin
everything? It was bad enough having to go to Easter services by
myself; why does he have to destroy the rest of my day too?"
Theresa isn't alone. Rita's husband is a lawyer who is openly
antagonistic toward anything Christian. Rita said, "He actually
told our son that church is where bad people are, that people will
try to make you think like them if you go to church, that little
boys who go to church get molested, and if Mommy ever tries to
take you to church again, you tell her you won't go."
Or consider Kathy. She said her anguish over her marital situation
has only been amplified by her church and Christian
friends who inadvertently make matters worse for her. "There's
this underlying implication that if I would just be a better witness,
if I'd just pray harder, if I'd just get him to come to Christmas
services, if I'd give him the right book to read or tape to listen to,
that somehow everything would work out," she said. "They don't
come right out and say it, but I get the feeling that I'm the one
at fault-and that hurts!"
Linda Davis, who lived for years in an unequally yoked marriage
until her husband became a Christian, said the only lonelier
plight for an unequally yoked person would be the death of her
spouse. "I doubt, however, that even physical widowhood makes
a woman feel as rejected and inadequate as does 'spiritual widow-hood,
'" she added. "The spiritual widow receives no flowers or
sympathy cards. She simply grieves in silence for a union that
never was."
DON'T GIVE UP HOPE!
More than once while Leslie and I were spiritually mismatched,
I predicted our marriage would end in divorce. Men-tally,
I had thrown in the towel. But through a variety of
circumstances we were rescued from that fate.
Before it was too late, Leslie figured out how to live out her
faith in a way that began to attract me rather than repel me. She
learned how to grow and even flourish in her relationship with
Christ despite discouragement from me. Although she would be
the first to admit that she made mistakes from time to time, she
was able to restore equilibrium to our relationship. Gently and
lovingly, she started to point me toward Christ-and, ultimately,
God used her to open my eyes to my need for a Savior.
Today we're celebrating twenty years as a Christian couple
and thirty years of marriage. In an absolutely astounding display
of God's grace, he not only forgave me for my immoral and atheistic
past, but he gave me a ministry as a pastor and evangelist.
Together, Leslie and I are experiencing a depth of intimacy,
adventure, and fulfillment that we never could have imagined
during those shallow years we spent without God.
Now, it's important to stress that-unfortunately-not every
spiritual mismatch will end with both spouses joyfully serving
Christ. The sobering truth is that some couples travel radically
different spiritual paths for the rest of their lives. That's reality.
No matter how much you want to, you cannot force your spouse
to become a Christian.
Yet it's equally important to emphasize that if you find yourself
in a spiritually mismatched marriage, there
is
hope. Don't
despair! You can learn to thrive despite your differences. You can
learn to encourage your spouse in his spiritual journey without
inadvertently chasing him away. You can learn to earnestly seek
the best for your partner without unfairly burdening yourself with
undue responsibility for his salvation. In short, a spiritual mismatch
does not have to be a death sentence for a marriage.
That may seem hard to believe if you're currently embroiled
in conflict with your spouse over your differing views of God. But
that's why Leslie and I are writing this book-to help you learn
from what we did both right and wrong in this rocky period of
our relationship. Believe me, we fumbled our way through, but
we did walk away with some hard-earned lessons that we hope
will both encourage you and give you concrete, practical, and biblical
steps to take.
More importantly, you need to remind yourself on a regular
basis that God has not forgotten you. He isn't gleefully punishing
you because you're married to a nonbeliever. In fact, all of
heaven is cheering you on as you seek to humbly and sincerely live
out your faith in an often stressful and difficult environment. Your
heavenly Father graciously wants to offer you courage in the face
of strife, peace in the midst of turmoil, and optimism when everything
seems shrouded in gloom.
With his help, you really
can
learn to survive a spiritual mismatch.
THE "WHY" BEHIND GOD'S COMMAND
If you've experienced the anguish of being a Christian wed to
a nonbeliever, then you can readily understand why God has prohibited
his followers from marrying outside the faith. He loves us
so much that he wants to spare us from the emotional anguish,
the clash of values, and the ongoing conflict that can result when
one spouse is a Christian but the other isn't. His goal isn't to
unnecessarily limit our choice of prospective mates but to lovingly
shield us from the kind of difficulties that Leslie and I faced during
the nearly two years we were spiritually mismatched.
"Do not be yoked together with unbelievers," Paul wrote in
2 Corinthians 6:14-16. "For what do righteousness and wickedness
have in common? Or what fellowship can light have with
darkness? What harmony is there between Christ and Belial? What
does a believer have in common with an unbeliever? What agreement
is there between the temple of God and idols? For we are
the temple of the living God...."
Paul was not issuing a blanket prohibition against Christians
having any association with nonbelievers. He was far too realistic
to expect that.
Continues...