25 For husbands, this means love your wives, just as Christ loved the church. He gave up his life for her 26 to make her holy and clean, washed by the cleansing of God’s word. 27 He did this to present her to himself as a glorious church without a spot or wrinkle or any other blemish. Instead, she will be holy and without fault. 28 In the same way, husbands ought to love their wives as they love their own bodies. For a man who loves his wife actually shows love for himself. 29 No one hates his own body but feeds and cares for it, just as Christ cares for the church. 30 And we are members of his body.
31 As the Scriptures say, “A man leaves his father and mother and is joined to his wife, and the two are united into one.” 32 This is a great mystery, but it is an illustration of the way Christ and the church are one. 33 So again I say, each man must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband.
Ephesians 5:25-33
Dear God, I always think of this verse on my anniversary. It was read at our wedding, and I’ll always remember one of my wife’s friends telling her that the verses preceding verse 25 about women submitting to their husbands made them nervous, but they trusted her to know what she was doing.
I was thinking about it yesterday on my bike ride. I was thinking about how much I have changed since I was fresh out of college 22 years ago. My wife has changed as well. I think the key is me really learning what it is like to:
- Love her
- Make her holy and clean through the cleansing of your Word
- Present her without a spot or wrinkle
- Love her as myself
- Leave my father and mother and join with her
- Unite with her
So what does that look like, and does doing those things successfully help her to “submit” in a way that is edifying for her? Back to my bike ride, I was thinking about how needy I was when we first got married. I was incredibly insecure, looking for her to love me the way my insecurity needed to be loved. I had expectations of her that were not freeing to her. Submission to 22-year-old me could be burdensome. Not because I was being mean, but because I did not really love her in a way that gave her freedom to discover who she was in you. I was too busy making sure she fed a part of my ego that was damaged.
I guess it didn’t really start to change until 1.) I started doing these prayer journals eight years later and 2.) I experienced Sacred Marriage by Gary Thomas for the first time. The prayer journals rekindled my discipleship and reliance upon you for the needs that my damaged ego had. Sacred Marriage taught me that her job in my life was not to make me happy, but to be a friend and help me to grow into a better, more humble man. All of a sudden, I could take my need to control her love for me and turn it into an incredible desire to see her flourish in every way–just like Jesus wants to see His church flourish.
Father, I haven’t figured all of this out. There are still parts of my life that are a mess. There are still things I do that frustrate her and hurt her. So I’m not sitting here and claiming to be this amazing husband. What I am saying is that I know I’m not the man I was 30 years ago, and that is all because of you and what you have done for me, including what you have done for me through her. Thank you. Thank you for the 33 years I have known her. Thank you for the 30 years of marriage. Thank you for our daughter and our son. As year 31 starts today, I pray that you would help us to be, as a couple, exactly what you need us to be for all of those in our sphere of influence. And please continue to grow our hearts together.
In Jesus’s name I pray,
Amen