Soaring Christian Counseling

The other day I was watering our flowers and spied something that did not look like any of the flowers. When I looked closer, I saw a rather large turtle with the most beautiful colors, mostly oranges and yellows, on its shell. I rushed to find a container because this was a true find for sharing with my grandchildren. Only last year we had let a turtle go “home” and had taken “Timmy” to a creek bank, left him plenty of turtle food and said our tearful goodbyes. On picking up my new friend, I discovered the saddest thing. His shell was broken and there was this bloody fleshy evidence of a beating heart pulsating inside. That hard shell had covered a tender heart.

I began to think of a wonderful song by Pam Rose that contains the line, “If there’s any hope for love at all, some walls must fall.” Those walls weren’t erected overnight. They were built one brick at a time: a disappointment here, a betrayal there, and some injustice to top it off. First thing you know, a whole fortress exists. It reminds me of those walls we built as kids. We’d pack it tight and then use it as a shield for our snowball fights. It’s a pretty true picture because our protective emotional walls are for the same purpose: something shield-like to hide behind.

C.S. Lewis wrote the following: “Love anything and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully around with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket safe, dark motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.”

One of the most challenging dynamics in this scenario is the fact that, in order for those sacred hiding parts of ourselves to be healed, they must be touched by love. They tried that once and got badly hurt. How will they ever get enough courage to try, to risk again? For they have to touch another for healing as surely as the woman reached for the hem of Jesus’ garment. She may have been afraid too, but something she lived with was so painful it outweighed the payoffs of hiding. Jesus’ invitation always stands. “Come.” “Come you who are weary and heavy laden.” Touch. Touch the hem of his garments. Touch his love in one of His kids. If you’re severely wounded rock a baby or share in some activity with a child with Downe’s syndrome. These are God’s pure innocent children who promise not to hurt you.

In Frederick Buechner’s novel, Godric, he says that “devils, like rats, make foul nests in us and gnaw in two the stoutest bonds of love.” And we believe that the spirit of God has the potential of serving as a healing balm that can heal and mend those strands back together again. My newfound friend, the turtle with the broken shell, was created by God that way. But you and I weren’t. Our hearts were meant to be open and vulnerable, ready to connect and share the life within.

It’s so true: “If there’s any hope for love at all, some walls must fall.” Pam Rose on her new album, Morpheus.

This morning on the way to church, I saw a squirrel scurrying across a power wire high up in the air. The thought went through my mind, “He’s dancing on the high wire, like those people in the circus.” Yet he didn’t have a pole and there was not much of an audience to ooh and ahh over his high wire act. I went on to think for awhile about how this is a picture of so much of our life: a delicate balancing act on the high wire of life. There is so much demanded, so many responsibilities, so many balls to keep juggled in this information glutted world. We better keep moving and try not to fall because it’s a long way down.

But the squirrel looked as if he didn’t have a care in the world. There was no fright in his scamper. It looked so easy. He (or she as the case may be) was rather childlike in his daring-do. You remember those days when you didn’t worry about the bills, didn’t worry about how everything would be taken care of? Those were the days when there was a childlike faith that it would all be taken care of by your parents, if of course, it was a safe secure home. In fact, to say it was childlike faith is probably an overstatement because children don’t’ seem to have an awareness that there could even be a problem with the provision of the next meal.

Oh, to recapture that childlikeness! Jesus encourages us with these words:

“Therefore, I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about the body, what you will wear. Is not life more important than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life? And why do you worry about clothes? See how the lilies of the field grow. They do not labor or spin… Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.” Matthew 6:45-34

Lord, you blow my mind sometimes. As I see you weaving your spirit—strands through my thoughts. I don’t know why I keep on being surprised. Like the other day when I was sitting before you, waiting to hear: “Here’s your phrenetic daughter… I’m here. I’m waiting.” I began to sing: “Speak to my Heart, Lord…” He spoke to me of trees. I was sitting in the woods behind our house and He just showed me trees. They didn’t’ seem to be moving one bit, but somehow they had grown to tremendous heights. So much to learn from trees:

Branches reaching up to the LIGHT

·Roots reaching down for WATER SOURCES

·Growth, a natural process, accomplished through God’s laws

·Fruit born without striving

·Standing like great monuments to the Maker

I do believe the secret of a tree must be in the root system—that part about reaching to the WATER SOURCE.

If in the heat of the day or season, we reach toward our WATER SOURCE—living water, we too will grow. It’s God’s law. We have reached for every putrid stream in our past because Satan put little signs nearby: “Cool Clear Water! Stop here and be Refreshed!” Being easily duped, we tarried a while, drank of the contaminated waters, got sin-sick, and stunted our growth.

But we’re getting wiser. We’re learning to reach for HIM. The man of Psalm 1—the blessed man whose delight is in the law of the Lord and he meditates on it day and night. He’s like a tree planted by riverside, bringing forth fruit, and his leaf does not wither.

Growth—no striving, just a choice to drink from the living WATER SOURCE. When I lived in Africa, people were so God—conscious. If you asked about a future plan, the answer in Creole was always “Yes, if God go gree” (which means ‘if God agrees’). Well by His Word, God has ‘greed’ to bless the man and woman who follows His laws and makes them flourishing fruitful trees.

I have to begin by saying how happy I am that you are a fellow journeymate. I would thank you for it, but you probably had little to do with it, since God was the one who determined our time and place together, so I’ll thank Him instead.

Somehow for every counterfeit, there’s a real thing. So I figure for all the valentine wishes there must be a legitimate place to contemplate love. So this is my prayer for you (and me) that we “may have the power to grasp… how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ.” (Ephesians 3:18) For what more is the gospel than a love story of ONE loving us so much—an unfailing love, an everlasting love—that He knew no bounds in loving us.

I used to wonder if you or I ever did a single act of love that was love of a totally pure variety. For we are so needy and do so much to please, to look for a pat on the head, a tiny piece of praise, something to make ourselves feel o.k. But now I know as much as we can let Christ dwell in us and the Holy Spirit operate in us, that yes, occasionally we are able to let True Love flow from ourselves to others. It’s like a pipeline. The love doesn’t originate in us, but in Him, and we unclog it with SELF, there is an open pipe through which His love can freely flow through us to others.

Awhile back, God gave me this little song. I sing it in my heart often when I am with you and among you. It says:

Lord, you be the potter, and I’ll be your clay.

Make me and shape me in all your Holy ways.

Make me a vessel that holds your great love.

So I can pour out below what was poured out from above.

Oh to be fashioned into such a pitcher, emptied of self and full of Him that I might go around pouring out His kindness, His goodness, His peace, His joy, His tenderness, His forgiveness, His love. What a healing force I could be in this world. What if I poured these all over my husband, my boss, my children, distributed them freely in the body??? Let it be! AMEN and AMEN!

An Overview:

The Importance of the Family Crucible: We cannot overestimate the effects of our family of origin in the formation of our world view. This world view contains our view of ourselves, others, and God. For it is in the family that we form language. We learn to label the world as we are taught. “This is good. This is bad. That is wonderful. That is terrible. This thing is to be feared. This is to be loved.” The verbal labeling is profound. Then there is the nonverbal labeling. The look of the eyes, the pursing of the lips, the clinching of the fists. We enter the family play in at least the 2nd act. It is well underway at our conception and birth. The later born children enter with the play almost set in concrete with less power to change the ending. We are imprinted. We are handed a script. “When we say these lines, you are then to say these lines. That is if you want to be labeled a good boy or girl.”

Now at some point we come in contact with another’s family story. The main characters of this play are God the Father, Jesus the elder brother, and the Holy Spirit. They invite us into their family and lo and behold, we discover that we are always part of that family. That we are made in the image of God. We look in the mirror and don’t look a thing like Him. But He pulls out His gigantic wallet, and would you believe it? There is our picture right there with His other kids. We believe. He’s got proof. But we do not know His language. We don’t have things labeled the same way. But to have a relationship, we begin to learn the language. Big words like propitiation, redemption, and justification. God’s language sure seems hard. Oh well.

Then there is a choice. Do I keep the old language of the old familiar family? Or do I learn the new one? “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple.”

How do I want to create my history? It’s my turn to step on the stage now. Will I recreate my family crucible? Or will my history one day be His story, told through my life to the world.

So we must examine our world view, the “erroneous map of reality”. I call these the blueprints that lay out our boundaries, define our territory of safety and our capacity for intimacy. We must examine our “self-talk”, how we label our world. Transactional analysis theory holds that we have introjected the voices of our authority figures and now they give running commentary on our lives. The problem is that because our parents were of Adam, they were missing some pieces. We “objects” we have now internalized can rule us with tyranny. We have learned how to overwhelm ourselves, how to scare ourselves, and how to motivate ourselves with condemnation and administering punishment with twenty lashes of the wet noodle. The lashing wet noodle syndrome at least offers us a way of paying penance so we can feel okay again. Our “atonement strategies” as Jordan calls them. How have we each learned to ease and soothe our anxious souls? We must satisfy the “committee” inside. We are now trying our best to calm these voices that compete with the voice of our Heavenly Father. Wretched people that we are. But wait. There is good news: We learn that there is a love that we cannot escape. We learn that neither death, nor life, nor angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” We learn that we are never alone, that “though we walk through the shadow of the valley of death, One is with us.” We learn of mercy and grace and they are balm to our wounded souls.

The old Adamic family crucible can yield such results as the loss of the voice, victim mentalities, feelings of painful isolation or overwhelming engulfment, tendencies toward passivity or aggression, overcompliance, overdefiance. The old crucible defines our roles and teaches us the rules. Roles and rules. These define the family. Hero, scapegoat, lost child, and mascot. Taking on an identity as experienced in the mirrors of our parents eyes. But the new crucible promises to the experience of divine love, the healing balm that calls us into the freedom to like ourselves, to honor the divine giftedness that resides inside, to be willing to share those gifts unashamedly, and to celebrate our individuality. Merle Jordan calls this the “unfolding of the image of God.” (p. 12) Now we look in His eyes and behold ourselves as prized and loved. We discover new roles such as divine heir, sons and daughters of the Most High God. We are adopted children into a Divine household. Yes, we are chosen and wanted. Merle says “the deepest acceptance of our own individuality and autonomy can be experienced only through the knowledge that the ultimate Source of Being is also the Divine Affirmer and Guarantor of indestructible identity.” (p. 13) Think of it. The redeemed version of my genogram is written in Matthew 1: “A record of the genealogy of Jesus Christ the son of David, the son of Abraham.”

As we learn God’s language and come to label things out of truth, as we experience intimacy with him through the verbal intercourse of prayer, we learn his ways. The records are set straight. Jordan says, “God is ever seeking to bring us into life by inviting us with all our strengths, assertiveness, individuality, and total personhood into loving and prayerful encounter with divine love. We could speak of ministry, especially of counseling and spiritual direction, as a crusade to free people from the demonic and self-destructive patterns of their existence so that the authentic image of God that is buried in each person can be free to live, love, have meaning, and be in intimate relationship and dialogue with God” (p. 15)

At some point, each of us was a child. That child responded to stimuli. That child responded to stimuli of certain people over approximately 18 years times 365 days times the number of interactions present each of those days. Quite an astounding number. These responses from Daniel Stearn calls rigs. They are like well worn paths in our brain now. They are like paved 4 lane highways. Each to travel over. The child has accumulated fears, anxieties, established a comfort zone, and carries a box at all times called Coping Kit. David Seamands says “You are a complex tapestry, woven with a million strands, some of which reach back to Adam and beyond him to God who created you in His image. But many of most important threads in the complex design of who you are were introduced in your childhood, especially in the parent-child relationships.” It’s a strange thing how your “adult” knows certain new information the minute he/she begins to act on it, there’s that kid, the well known “child within” standing terrified, pulling on your pants leg or skirt tail, digging in his heels, and in the end directing the play of your life. You can’t beg, please, cajole, or threaten him in a way that moves him. The only way he’ll come along is through love, mercy, grace, and tenderness. Love is a change agent. Love is a behavior modifier. It is the balm of Gilead applied to the wounded soul.

I have often shared my story. One day flipping through an old album, I caught a glimpse of myself at age twelve. It was a picture made at my father and soon to be step-mother’s wedding shower. There I was, THE KID, the little girl who cut her own hair for there was no mother around. I wept for this pathetic little girl. For the first time I saw the orphan that she truly was and compassion overwhelmed me. I took out the picture and put it on a mirror. Now in my early thirties, I began the healing journey of loving myself and connecting to me. No longer did I have to hide and try to be “more than”. I took Bob Subby’s advice and said to her each morning, “I love you and I’ll be there for you all day”, just as his custom had been in recovery. We’re all in recovery. It just helps to know what you are recovering from so you can work your program more deliberately!!!

I’ve always heard confession is good for the soul. Well today when my new LIFE magazine arrived with a fantastic story of a singer turned mom and back to singer in her midlife crisis, I said, “That’s it. That’s why I do some of the crazy things I do.” Outwardly I would say my life looks pretty settled, like I’m in the proper little ruts and grooves. A grandma called “Go-go” and nicknamed the “go-go girl” by close friends. And to think just 6 years ago I was street skating on the streets of Florida with other crazy baby boomers.

I am from the flower child generation. I gave up on America in the late 60’s, early 70’s with its warped values. I must have felt quite unempowered as I didn’t see how marches, sit-ins, or smoking marijuana was going to change anything. But oh, I did want to change things, to know my being here had made a difference. I could not tolerate the thought of meaninglessness. So after graduating with a BA in psychology and my husband with his MS in physics, we chucked it all and moved to West Africa to a fourth world country. We went simply to teach people about Jesus and it was a simple life. We’d set out on Sunday mornings to villages on the peninsula. Someone would notice the missionaries had arrived and go around the village beating on a railroad tie to notify that services would soon begin. People would mosey in. If there was no communion bread, we’d gather the ingredients and make some over an open fire.

After several years in Africa and 3 baby boys, it was discovered my husband had a serious type of cancer that threatened his life. That was a long battle that began to take all our focus. We decided I should return to school to prepare for the event of raising and supporting the children if the cancer took Gary’s life. Our attention turned from the world at large to our growing family and everyday concerns of what’s for supper, how can we juggle 3 soccer games on the same day, and how to pay the latest medical bill.

Now my husband has passed the 15 year mark where the medical community considers full and complete remission. The boys are grown, two married, and the youngest independently in college. Now I find my lenses widening once more, back to straightening out the crooked world. I find the old discontent stirring up the unsettledness in my soul once more. I want to be a change agent. On bad days, I want to be a savior, but then I remember we already have One. On really bad days, I want to be God, but I remember the position is filled by the One and Only One.

So then I must pray: “Lord, channel these desires, the deep stirrings within into something productive. Teach me to wait on you, take up Your agendas, and only go forth in Your strength. May I not flail uselessly about during these wonder years. Thank You for this marvelous time. Would You anoint the days, anoint the lenses, redeem the stirrings, and show me Your way. Yes, teach me Your ways, oh Lord, that I might walk in them.”

Margaret

I received letters from a client last week letting me glimpse some of her corridors of pain: some briefly explored but others just shown the bolted doors too painful to open. To speak the horrors inside would be too much, as if the words themselves carried realities that would bring self-inflicted wounds.

Incest. Sex abuse. How smart of the professional world. We can name everything. Oh, I am aware of the value of being able to identify things, but I am also aware of the illusory power, control, and distance those labels can provide. Probably that is helpful to the therapist since we carry much of the same trauma, so much so we might be on our faces with the client if we did not have our illusory power.

Sex abuse. Yes, I identified. I too kept the doors locked tight until a phantom called panic attacks burst through all the cracks and my psyche could no longer contain it. Thank God, the phantom did burst forth so it did not have an opportunity to destroy me from within: the shame monster gobbling up my soul.

Yesterday I surveyed my front yard because my son and I had planted about 200 bulbs in the fall and frost had come the previous two nights. I was thankful that all the tender shoots had survived. As I looked, I was thankful for their green but struck by their tenderness and fragility and then I made the connection. Those tender shoots are like the children coming forth into the world that can contain some cold hard realities. Frostbitten by cold harsh realities.

Thank you, Lord, for your provision of warmth in the Son. Thank you for Your patience in holding our hands and holding us in your lap when we’re too paralyzed to move, for rocking us in Your big rocking chair, for Your love so deep so wide that wraps around us and provides protection, comfort, and ultimate healing. You are a wonderful Father. My favorite way to think of you is Redeemer: the One who buys back Every lost thing, every stolen item. And to think You bought it all with the blood of Your own Son!

Sincerely,

Margaret

God sat down one day, hand on chin, and contemplated His church, that is, His kingdom. He surveyed the living stones making up this building and made a list of projected needs. There were needs for apostles, prophets, pastors, teachers, evangelists, and servants. Special gifts were needed: to exhort, encourage, show mercy, serve, and teach. He got his list together and then went over to His drawing board and began His blueprint. What an architect! Designer of MAN and Designer of WOMAN! As He drew His specs He said, “Oh, this is a fine one.” And over this one He said, “Oh, it is good. It is very good.” And over another He said, “Excellent!” He drew and drew then sat back and took a deep breath, sighed with satisfaction and smiled. A day’s work well done. As He looked over His fine work, He saw the names of the living stones at the bottom of each page.

As He saw the names and looked over the fine work, He began to feel more than satisfaction. He began to feel joy and He leaped from His chair and began to dance for the thought of His new children.

Eventually each was born into a family on earth. These were to be nurturers for His precious children. Some of the parents failed miserably. Some of the children never once felt their specialness. Some never knew God danced for joy at the very thought of them. Some of the parents didn’t know how to cuddle, hold, and sing. Other parents were able to do these things to some measure. For whatever reason, many grew up, not knowing just how special they were to God; some not even knowing they had gifts and a lofty high purpose of building up the temple. But… God arranged by his providence and will for each to discover who he and she was meant to be and who he and she is today. He helped each to find their identity as He designed them because this was part of the plan that could not be thwarted.

And each one gladly took the place God called them to… with confidence, peace and joy…

Which is my prayer for YOU!

Margaret Phillips

Something happened today that brought afresh this concept to me. Someone had made a promise to do something for me and when the time came, they did not come through. Irritation, feeling let down, and then I caught myself telling a story about it. We do that, you know. It’s a pretty frightening thing, the face that we tell ourselves stories, especially the fact, that we believe them. I believe in the old days they called it “spinning a yarn” except they knew the yarn was a fabrication in their minds.

In our couples therapy group, we’ve been studying how some people have the ability (or make the choice!) to use “self-soothing” thoughts and others use “distress-maintaining” thoughts. Of course, the first leads to the de-escalating a disagreement and the other leads to escalation. The first leads to rational resolve and the second leads to chaotic unresolve. For many people who border on obsessing over things, I use the term ‘spinning’ to represent this idea. It’s as though they put on a record and spin it over and over again. We discuss in therapy how to create other albums to choose from and developing the ability to stop the nonproductive record and get out another one.

It is my believe that those who do the “distress-maintaining” kinds of thoughts are those who are bearing deep woundedness that is yet unhealed. Usually the incidences that snag them are those representing their themes of hurt: rejection, abandonment, injustices, and broken promises to name a few. Usually their “distress-maintaining” thoughts begin to spin a story in which they are once again victimized–the “somebody done me something wrong song”. Don’t get me wrong. Plenty of people have been truly victimized, but the situation I am referring to is one where a person is building a case without all the facts, or they project onto their present situation the past painful play of their life.

Example: Your wife totally forgot to drop your shirts off at the laundry. You have worn your last white shirt and tomorrow is a big meeting. You really needed her to remember. You tap into old feelings of abandonment. You begin telling yourself she always has time to think of everyone else. She never thinks of you. You made a big mistake marrying her in the first place and on and on. Notice the black and white statements. Notice how true your story sounds to you. notice the distance that will follow. The self-soother would possibly maintain the big picture: how she’s really a wonderful wife that has a lot of responsibility on her. . . a lot to think about . . . and then go into the problem solving of how to get a shirt washed and ironed by tomorrow. Several themes emerge here. In the first scenario the hurt person thinks about himself while in the second scenario, the person thinks about the other. The second scenario seems to carry much greater maturity moving right on from the problem to the solution. Overall the thoughts of the first husband maintain himself as a victim and his wife is the bad guy while in the second, the wife receives a grace-base, able to keep her standing as a good-guy even in the face of failure.

As Christians, it seems to me that we have an unlimited supply of soothing thoughts: God is in control. Let me get the beam out of my own eye before I get the speck out of yours. We get to walk in the triumphant procession with Christ. God loved us while we were yet sinners. When you really think of it, there’s a soothing truth that fits every distressing situation if we will just take the time and energy to make that choice!!!

The world has been fascinated with the Titanic long before the recent movie made its debut. In fact, Walter Lord’s book A Night to Remember, has undergone 65 reprints. Several weeks ago we heard Jack Deere deliver a cutting-edge message at our church on the Titanic as a prophetic symbol for the church. You may easily extrapolate the basic message just upon hearing the subject matter.

However, since much of my life is given to another great institution called marriage, I could not but muse and mull for quite a while on the similarities between the gigantic ocean liner and many of the marriages I have encountered. One such tragedy is indelibly imprinted on my life, or I grew to personally care a great deal for this couple. In fact, they lived in a home and in the midst of a lifestyle that would be quite representative of a luxury liner. They had been married for nearly 35 years. For their entire married life this couple and their children, while they lived at home, were found on the church pew each Sunday morning. He, a leader in the church as well as in the business community, was a favored Sunday School teacher. She was a fervent student of the Bible and could sharpen her Biblical sword with the best of them.

She had another kind of sword in her arsenal as well. It was her tongue. This tongue could be sweet as honey, quite full of wit, yet could whip out some of the most cutting, biting remarks I’ve ever heard. And the main one on the receiving end of this sharp sword was her husband. Her critical eye rarely missed a thing about him–his tie, his shoes, his car, how he spent his time, how he did his work, how he sat, where he sat, and the list seemed to be endless. I guess he felt that way. After a multitude of warnings, begging, counseling with professionals and the pastor, suddenly the ship sunk. She arrived after a Bible study one morning, and there on the dressing table in the bedroom lay a piece of paper: “I love you and always have, but I can’t live like this any longer. You can have everything. All I want is peace.” And as she looked around, everything of his was gone as if he had never existed. Her world crumbled. Suddenly everything was clear, but it was too late. No chance for further discussion. No chance to renegotiate. No time for I’m sorry.

At 11:00 p.m. when Jack Phillips received the seventh warning from the Californian stating, “Say, old man, we are stopped dead in a field of ice,” he radioed back, “Shut up, shut up,” and went back to communicating frivolous messages from passengers to their friends and relatives on shore. Phillips had sent the first five messages regarding “a field of ice” ahead to higher ranking officers, but they were totally ignored, so he ignored the sixth and final warning. After all, “the ship was unsinkable.”

What made the four-block-long ship unsinkable? The main argument made for this seemed to be its sixteen compartments which could be shut off individually. The ship could sustain water in the first four compartments and still stay afloat. No one could imagine an object large enough to hit all four. The iceberg, however, towered 100 feet above the water and 800 feet below. It managed to cut a gash in the first six compartments. I believe couples are deceived the same way. After all, there are many compartments that would seemingly sustain the “marriage ship”–the vows taken in the presence of witnesses and God, the children, friends and family, joint finances, church relationships, memories of Christmas, vacations, on and on.

Believe me, I have seen marriages be able to take some really hard hits–infidelity, abuse, and the list goes on–and still stay afloat. But I’ve seen that no marriage is unsinkable and that a relationship can only sustain so much damage. One should not be so naive as to think that just because it survived a really bad swounding, it will keep on surviving more and more damage. Not all marriages end in overt divorce, you will notice. Some die a quiet, unnoticeable death.

One could say that pride sunk the Titanic. Everything seems to lead back to that culprit. Even the fact that there were no binoculars aboard seems to be traceable to pride. Who could imagine that on this oceanliner, Frederick Fleet, the lookout perched in the Crow’s Nest, had made a request for a pair of binoculars! Someone felt so cushy and secure that this provision which would appear to be a necessity was, in fact, not provided. In my musing on this subject, I keep hearing, “You have eyes to see, but you do not see. You have ears to hear, yet you do not hear.” How many wives and husbands have, in fact, tried over and over to explain a particular area of dissatisfaction, only to have a gesture of change made, a mere tap of the little finger on the table of life.

I so believe that marriage is a garden to be tended, especially in our day and time. Maybe Albert and Etherl who lived out on the farm and were concerned about getting the crops planted and having shoes for the kids weren’t facing the troubled waters marriages face today. There was a day and time where Etherl probably wasn’t going anywhere even if Albert never said, “I love you,” or even kissed her goodnight. That era is bygone. Proactivity is the only course open to those who want to strengthen and thrive. Binoculars. Wow! Do you have some? A man told me last week that he should have gone to a marriage seminar every six months, should have read some of those books that his wife kept bringing home, should have gone tot he classes offered at the church on relationships . . . but . . . well, you know the PRIDE word. The sixth compartment may have been hit. Time will tell if it’s too late.

And then the end of the story–the lack of adequate lifeboats, only enough for 1,178, only half enough. In the fury, only 28 were in the first boat that held 68 passengers. Only 12 in another one. What a disaster! Unlike the Titanic, the children are the ones left on the sinking ship of divorce. Sometimes a wife or husband. . . while one is so selfish that he or she jumps into the lifeboat and leaves the others on the ship. But in my experience, the children are always left on the ship. They are, without fail, the victims.

Urgency. Vision. Humility. An equipped lookout. Eyes to see. Ears to hear. Diligence. All around us the messages are coming, “Say, old man, we are stopped dead in a field of ice.” Are you apathetically throwing the messages away? I hope not.