Leaving home

I read once that everything the Bible has to say about marriage is in Genesis 2:24-25. Anywhere else the Bible talks about marriage is just reinforcing or commenting on these verses. The more I live with these verses, the more convinced I am that it is true.

Anyone who has brought marriage issues to me as a pastor knows that I refer to these verses a lot. Premarriage counseling, marriage troubles, my own issues around marriage, all of these draw me back into Genesis 2:24-25. I haven't gotten anywhere near the bottom of this well yet.

Genesis 2:24 lists three things we must do if marriages are to be strong. (It says the man does these things, but it has been my experience that both husband and wife need to do these three things to build a strong marriage.) First is to leave father and mother. Second is to cleave to each other. Third is to become one flesh.

Leaving home is difficult. For some of us it's tough to physically leave. I've been teaching a group of 19-and-20 year old students this week and I'm vividly reminded of leaving home at 17, getting on the Greyhound in Grand Forks, North Dakota, and getting off in Seattle. For a kid who had never been out of the upper Midwest before (does a trip to Kansas in 7th grade count?) it was a terrible shock to my system. I tried to find a home in college that fall, but the homesickness nearly killed me. It was so bad that when my RA planned a weekend trip back to Minneapolis for his sister's wedding, driving 1800 miles in a Ford Courier pickup, I jumped at the chance to ride along as far as Fargo and spend a day and a half at home. We left school Thursday evening, drove straight through 27 hours, I was home about 36 hours, and I got back in that Ford Courier and rode all the way to Seattle where we pulled in late Monday night. It was bad.

For some people, leaving home physically is a relief. Home has not been a good place for them. Maybe it's abuse issues, maybe personality conflicts, maybe there's just no love. They run from home at the first sign of an open door. But it is especially hard for these people to let go of home emotionally. "Home" is surrounded in their hearts with all sorts of vows that start out "I will NEVER ..." So they hold home in their hearts with bonds of judgment and condemnation.

No matter why we hold onto home, we have to leave before we can cleave. We have to let go of the way Mom & Dad always did things. We have to undo the bonds that hold us to the home where we grew up or we cannot enter into a successful marriage.

If we are not willing to set aside what we learned at home and recognize that we might have to learn new habits, new methods, new expressions, we cannot love effectively. Fact is, the things I learned watching my parents don't often work in my marriage. My parents were good people and I deeply respect them. But I had to leave home -- especially emotionally -- before I could learn to love my wife. The ways my Dad showed affection to my Mom just don't cut it in my marriage.

It's the same with every area of marriage. Financial management, child-rearing, home maintenance, household chores, Christmas traditions, vacation plans -- all need to be renegotiated. Just because Mom & Dad did things that way doesn't mean it will work in your marriage. You have to leave home.

What this does is create space for a relationship that is safe for both man and woman. It keeps the inlaws, the grandparents, and everybody else out of the bubble the two of you create.

What goes on in that bubble? We'll talk about that next time.

Ribs

You wouldn't believe how much trouble I got into for my last post. Lots of guys have been coming up to me telling me to quit talking about marriage, quit talking about what relationships between men and women are supposed to be like, quit talking up how great women are, just quit it!

Sorry, guys. Can't do it. I don't have a pro-feminist agenda or anything like that, I've got a biblical agenda. And as we work through what Genesis has to say about us -- this is our story -- we have to work through these verses at the end of Genesis 2.

So man is alone, and God sees the aloneness is not good, and God decides to do something about it. I've heard and seen and lived this story so many times. There's a fairly decent guy who is maybe in his early 20's or maybe his early 30's or maybe his late 40's, it doesn't matter. But everyone around him just aches because he's such a fairly decent guy and why doesn't he find a nice girl and settle down but he just keeps doing his own thing and it annoys them to no end. My dad was 38 before he got married to the little girl across the road who somewhere along the way grew up and became a rather remarkable young woman who got a hold on his heart and wouldn't let go. When he was a bachelor, he did a lot of hunting and fishing until nearly every housewife in the territory had given up trying to figure out who Art should marry. Then Pearl got him. (Good thing, too, for my sake, or I wouldn't be here!)

We know this story. The man likes to be alone a little too much, and everyone -- maybe including him -- can see it's too much of a good thing. Then into his loneliness walks a woman with a light in her eyes and a flip of her ponytail and his friends are suddenly wearing tuxes and pouring Rice Krispies into the defrost on his car. (Don't do it -- you'll NEVER get them all out, and every October a few more will come fluttering out when you turn on the defrost for the first time. It's a pain.) And in the fairy tales, that's the happy ending.

But we also live in a world where we know that the story goes on, and all too often it is a sad, difficult story. She may have kissed prince charming, and he doesn't look like a frog anymore, but he still likes to eat flies when she's not looking. I've sat in my office with way too many couples who have tried on their own wisdom for month after month to make their marriage work. Trouble is, they don't know what it's supposed to look like, so they just keep fighting and making each other mad. So he stomps off to the garage to be alone, and she calls her mother in tears. It happens way too much.

We won't solve people's marriage problems right now. It's going to take a while to work through these verses, because there is a lot of stuff packed in here. But let's start with a rib.

Why does God take from Adam's ribs to make this woman? Why not a different bone, or maybe just another pile of dust? Why a rib?

First of all, the rib means that these two are intimately tied. When he wakes up and sees her, the man recognizes this right away: "This is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh," he says, which is a rough Hebrew approximation of "WOW!" He recognizes that this goes beyond the bond he had with the golden retriever, as much fun as the frisbee game was. Here is someone who is custom made for him, in fact made from him, so that in a sense these two fit together. To separate them now will cause irreparable harm. It will be like letting an oak tree put roots down into your heart and then tearing it out, roots and all. It leaves you behind, but you're shredded.

Second thing the rib tells us is that there's a symmetry, an equality, to God's intended relationship between a man and a woman. She's not made from his head to tell him what to do or how to think. Male passivity has allowed and encouraged (and sometimes required) women to step into the role of directors and dictators, but that was never God's intention and it is not God's intention today that she should be domineering and he should be henpecked. Neither was the woman made from his foot so that he could stomp all over her, grind her into the dirt, use her and put her away when he doesn't want her around, make jokes at her expense, beat up on her when he's feeling threatened and powerless, or play her emotions like a fish, reeling her in and rejecting her just to reassure himself that he's got some power. She's created from his rib, which lies underneath his arm where it can be held close, and which lies over his heart. She belongs with him, nestled up against the seat of his will and emotion. (Yes, guys do have emotions. They're in the tool box next to the 9/16 socket. Go dig them out and tell her about them sometime.) The rib tells us a lot about what God desires for this relationship.

But there's more coming.

Ezer

It is not good for the man to be alone, God said. So what's the solution? God brings around a truckload of animals and the man names them and they have fun hanging around and playing frisbee in the garden. But the man still doesn't have what he needs.

Why does God do this? Doesn't he know what the man needs?

Wait a minute. Remember -- this is not about what happened back then, it's about what happens now. It's about you. It's about me. So this part of the story is incredibly helpful to me. When I go looking for the solution to my loneliness in some other place -- on my treestand during deer season, or out in a boat, or in a novel or writing a blog or ... (where do YOU go looking for solutions apart from God? Fill in the blank) ... we find that as good as these things are, they don't satisfy. When I was in college and had tons of discretionary time, I hardly ever went hunting. Why? These days I would kill for a tenth of the free time I had then. Back then I had a ton of excuses for not getting out in the woods every Saturday throughout the fall, but reality is that I already had enough solitude during college, and I didn't need any more.

When I have a few days at home to myself, when my wife and daughters are gone, at first I revel in grinding my way through a few escapist novels or movies with lots of suspense and explosives (two things Julie is allergic to onscreen) -- but then I start wandering the house aimlessly and all the books and movies waiting for me look like loneliness and boredom waiting to happen. I've been around the block enough to realize that I don't need more of those things.

One huge danger for us is that sometimes we buy into other activities to fill our loneliness, or we let our appropriate appetites grow beyond their appropriate boundaries. So a man develops an escapist habit of reading or fishing or golfing or woodworking or just plain working. These are good activities within boundaries, but they are unhealthy when they are allowed to grow too dominant in our lives. Then there are activities that are unhealthy from the start, and they will take a lonely person and make an addict out of him. So he turns to pornography that for a few minutes makes him feel alive, or alcohol in quantities enough to dull his pain. He gets addicted to the adrenaline rush of online poker because he keeps thinking he's about to score big, or he just whiles away the hours with the fictional courage of video games.

It's not good for the man to be alone.

So God creates a ... well, let's see. This is a tough word to translate. So let's stick with the Hebrew for a minute, because in English we get messed up in a hurry. God creates an "ezer" for the man. Not exactly just "for the man" either, but to be with the man. Like peanutbutter was created for jelly, or rubber rafts and whitewater rapids were made for each other.

What is an "ezer"? Most English translations say something like "helper". That works, sort of, as long as we don't think "assistant." I've often wished for an assistant; someone who could come along behind me and do all the detail work, so I could just focus on high and lofty and non-messy things. More honestly, I've wanted an assistant so I wouldn't have to clean up after myself. God is not saying he will make an assistant for the man. In fact, if you take a look through the rest of the Bible, "ezer" does mean "helper." But the only other way it's used in the Bible is to refer to God as the helper, as in "God is a very present help in time of trouble" (See Psalm 46). So unless you're tripping through life thinking God is there to clean up after you -- if that's the case we need to talk, seriously -- you have to realize that an "ezer" in Genesis 2 is not a way for a man to get a little clerical help.

So when God says he wants to make a help perfect for the man -- the King James says "a help meet for him" which is not coining a new term, "helpmeet" which means assistant -- instead it means a help fitting for him. In the liturgy we used in church when I was a child there was a line that said, "It is truly meet, right, and salutary that we should at all times and in all places offer praise to you, O Lord ..." "Meet" means fitting, perfect. In the world of cool toys we'd say it's "custom." So God decides to make for the man one who will be a custom-made help, one who will be perfectly made for him to take away the ungoodness of his loneliness. All the other good things in creation -- fish and birds and zebras and koala bears, even golden retrievers -- fall short of what the man needs. But this "ezer" will be the perfect partner, the perfect help, the perfect one who bears the nature of God for him in a way that pierces through his illusions and his isolation to reconnect him to God, to himself, and to her.

Do we have any concept of the gift men and women are supposed to be to each other? This is where it becomes so important to read God's word not for entertainment but so that we might understand who we are, why we exist, and how we must live.

I brake for poetry

Change of pace -- this is something I wrote roughly twenty-five years ago and filed away. I was intrigued at the time by the idea of something in Gerard Manley Hopkins' poetry that a critic labeled "inscape" -- the use of an external landscape to describe the condition of the soul. So I played with it in an attempt to capture what the soul -- my soul -- goes through in coming to repentance.

Inscape: The Prodigal Turns

Prologue: Narcissism

In a far country, dreams grow like ivy up the sides of the valley;

all they touch is trimmed in gaudy green

with streaks of brilliant red.

The earth turns. Emerald leaves wither and die.

An avalanche of brown precedes the snowline

as it falls from the hilltops.

Autumn: Hubris

A cat, death brooding in its eyes, stalked a sparrow.

The bird neither sowed nor reaped, nor took measures

for its own defense.

Cats may levitate if need be, rising slowly

above brown earth for a mouthful of bloody down;

mine did. I mourned silently for the bird, but cried out

in awe of the spectacle: Life from death.

My cat only chewed hollow bones

and left a scarlet-black stain on the earth.

Winter: Recognition

Hell is bright days in winter

when the sun has no power to warm.

I cannot open my eyes, partly for the cold

and partly for the light jabbing icicles

through my eyelids. Ice-crystal rainbows

obscure frost-rimmed trees ringing like bells

in the breeze, or cracking like a firing squad at sunrise.

Too grand for me, this miracle-laden landscape

must remain external, and behind my eyelids

I stand face to face with my pettiness.

Spring: Surrender

Aggressive freshets of meltwater steer

downhill; they seek a river. Before reaching its banks

they are a flood to give even Noah pause.

Death swims these raging waters.

As days go by, the deluge recedes;

I see muddy fields, barren and fertile as my own soul,

awaiting the sower.

Alone

One of my favorite e. e. cummings poems goes like this:

l(a

le

af

fa

ll

s)oneliness

The poem is usually referred to by the title "loneliness" and it's worth pondering a bit to see all that cummings packs into this tiny little creation, the emotion that he communicates in a number of different ways ... I think cummings understood well what God says about you and me, "It is not good for the man to be alone."

There is a huge difference between solitude and loneliness. Jesus was a great advocate of solitude, and the rest of the Bible backs him up. "Be still and know that I am God," declares Psalm 103. Mark 1:35 tells us that "A great while before day, Jesus got up and went to a solitary place where he prayed." Solitude is almost a requirement -- at least sometimes -- for a relationship with God.

But loneliness is different. While solitude can be abundantly full of the presence of God, loneliness is desperately empty. Solitude offers the opportunity for reflection; loneliness drives me to despair. When we seek out solitude, we give God room to work in us. Sitting quiet for a half hour in the mornings, reading my Bible and praying, and sometimes just staring out my window at the pine trees, is a discipline of solitude for me. Leaving the radio off when I'm in the car is another that I practice from time to time. Do you have disciplines of solitude? God will honor these times with his presence.

Yet God can use loneliness also. There is an emptiness in loneliness that allows us -- sometimes forces us -- to face our brokenness, to face our wounds, to face the reality of ourselves in a new way. One of the formative experiences of my life was in 1998 when I graduated from seminary. For graduation, my wife gave me a wonderful gift -- three days alone in the Boundary Waters. I prepared and plotted, rented a solo canoe and chose a route that looked pretty remote. I intentionally didn't bring a novel or any other time-fillers -- I was so looking forward to the solitude. After a hard day's paddle to my first campsite I settled in to enjoy the peace and quiet -- and I was immediately uncomfortable. Nervous. Fidgety. The hours crept by. I got my fishing rod out. I paddled around the lake. I watched a moose. I tracked a bear. Another hour crept by. I began to face a hard truth: without something to do, I was nearly frantic. All the peace and quiet was stressing me out. The isolation I had longed for was killing me. At the bottom line, I had to learn a difficult truth on that trip -- I was not the man I thought I was. I had thought I was all about peace and quiet, that I loved solitude and that I was quite comfortable with myself.

Oops.

So that trip became an enormous learning experience for me. It was not good for me to be alone. I began to see a lot of my drivenness didn't come from my class demands at seminary, my hectic schedule wasn't something being forced on me from outside. I filled my days because I was afraid to be quiet, afraid to be alone.

Ouch.

Those three days became a defining experience in my life. A few years ago I talked to a friend who spends a lot of solo time in the Boundary Waters and told him about that trip in '98. "You think three days is bad," he chuckled. "Five days is the real crazy time. If you can get past day five you're good up to about ten. But five is really tough." I don't know that I'll have a chance to do a five day solo trip anytime soon, but I'd like to try it. I'd like to plan for solitude -- including some good activities like a novel and a journal and a route that requires me to move from place to place. I'd like to plan that trip as a way to seek God. And I expect that some of it would be uncomfortable and lonely, and that's okay, because God can use that to teach me as well.

I think guys especially struggle with this business of being alone. Most of us have so many walls up that it's easier sometimes to be alone, even if we are lonely. But we want to be alone on our own terms, and come back to rub shoulders with others when we're ready. I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing, but we need to give God access to our rhythms of together and alone so that he can use our solitude and our loneliness and our togetherness and our community to shape us and to teach us. At the risk of stereotyping, women tend to be hardwired more for relationships. So there are a lot of isolated men hiding behind their walls, involved with lonely women who wish for them to come back into the relationship. But too many men haven't figured out how to invite anyone inside the walls, how to not be alone, even with someone else. Even in a marriage, even in a room full of people, these men are alone, and some of them don't even know it. They just think they're miserable because ... well, just because. Have another beer and try not to think about it.

So we discover again that God knows what he's talking about. It is not good for the man to be alone. There are deep wells to explore in this, but it starts with facing our isolation and seeking God in the solitude.

Isaiah 51

As I posted earlier, I've been living in Isaiah for a while now as far as my own devotion time goes. One of the things that always amazes me about Isaiah 40-66 is how much emphasis there is on God as the creator. Over and over again God proclaims himself the creator or Isaiah extols him as the creator or one or the other of them lays down the distinction between God, the true creator, and idols, who are pretty much created by a craftsman. There's a lot of responsibility that gets laid at God's feet, being the creator and all (see Isaiah 47, for instance).

But the other day when I reread Isaiah 51, I was blown away by the way God wants to re-create us when we are damaged, worn down, beat up, sin-stressed, or otherwise hurt. Take a look at verse 3, for example:

The LORD will surely comfort Zion
and will look with compassion on all her ruins;
he will make her deserts like Eden,
her wastelands like the garden of the LORD.
Joy and gladness will be found in her,
thanksgiving and the sound of singing.

God is speaking here to people who have lost everything, and he says that into their desert, into their barrenness, he will create anew the garden of Eden. He's using Genesis the way we've been using Genesis. He's saying, "It's YOUR story. I'm going to create you anew, and just like the world was fresh and clean and verdant and glorious, so will you be."

So guess what? If this is you, see what God wants to do?

Percolating

I've been percolating for several days now on the last entry on this blog, thinking about what it means to accept what God says about me, who he says I am, who he wants me to be is who I should be, etc. Every time I find myself starting to get ambitious -- meaning, starting to get riled up to do something with myself that is outside God's intention for me, something that is designed to improve my image or my ability (and this is the key part) so I feel better about myself, I turn away from it and turn back to what God says about me.

Offhandedly this morning my wife said, "Did I tell you the other day that I think you ought to read Isaiah 43 through 45? Actually it was more a sense that you should start reading at 43, I don't know how far you should read." So I read Isaiah 43-50 for my devotions this morning, and kept being confronted with what God says is true about me, and more importantly what is true about HIM. He is the creator. He is the one who makes plans and makes them happen.

So my recommendation for the day? Spend some time in Isaiah 43-50 and see who God is.

I guarantee you that this will come back around to Genesis and the garden of Eden, but I'm not going to give away the secret yet. Have fun!