Bringing It All Together 19: Toward a Healthy Marriage-- Trust

A healthy marriage fosters individuality (what we looked at yesterday) and also mutuality. Growing in togetherness cannot happen without TRUST.

The roots of trust are sown very early in our development. If your parents were attuned and responsive to your physical and emotional needs, then you are going to have an easier time trusting people--(God too!) even as an adult.

And if the opposite was true, trusting people will be a big struggle.

But it's not just about what happens when you are little, right? We have all lived a lot of life since childhood, and been hurt by the actions of others. We all develop ways of keeping ourselves safe from those we have felt hurt by. Self-protection keeps us from trusting others. And many times, for good reasons. It is good and right to establish healthy boundaries of protection from abusive and harmful situations. And yet, even with those who are not abusive and DO love us, we unknowingly act at times in self-protective ways based on patterns we do not see.

So how do you grow in deeper trust of your spouse, a fellow sinner like yourself, who does in fact hurt you at times?

Moving towards a person in trust will always be a challenge post-Fall. But the freedom to trust another becomes more possible when you see both the goodness and the depravity in yourself. If you believe that you were created with a glorious stamp of God's image, then it's easier for you to believe in another's created good (even when it doesn't seem that obvious.) And when you really see, own, and can sit with your own brokenness, then you can extend grace in another's mess as well. And the opposite is true. A person who has a hard time believing that they are a beautiful part of God's good creation will have a hard time affirming the dignity in others. And a person who is always pointing an accusing finger at other's mess has probably not experienced the grace of God in the midst of their own brokenness and sin.

A newly married student in our Adv. Marriage & Family class once asked our prof-- Well then, how long does it take?? (Read that with a tone of desperation!) He commented that after about 20 years (mind you, teaching marriage counseling is his career!) they just began to see the ways that he and his wife hid from each other. He asked another older women in the class to comment her thoughts. She agreed-- having been married 40+ years-- after 20 years, they were just starting to see their mess.

Yikes, you say. Is there hope? You mean growing a healthy marriage is going to take a whole lifetime? It would seem that is exactly how He has designed it to be.