Winning Him Without Words: 10 Keys to Thriving in Your Spiritually Mismatched Marriage (8 page)

At the time, our financial picture was intense. In the past, I would have expressed my worry and would have even made suggestions to push my husband in a specific direction. This time, I decided I would be the pillar by his side and show him I
trusted his judgment completely to handle our financial situation. This was not easy for me. I’ve never been one to bite my tongue, but I do tend to clench my jaw. Let’s just say, my jaw stayed pretty sore throughout this period.

I could not have done this without God’s leading and strength. I amazed even myself, but I knew my actions affirmed my husband’s role as the leader of our household and showed him I believed we would be fine.

Amazing things happened. Instead of the stressful situation putting us at odds with one another, we grew closer—even to the point that my husband would send me messages on my phone or computer to tell me he loved or missed me. (He hadn’t done that in quite a while.)

The more I aligned myself with him as I sensed God calling me to do, and the more I showed my husband that I respected his decisions and trusted him, the more my husband drew closer to me. A whole new realm of truth opened up to me.

I know this isn’t easy and, as I said, I don’t think I could have done this without God’s strength. No, I
know
I couldn’t have. My way would have been to nag, worry and add to the stress of the situation. But God showed me that by doing this His way, I honored and respected not only my husband but God as well. And let me tell you, nothing is more exciting, invigorating and peaceful than obedience to God’s will. I had peace in the middle of an impending storm.

I am my beloved’s, and his desire is for me
.

SONG OF SOLOMON 7:10,
ESV

We see it in movies and books. The woman goes into the world, convinced she has a soulmate out there somewhere. She’ll go
from man to man, until she finds the right one. Unfortunately for our heroine, each man takes her farther and farther away from a true love relationship. She’s become the victim of a trap that many women fall into.

Most of us grew up thinking that there is only one person in the world who will meet all our needs. And when our marriage fails or when we’re not happy, we question our marriage choice.

I know I grew up believing this lie, and I even bought into it during the early years of my marriage. When my husband didn’t meet my needs, I wondered if I’d made a mistake.
Did I marry the wrong guy? What if my true soulmate is still out there, looking for me?

Thinking this way is a lethal trap, deadly to a marriage and destructive to the heart of our unsuspecting man who hasn’t a clue about our misconceptions. Can’t you just see the question mark sprouting from your husband’s head?

We actually do have this desire for our deepest needs to be met by the one most important to us. The mistake too many of us make is in seeking this from a person and not from the God who created us to need Him. God designed us with a need for deep love—to be seen and acknowledged, treasured and appreciated; to be known and understood on the deepest of levels. We can’t possibly expect our husbands to fulfill that need 100 percent of the time without fail.

But we often do.

When we seek this from our husband, we are putting godlike expectations on an incapable human being. Our husband can’t possibly fulfill this need, and he’ll wind up feeling like a failure when he tries. And we end up feeling unloved, undesired and resentful. This resentment then creeps in and threatens the marriage relationship.

Instead, God wants us to look to Him for those needs. When our expectations are rightly placed in the One who created
those needs in the first place, we discover a freedom in our marriage that allows us to be the woman God created each of us to be and the wife He needs us to be so that He can work through us to reach our husband. The burden is taken off our man, as is the label of failure. We can then respect our husband as he is and love him unconditionally.

How do we love our man unconditionally? First John 4 is one of the most powerful books of the Bible about God’s love. You can read that book over and over again and still not completely grasp just how deeply God loves us. The key, though, is right in verse 19, a verse quoted by Lynn in the previous chapter:

We love because he first loved us (1 John 4:19).

Let that truth wrap around your brain, and truly accept it. Then and only then will it reach the depths of your heart and that deepest of needs. It may take time, but to truly love unconditionally requires us to comprehend that we are loved unconditionally by God. This is a turning point to understanding true love (sacrificial love) and the beginning of loving and respecting our husband through God’s strength, not our own.

Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us
.

HEBREWS 12:1

If you are like me, you have prayed for weeks, days, months, perhaps even years for your spouse’s salvation. The prayers now, however, aren’t as frequent as before. Instead, a sense of
hopelessness has slowly replaced the original fervency of your petitions. You’ve asked so many times, yet God seems to either not hear you or your spouse has an unusually thick skull. Nothing’s getting through. I can only say one thing: Don’t stop now.

While living in Europe, I was part of a small support group for unequally yoked women. For one of our monthly sessions, our small-group leader did a wonderful thing: She planned a meeting with six female guests who were once unequally yoked. Each of the six women shared her journey as an unequally yoked spouse, including the pièce de résistance: how her spouse had come to Christ and where he stood as of that day.

I remember one woman sharing how her young daughter wound up influencing her husband to make the all-important decision to become a Christian. Others spoke of life-changing events playing a significant role. One woman mentioned the 12 years she waited, praying for her husband to accept Christ. Twelve years.

I recall thinking,
That won’t be me
. Little did I know then that my years would exceed hers.

The one thread that ran through all their testimonies was prayer. Keep praying, keep believing, and then pray some more. Prayer is the key ingredient here, but how do we keep going when we see nothing change? How do we persevere when the enemy’s whispering things in our ear?

“He’ll never change, so why bother?”

“You blew up at him yesterday. What kind of witness can you possibly offer?”

“It’s hopeless. There’s nothing you can do.”

I’ll admit, I haven’t always prayed consistently for my husband; but since God told me my husband was my Jericho and that I was to march around him in prayer, I’ve stuck to a weekly prayer schedule to keep me on track.

Have I seen any change since then? No.

Have I witnessed a softening of my husband’s heart toward God? No.

Have I quit praying? No.

At one point, God grabbed my attention again and told me to step things up: more prayer, more marching, daily, keep it going. Why? I don’t know. Maybe the battle for my husband’s soul was more intense at the time. What I do know is that God is big enough to just snap His fingers and make it happen. He knows my prayer before I even speak it. So why more, why now?

Because I wasn’t ready.

Feel free to read that line again. It surprised me when I wrote it.

Go back to the time you started praying for your spouse. Spend a little time there and look at who you were then. Now come back to the present and answer this question: Are you the same person now that you were then?

I’m betting you said no. (If not, then we really need to talk!) You may not see any changes in your husband, or perhaps you see some miniscule movement in the right direction, but I’m guessing you’ve changed significantly. The road has been rough, full of potholes, but each time you bounced through one of those setbacks, you wound up stronger, better able to handle the next difficulty in the road.

Prayer is truly a journey. When we open our heart and align our will with God’s, we can’t help but be transformed. God is just that way. Even when our prayers seem to ricochet like rubber balls, He’s there, helping us pitch the next throw.

The point is to keep pitching, keep praying. Don’t give up. Don’t let the enemy win. God wants us to have the best arm possible so that when that day comes—that amazing day when our spouse says yes to Jesus—we’ve got the muscle to help him walk his own journey of prayer and faith.

But the man who loves God is known by God
.

1 CORINTHIANS 8:3

One day as I wrote down a prayer, the ache in my heart formed into five words: “to know and be known.” Baffled by its meaning, yet fearful of the ramifications, I realized that this was one of my deepest needs and something I wanted desperately in my marriage. I thought if my husband shared my faith, he would truly know who I was.

“To know and be known.”

What’s at the heart of this plea-like desire? If you’re like me, your faith defines who you are. At your very core, you find God, and everything you do is affected by this relationship.

Now I don’t say this to appear more than I am. Believe me when I say that the closer I come to Christ, the more I see how truly fallen I am. No, this goes deeper. It goes to a deep need to share ourselves with our Creator and with our husband.

But here’s our dilemma: How do we share our authentic self when the very essence that defines us is a Creator our husband refuses to acknowledge? We already struggle with who we are in a society that tells us we’re not good enough, no matter what we do. Our marriage is supposed to be a place where we can be our true self, secure in the knowledge that we are loved and accepted. But what happens when what we believe is unacceptable to the one we’ve committed to spend our life with? Let’s look at this in two parts:

1. “To know.” I want to know and understand my spouse, to relate to him on a spiritual level. Yet our mismatch makes this virtually impossible. I can’t know him this way, because he is still entrenched in his worldly state. The spirit I long to connect with isn’t there. But to
delve deeper is to understand that who I truly long to know is God—to understand my place in His kingdom and to find peace in this knowledge.

2. “And be known.” I want my husband to know who I am, to understand that my faith defines who I am at the very core of my being. Again I am drawn to connect with him on this spiritual level. To look further is to see a deep-seated need to be known by God. To know I matter to Him. That I am more than just one of many and unique in the Master’s eye.

Our natural tendency is to search for fulfillment of our greatest needs in the ones we are closest to: our husband, our children, our friends, our ministries, our jobs. Yet God desires that He be the One we turn to for this deep fulfillment and connection. This is the essence of our relationship with Him—our one true love. And He’s the One who placed this desire within us to point us right back to Him.

I can’t relate to what it feels like to be married to a believer. I can only imagine it, picture it, desire it—deeply yearn for and even dream about it. I’m guessing you feel the same. But therein lies a question we have to ask ourselves at some point:
Do I want my husband’s salvation more than I want Jesus?

Anything in our lives that becomes more important than our relationship with God is an idol. And we can so easily make an idol out of our husband’s salvation, desiring it more than even our own relationship with God.

Part of this goes back to what I said in the previous section about not being ready. Our husband is not the only one God is working on. He’s changing us, too—preparing us. Why? So that when our husband finally takes this step, we aren’t tempted to seek him to fill this need instead of God. As much as we want
our husband to know Jesus, God wants us to know Him first and foremost.

And if you’ve walked with God long enough and read the Bible, you know how He feels about idols. He will not tolerate them because He knows what we really need is so much better than what we think we want. My experience has proven this truth time and again.

Amazingly, when we put God first in our lives, our deepest needs are met. Oftentimes, the met needs are ones we didn’t even know we had. And the beauty of it all? In God’s presence, we are known from head to toe—our thoughts, our needs and even our dreams.

Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see
.

HEBREWS 11:1

So how do we keep hoping—and praying—when everything we see tells us that there is no hope? And how do we go beyond our own earthly hope and experience God’s wild hope?

According to Hebrews 11:1, the very definition of faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see. But how do we apply that to situations that leave us feeling hopeless, as if our prayers are unheard and unanswered? So often we see the struggle of being unequally yoked as a battle for us to simply hang on to our own faith. In the midst of the adversity the mismatched marriage naturally brings, we find ourselves praying and hoping for our husband’s salvation. Day after day we petition God. Months or even years pass with no visible change.

As I became more involved in this ministry to the unequally yoked, and as my own family was hit by an unexpected
trial that turned our lives upside down, this became my main question to God: How do we continue to hope and persevere in prayer? I searched my concordance and found one principle Scripture that for me shed a high-focus light beam on this dimly lit subject:

Even youths grow tired and weary, and young men stumble and fall; but those who hope in the L
ORD
will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint (Isa. 40:30-31).