When Faith is Like Your Marriage

Introducing Little Miss Can’t Be Wrong

When I say I love my husband of nearly forty-seven years, I’m not referring to romantic love the way I did at one time. Now, love means doing a lot of stuff I don’t want to do and tolerating habits and attitudes I don’t like. To be honest, I’m usually more than a little irked. But although I feel like wringing his neck at times—OK too much of the time—our bond seems to run deep and strong.

I have the same kind of relationship with God. Oh sure, I worship, praise and glorify the Almighty every single day. But like a long-term spouse, I can always find something that’s not to my liking. Whether God is late again with the answer to prayer I was seeking or if I don’t receive as much as I want, there I am, Little Miss Can’t Be Wrong, with my hand on my hip and a scowl on my face.

Long-term marriages are often like this, no matter if you’re talking about your physical partner or your relationship with God. You can carp, judge, and be disappointed with both humans and the Lord of All and still be deeply in love.

If you’ve been with a partner for long, you probably have your own peeves, pet or otherwise. The toilet seat’s always left up, someone chews way too loud, he/she never/always remembers to fill-in-the-blank. We’re so darn human.

Same. My skin crawls every time I bite my tongue to keep from blasting out judgment. For instance, my newly discharged-from-hospital sweetheart has been receiving nicotine patches for seven weeks. Long enough to get past the cravings and the addiction that cigarettes provide. But what does he want? You guessed it.

And there’s not one damn thing I plan to do about it.

For nearly half a century, I’ve been his Nagger-in-Chief. Most other vices I’ve been able to persuade him to drop. He no longer complains about reheated leftovers as “used food.” Sometimes he remembers about the toilet seat. But R.J. Reynolds has always won out over perfectly sane and convincing statistics, dramatic “second-hand smoke” worries and other forms of begging.

Before you clutch your pearls, remember that most of our parents thought cigarettes were fine for grown-ups. Geez, my own dad used to put out his after-dinner butt in his dinnerplate. That was enough for me to vow never to smoke.

But then, in my twenties, I bought Benson & Hedges like a rebellious seventh-grader and tried to hide my habit from my grandmother. I gave it up long ago, but I really have no room to complain about my husband’s latter-day light-ups.

Before my adoptive dad died of complications of kidney disease in the 1980s, the doctors told him, “Smoke if it makes you feel alive.” The idea was that the burden of dialysis already drained away his time, so a smoke here and there wasn’t going to make much difference.

My dear husband has the same excuse: hemodialysis takes at least fifteen hours a week; his broken ribs, neck and sternum cause aggravation and pain even now; he’s trying to keep from that internal bleeding again. Add in occasional congestive heart failure and being so thin you can practically see through him, and it makes sense. Why torture him anymore?

You can carp, judge, and be disappointed with both humans and the Lord of All and still be deeply in love.

And yet, I’m upset. These days, it’s so not cool to be a slave to tobacco. At least if he vaped I couldn’t smell that stale awful odor. But no. I’ve talked myself blue in the face, and he isn’t persuaded. “I’m a Marine and I’ve been smoking since I was fifteen,” he says, and then won’t talk to me for an hour.

And although I don’t think God smokes, I sometimes run into that same problem. I lay my judgy, know-it-all ideas on God and then I hear crickets for a time. After a while, I panic and cry out, “Are you there, God? It’s me, Dum-dum.” Of course, God just sighs and wraps those arms around me.

After that hour of silence, my husband does the same.

I ask myself why the two most important relationships in my life always seem to take me back after I’ve stepped in it big time. I’m not exactly known to be an excellent wife or even a so-so saint. So why do I always end up cocooned in love?

All I can think of is that when your love is this complete, you overlook the mistakes, snafus and raised toilet seats. Love drills down deep for living water that sustains when you are walking through the desert of the Cold Shoulder. My spouse understands that when I say or do stuff that hurts, I’ll be right there at his side soon enough.

Maybe God invented the word longsuffering for times when the Master of the whole entire universe has to wait out a temper tantrum or a narrow-minded judgment. Yet without gobs of love, I wonder if even God might give up on people like me.

The next time my longsuffering husband decides to reach for the Camel Filters, he’ll be very aware that I wish he wouldn’t. But although I could tell him all sorts of things for his own good, I’ll let God be in charge of that and keep my piehole shut. Being loved by those I love is enough to make me more loving more of the time.