marriage

A Paean for CJ

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FullSizeRenderIt was when I pulled out of the driveway that I knew. I knew I had to write it. Let me explain. She was sitting there with the dogs, watching me pull away to drive south again to Fort Benning for surgery this Thursday. I knew I had to write it. I can get it across on the page, things I don’t say as often or as well as I should—namely, that I am grateful for her, for her steadfastness, for her loyalty, for her feistiness, for her prayer life, for her deftness at organizing our lives, and on and on. I had to write it. To write what exactly? A paean to my wife who makes me better than I would otherwise be.

I learned an awful lot during my seminary years. And one of those lessons came by way of my favorite seminary professor. He was teaching us seminarians about personal discipleship. He was stressing that we could learn lots of theological precepts and still lose our marriages. Then he made this profound remark: “Don’t wait till Mother’s Day to realize if you have a Proverbs 31 wife.” Dr. Cutrer, my professor, could have ended class that moment. He was that gifted in teaching via example.

Proverbs 31:10-31 is perhaps the most obvious set of verses in Scripture where a godly wife is praised. King Lemuel uses synonymous parallelism in Hebrew poetry to make the point of how valuable a godly wife is. Here is just one example from verse 10: “An excellent wife who can find? She is far more precious than jewels” (Proverbs 31:10, ESV). Pretty straightforward, right? An excellent wife, according to Scripture, is worth more than fine jewels, and this was written circa 1,000 B.C. in an ancient Near East context, so precious jewels perhaps sparkled more in people’s thinking than they might today.

But what made Dr. Cutrer’s lesson for us more poignant was that Jane, his precious wife, was in class with him. She was at his side, serving alongside him to show us seminarians what an enduring commitment looked like. In short, the precept was theological (that God created, ordained, and loves biblical marriage) but also fleshed out in real lives. Theology was not just to be cerebral but incarnational. And that is why I had to write today—not primarily about theology but about my wife. Following are three examples of why I felt compelled to share.

 Example one: I love to work outside in the yard. Where I’m from, folks call it “piddlin’.” It is a catchall phrase. In my case, it usually involves doing something in the soil. From my mom and my maternal grandfather, I inherited a love for the earth—the smell of soil, a love of colors in nature, of flora, of things growing, etc. Some guys like to peruse sports cars; I like to walk through the garden section at Lowe’s, if that gives you an idea.

When I was outside piddlin’, my wife, CJ, pressure-washed both of the decks on the back of our house. We live in the woods, and so spiders and carpenter bees and all sorts of other creatures like to try and stake a claim on the decks of the house. So while I was out in the yard, my wife had gone down to the basement, hauled up a pressure washer, and sprayed off two decks. I don’t know of many husbands who would have complained. This one didn’t. Score one for the Proverbs 31 wife.

Example two: I have a surgery this week at Fort Benning to reconstruct my right shoulder. I’ll be operated on here, and then return to my barracks room to rest and recuperate, and hopefully, return home for a few days of convalescence. No big deal, right? No need for my wife to drive three hours south. Yet when I told her that I was good, that I had a buddy down here who had promised to look after me if anything goes wrong, she got … well, feisty. “Are you kidding me?” she asked, not really wanting any reply I might have offered. “I’ll be there. You’re having major surgery. Do you really think I’m staying home? Good grief, Pirtle.” Yep, not the brightest husband moment. Score another one for the Proverbs 31 wife.

Example three: I was in a church recently where a teacher was teaching on a couple of verses from one of the New Testament epistles. As part of his lesson, he cross-referenced a passage from another letter but when he cross-referenced the second passage, he did not explain the context of the passage at all. The passage was about dietary laws, not about what he was trying to emphasize. And I was troubled because context is crucial. A fundamental rule of correct interpretation is to know, understand, and teach the correct context. Put bluntly, we are never to rip verses out of context. Anyway, I was troubled but I did not say anything until my wife and I were talking after lunch. I told her what had transpired and she asked me this: “Will you just commit to pray about it (talking to the teacher) this week?” She knows I don’t like conflict, but she was right. Not only should I have gone to the teacher, but I should also have been praying and prayerful as I did it. But I had not. My wife was right on both counts and I was wrong. Score another one for the Proverbs 31 wife.

When I pulled away today to drive back down, she was on the driveway with the dogs. She would undoubtedly go in when I pulled away, make sure the kids were okay, straighten something in the house, perhaps read the book she’s working on currently, prep for the coming week, and wait for me to call and tell her I had made it to Benning again.

I have made it here now and reflected some on how much better I am because of her, on how far I still have to go, on how humbling it is to be chastened and loved by one who loves and remains alongside me despite knowing my many weaknesses.

Her parents (my in-laws) I have grown to love and respect more with each passing year, and two of the greatest blessings they gave this world were daughters, both of whom love the Lord. They (my in-laws, sister-in-law, and wife) know, too, that Proverbs 31 is not just for Mother’s Day homilies. It’s for us stubborn, sinful husbands who don’t tell you enough that you are more precious than jewels.

The Person’s Grammar vs. the Grammar of the Person

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Eight years of marriage to an abusive husband yielded bruised arms, bruised cheeks, and a battered soul. Yet some good came from those years of suffering. Now, she’s begun to talk about it all. How may one’s sufferings yield comfort, even joy, later?

A teacher asked his students on the first day of class to begin writing the first drafts of their autobiographies. Several students took quickly to the assignment. After all, one’s own story should bimgrese easy material about which to write, right? Perhaps. For some people. But not for at least one lady. What if, after all, one’s past is filled with memories, not of love, but of loss? How may one’s suffering be explained in a written assignment for school? How is one to even begin, if the pain is too close to the bone?

Ever noticed the old men with wrinkled skin that sit on the pine bench in a shopping mall? Sometimes they’re sipping coffee. Sometimes they’re wearing Members Only jackets and a fedora. Perhaps they have on plaid shirts with khaki pants. They wear brown Dr. Scholl’s loafers with thick comfortable soles. What are they doing? I used to think they were lonely or misplaced people. I don’t think that way as much anymore. Those wizened men are watching other people. They’re wondering about their stories. I like the way these bench observers seem unhurried, content to watch, sip their coffee, and imbibe their surroundings. You can see the sorrows written in their eyes, too. But they’ve learned to shape sorrows into lives. They’ve endured. And for some, they’ve gained wisdom. They’ve seen into the heart of the matter. More than a little of that skill came by leaning in—attending—to people at the right time.

When I, as the teacher, asked for the students’ drafts to be turned in the following week, one lady’s eyes told the story, even before she spoke. But she did finally speak.

“I, um, really struggled. May I have some more time to work on it?” she asked.

I suddenly felt like the old man on the bench at the mall. I watched the lady. I approached where she sat. She cowered behind her desktop computer.

“I just can’t seem to find the words. I’m really sorry,” she said.

“May I see what you have written so far?” I asked.

“Well, it’s not much,” she said, “and it’s not very good.”

“Let’s just take a look, okay?” I asked.

It didn’t take long to understand. I began reading. She’d married when she was 17 years old, already pregnant with her first child. Out of shame over the pregnancy, she had married the child’s father. Over the next eight years, she endured physical and emotional abuse. But her parents told her, “You will stay married. You will make it work.” And she never told her parents of the degree, or types, of abuse. She just told them it was tough being married.

Eight years and three more children. And abuse through it all. How could she write now, years later, divorced and scarred, in an English class with a deadline, about events that had battered her body and soul?

After I finished reading what she had written, I was not the same person. I raised my eyes. She was staring straight at me, to see what I thought. A stream of tears poured from her right eye, and moisture was building at her left eye. Her glasses were fogging from the tears. She’d begun to perspire. She was terrified about how I’d react.

“This is incredible. Not only is this the beginning of a remarkable autobiography, but you are remarkable for writing the truth, and for coming through to this point,” I said.

“Really?” she asked.

“Yes. Let’s work on it, okay?”

I pulled my MacBook over to her area. Now we both were behind her desktop computer. But she was no longer cowering. A wall had been demolished. I was not a threat. I was not a mean condemning man in her life. I was just her English teacher, and wanted to help.

We began reworking her autobiography. We did not erase her painful past, with all its horrific accuracy, from her autobiography. Initially, I had walked back to her in order to help her with written expression. I’d come to aid with mechanics, with subject–verb agreement, with diction. But life’s bruises intruded. Platitudes gave way to tears. She cried as she typed, and I tried not to look too much, but to encourage her as she pecked out her past on the keyboard, word by word.

We are continuing to work on it. But she’s writing now. The words are coming. She talks to me, too, about her past. I’ve become the old man on the bench at the mall, just by observing her—what she wrote, and what she couldn’t write yet.

There’s a unique humanity in teaching. It is akin to reading the soul’s language. Perhaps it’s not so different from that old man at the mall. He watches. He leans in. When appropriate, he advises.

I learn from my students. No, they’ve not taught me grammar, or love of language and literature; I’ve had those passions for decades. But I continue to learn that people are primary. Many live untouched by one who will attend, who will lean in, who will read what is there, but with compassion. We might find that our sorrows are more easily borne when shared. One of my favorite songwriters, John Brine, writes in “Hello in There”:

Ya know that old tress just grow stronger

And old rivers grow wilder ev’ry day

Old people just grow lonesome

Waiting for someone to say, ‘Hello in there, hello’

Sometimes it takes a song to remind me. Or perhaps a student who lets me read her current autobiography, and lets me lean in, and help her to form her future one. “Hello in there, hello.”