Growing Together, Not Apart

PART II

What matters is not whether you grow in perfect parallel. What matters is whether you stay invited into each other’s growth.

James’s grandparents understood this instinctively, the way long-married people sometimes understand things without being able to articulate them. When one of them moved through something (whether a loss, a shift in health, a quiet change in what they needed) the other moved toward it, not away. They didn’t require each other to stay the same. They required each other to stay close. There’s was no secret to any of it. As Granddad would say, “You just be a man, and she just be a woman.” 

The pastors’ wives we have admired most are women who could tell you, in specific terms, what their husband was wrestling with theologically at forty and at sixty, and whose husbands could say the same of them. Not because they had identical callings, but because they had made a discipline of keeping each other informed, narrating their interior lives out loud, and making the other person a witness to who they were becoming.

That practice of staying a witness to each other’s becoming is not a personality trait. It is a choice. A repeatable, learnable, daily choice.

The Discipline of 

Growing Together

Growth that pulls a marriage apart rarely announces itself as a crisis. It announces itself as busyness, as independence that feels healthy, as two people who love each other but have simply stopped sharing the interior of their lives.

When couples stop narrating their hopes to each other, they don’t immediately feel the distance, but it accumulates. The things that once connected them like the shared projects, the common routines, the pillow talk conversations quietly fade out. One day, without any particular moment to point to, they find themselves living with each other rather than doing life together.

The worthwhile question to sit with: Is your spouse on the inside of that change that you’re experiencing or watching it from a distance?

Keep them on the inside. Share what you’re learning, what you’re hoping for, what is quietly shifting in you. Invite them into your challenges before you’ve resolved them on your own. They are more valuable as an advocate and intercessor than a spectator.

The goal was never simply to stay married. It was to keep becoming together.

“Therefore encourage one another and build each other up.”

– 1 Thessalonians 5:11