I first heard our doorbell on the day we moved in. One of the men who unloaded our belongings rang it while we stood in the chaos of our kitchen. “Quaint,” he remarked as he came inside. Its “ding-dong” is rather charming. But the bell that rings simultaneously in the basement sounds more like a bug zapper on a July evening.
When
our doorbell rang at 2 AM several months ago, I was awake and breaking out in a
cold sweat before the first “ding” reached “dong.” I say the first
“ding” because the doorbell didn’t stop ringing. The upstairs bell continued “ding-donging”
while the basement bell buzzed as if it was getting mobbed by a swarm of angry
insects.
“B.J.!”
I grabbed my husband’s arm. “Someone’s
at the door!” His feet hit the floor at
the same time as mine. I snatched my
bathrobe from the closet, hurried down the hall, and slammed into him as I
rounded the corner, heading for the front door.
I cautiously opened it.
Nobody was on the front step. I leaned
out and peered down our quiet street.
Nothing. I scurried back into the
house and found my husband dismantling the upstairs door bell. “Must be an electrical short,” he whispered. The ringing upstairs suddenly stopped, and he headed
downstairs.
I followed
him, still trembling, and attempted to make myself useful as he searched for
the wires that connected the basement doorbell to the outside button. I ran for a screwdriver, then parked on the
basement floor and busied myself as moral supporter. My relieved exclamations were punctuated with
snickering: “What would I do if this happened when you were not here! Honestly, B.J., what would I do?!”
I
still chuckle when I think back to that evening. You see, the day before that happened, I’d
been in a bad mood. My husband had done
something that had gotten on my nerves (I can’t remember what it was anymore),
and I’d allowed that to feed all sorts of unsanctified thoughts. “How is it even possible for us not to get on
each other’s nerves? Seriously, we have got to be the two most incompatible
people in the world…”
Gary Thomas, in his excellent book A Lifelong Love, addresses that
self-centered, discontented perspective.
“Some couples face the listlessness of self-absorption by thinking that
they married the wrong person. If they
had married someone else, perhaps the marriage would be more fulfilling. But…it wasn’t about anything lacking in
either one of them as people; it was about what they lacked as couple in the
sense of purpose.”
God sent an electrical short and
an incessantly ringing doorbell to remind me that when it comes to marriage, a shared
purpose and a little humor go a long way. The bitterness that festered when I
went to bed was vanquished in our frantic, mutual attempts to silence the doorbell
before we had half a dozen startled children on our hands at 2 AM. Furthermore, this little escapade served as a
rather comical reminder of the reality that together we share a far greater
purpose. God made us one so that we
could assist one another “in all things that belong to this life and a better.” He blessed us with children, and with those
children came the calling to raise them in the fear of His name. That’s the mission we share as a married
couple. What a privilege! And in the meantime we enrich our marriage as
we set smaller mutual goals and work together to achieve them.
How’s your marriage? Do you think you and your spouse lack
compatibility? Maybe it’s time you focus
instead on a shared mission.
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