When my husband and
I packed up and moved across the country to go to seminary in Chicago, I was
excited. The seemingly high calling of becoming a seminarian and wife made me
willing to take on the relocation from Phoenix and all of its challenges. I
quit the nursing job that I had landed right out of college. I left behind the
church I had been tightly connected to. I left the friends I had made and the
mentors I had. I moved farther away from family than I had ever been.
We lived off campus.
Once my husband was fully immersed in his classes and reading, I was still
searching for a job. I was spending my days in a basement apartment trying to
pinch pennies and trying not to miss home too much. In those weeks of waiting,
I started to question, Why am I here?
My husband had his thing, but what in the world should I be doing? Was I just
along for the ride?"
I knew that it was
my calling to be a "wife." To be emotionally supportive, and to help
my husband pursue his calling. But that knowledge fell a bit flat when it came
to my purpose and day-to-day drive. I was a smart woman, who had technical
skills in nursing, and who was going crazy without a seemingly important
"to do" list for my hours of solitude! There I was, waiting on the Board
of Nursing to transfer my license, twiddling my thumbs and watching iTunes move
trailers.
Eventually, I took a
job at a children's hospital, on the night shift. The first months of being new
at that hospital, sleep-deprived, and cold (new to Midwest winters without
proper attire) led to many tearful drives in big city traffic. It took us six
months to find a church that we wanted to be a part of. My fellow seminary
wives lived closer to campus. Things felt pretty rough.
The move was also
incredibly stressful on our marriage. My husband and I were—in essence—alone,
and we were rapidly discovering our initial assumptions about each other were
dramatically mistaken. Those first months, the basement would be filled with
yelling, rage, bitterness, scathing accusation, blame, and disappointment. My
husband thought about divorce, while I wallowed in my self-justified
hurt.
And so I died. We died.
Without fully
understanding even what was happening, I leaned in. I gave up believing my
emotions dictated what was true. I tried to admit when I was wrong. And it was
stupidly hard for me to do that. Sometimes it took hours of painful
conversation. It felt like agony. I changed some of my quirks, even though I
staunchly believed there was nothing that really had to be changed. I broke,
and my husband broke, and it hurt so badly.
The fact that all of
this happened when we went away to seminary is coincidental?
Seminary was the
catalyst in our particular case. We went to learn more about biblical
languages, theology, and the church. But, if there is one thing to be learned
when you go away to study God, it is to learn your own embarrassing failures. They
are to be undone. I needed to be an emotional disaster of a wife, and to see
that my own rabbit hole of delusional thinking goes farther than I ever knew.
And then I needed to stop looking at myself altogether, to stop navel-gazing—as
my pastor in the city put it—and rest in Jesus.
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