If I could give one gift to married couples, parents, roommates, and fellow Christians, I think it might be…compassion.
Let me try to explain why we often lack it, and why it’s so essential to strive for more of it, with this analogy. Prior to filming the curriculum for Sacred Pathways last fall, a dermatologist recommended I have a few white bumps under my eyes (syragamas) taken off. They’re not a big deal, but with camera closeups, I thought he was probably right.
The dermatologist who took them off said the spots would scab up and he warned me not to scratch them or the marking could become permanent. When he first said it, I thought. “How gross! Who would scratch off scabs?”
I said that because I didn’t realize how much they would itch, especially during a run. For all my running life, if something itched during a run, I’d scratch it to get relief. It’s automatic. But I had to intentionally remember to live with that itch. Scratching for immediate relief would create long-term problems.
That’s a picture of addictions and bad habits. Without the “addiction” or “bad habit,” the thought of scratching seems gross, weak, repugnant: “How could anyone do that?” Feeling the itch firsthand you think, “Ahhhh. Now it makes sense…”
Compassion is difficult if we’ve never felt the “itch.” We can’t imagine why some people do such destructive things; it makes no sense, so we judge them and look down on them and think of them as weak.
Because men and women are different beings with different brains, I’ve worked hard to help wives have compassion for men, and husbands to have compassion for women. Each gender has different “itches” and some spouses, frankly, lack any compassion for any itch they’ve never felt.
I just finished reading Elin Hilderbrand’s novel Summer of ’69. One of the many substories portrays a wife who is pushing her husband away by becoming an alcoholic. Her only son has been sent to Vietnam and basically she just wants to put herself in a stupor until her son returns home. It’s too painful for her to be conscious; the danger is real. While her choice of comfort is making things worse, you can at least understand the itch of a mother’s love and terror. Her husband is understandably angry at her behavior, but lacks compassion for the underlying cause. He doesn’t have to excuse what she’s doing, but it might help if he took a moment to understand why she’s doing what she’s doing.
Last weekend I spoke at a conference where a pastor gave his testimony about overcoming porn. He mentioned that 70% of men struggle with this—that seems high to me, and I’ve seen slightly lower numbers reported by Barna (around 64-65%). There’s a reason this is such a common struggle for men: Dr. Louann Brizendine, who studied at Yale and Harvard and is now on the faculty of UCSF Medical Center, states that “Men have two and a half times the brain space devoted to sexual drive in their hypothalamus.” While there are many differences in our brains, in general, the struggle for sexual purity isn’t the same for a husband as it is for a wife, for the simple reason that sexual thoughts are going to be far more frequent and common and more easily stirred in the husband. Thankfully, in my experience, this changes somewhat as we age, and science backs this up as men’s testosterone does tend to decrease with every decade of life.
This doesn’t lessen the impact, however. I’ve read one study that revealed about 35% of women who find out their husbands look at porn have legitimate PTSD. One confession from their husband won’t “cure” PTSD. When a guy, just weeks or even a couple months later, says, “When are you going to get over this?” he’s displaying a cold heart without compassion. He doesn’t get how hurtful his actions were to his wife. He can understand why he looked at porn; he doesn’t understand how his wife doesn’t understand why he looked at porn, and he just wants her to get over it. He lacks compassion for the depth of her pain and the feeling of betrayal. The couples I have seen who have grown closer through this struggle usually have a husband who remains genuinely repentant and humble, and who strives to understand the hurt from his wife’s perspective. He develops compassion for her.
Most men who look at porn started long before they were married, so it’s never a wife’s fault when he keeps looking at porn after marriage; it is monstrous to blame the wife for this, even if she has allowed the sexual relationship to cool somewhat. But compassion reaches past fault-finding to seek understanding, and then to offer help with empathy.
I have compassion for wives whose hearts are broken and whose souls feel devastated when they find out their husbands have been mentally unfaithful with porn; of course they are hurting and no, they shouldn’t have to live with that kind of behavior. But I also feel compassion for the men who were often tempted by porn as young boys while never looking for it, and who soon found themselves struggling with a temptation that got into their brain and just won’t let go. Without excusing the behavior at all, I’d simply like to point out that if this was an easy struggle to win, I don’t think 65% of men would be losing it. And, as a pastor, I’ve never seen shame help someone change. In his book Unwanted, Jay Stringer makes a compelling case that shame is the empowering agent behind this struggle. Casting shame instead of compassion is likely to make a bad problem grow worse.
In this world, however, we pit men against women and women against men. There are blogs that always take the women’s side, and a lot of angry spouses who have been hurt by their husbands share their outrage. And I’ve read blogs that always take the men’s side, and a lot of angry husbands hurt by their wives share their outrage. I’ve been attacked by both kinds of blogs! (The men’s blog laughed at me for being bald, which, in their minds, proved I’m a weak man who always takes the women’s side. I’d like to see them tell that to the Rock…)
In another vein, people sometimes wonder how I could have written Sacred Marriage and When to Walk Away. The answer is compassion. When you see the nightmare an abused woman must live with, as she is emotionally and/or physically terrorized and crushed in spirit, you can’t, if you have any degree of compassion, legalistically tell her to “get over” her fears and stick to her vows. Taken in its cultural context, Jesus said what he said about divorce to protect women, not to imprison them. Out of compassion, you want to write a book like When to Walk Away. God has given me great compassion for the victims of bullying and abuse.
On the other hand, when you’ve witnessed the awful destruction that divorce foisted as a weapon (due to selfishness, disappointment, or difficulty), you want to urge the church to reach a little higher, to learn the spiritual lessons that only difficult marriages can teach (if we don’t run from them). That’s when you want to write a book like Sacred Marriage. God has given me great compassion for the victims of divorce (spouses and children).
Many in the church want me to choose sides but that’s not something I’m willing to do. Life rarely works that way.
If you want to cherish a spouse who has a lot of issues, you have to begin with compassion. Compassion begins with finding out what hurts our spouse has gone through and what may have led to their current “itch.” Abuse, shame, neglect, or maybe poor choices that created the grooves for an addiction that they’re now trying to fight as an adult aren’t easy to get over or master. Whatever created the itch, I want to have compassion for the itch even if I’ve never felt it, and I want to celebrate their effort and courage to stop itching.
Last year I read Addiction and Grace: Love and Spirituality in the Healing of Addictions by Dr. Gerald May for the third time. It’s a rare contemporary book that gets that much attention from me but the reason I keep re-reading this one is that it gives me compassion for the universal struggle all of us have with attachments. The way Dr. May describes spiritual attachments basically labels every one of us an addict of some kind. Realizing I’m an addict, I can have more compassion for other addicts.
When I get weary of people destroying their lives, throwing away their families, making a bad situation worse by going back to the behavior that is ruining them, I ask “Why would they do that? …until I read May’s book, and then the question becomes, “Why do I do that?”
Compassion doesn’t mean your spouse or child or parent hasn’t and isn’t hurting you. Compassion doesn’t excuse offensive sin or destructive behavior. But compassion seeks to first understand and second offer itself as an agent of healing. It’s supernatural kindness, forgiveness, and grace. If you don’t think you need compassion, you’ll never be able to offer compassion. But without compassion, your relationships will remain worldly. A sacred marriage needs sacred compassion.
Shari says
Great article! I love your insights and perspectives. You always bring the gift of freedom by way of truth wrapped in grace and forgiveness.