On Practice
“Two things You told me, that You are strong and You love me. Yes, You love me.” –Jon Foreman
Morning light on waves in Isle of Palms, SC
My husband recently officiated the wedding of our friends. In preparation, he dove head-on into marriage material: books, blogs, podcasts, and informal interviews with coworkers about their own marriages. Marriage became the primary topic occupying our minds for a few months.
Most of the content came from Dr. Tim Keller’s Meaning of Marriage podcast series with his wife, Kathy Keller, but we also drew from Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, and others.
As Matthew’s wife, I had the pleasure of watching him grow in the process. I also got to be on the receiving end of his reflections on marriage whenever we had free time.
We talked about everything — Genesis and Adam and Eve, the Biblical narrative of marriage and how it differs from both western and eastern concepts of marriage. We pondered the marriages of our friends and loved ones, and most importantly, we evaluated our own.
As we went through the process, one theme frequently emerged: the idea of practice within marriage.
Practice is worth considering in any context. As a child, I seemed to have endless energy to practice any and everything I wanted — drawing, cartwheels, sports, new languages, braiding my hair, piano, running. I would eagerly stay awake to read one more chapter or do one more back-handspring. Now, in adulthood, I take any opportunity to retreat to bed. It’s a shame, really.
A few years ago, my mom sent me an interview with Vivek Ramaswamy, the presidential candidate at that time from our hometown. My mom does this often. She’s fervent about shaping her kids’ minds, of which I have one.
I’m typically too busy to watch the content, but for some reason, I watched this one long enough to hear the interviewer comment on Mr. Ramaswamy’s marriage, noting that it seemingly survives the stress of political life, and asking for his marriage advice.
My interest was piqued.
I assumed he would answer with communication, honesty, commitment, or any of the true-but-not-necessarily-helpful one-liners on marriage. What he said instead, made me pause.
He smiled and said, “uh, I guess practice.” That was it.
Practice. It’s simple, but hard. For most activities, we practice for a set duration: doing algebra, learning to ride a bike, playing basketball. Careers often demand longer practice — my trade literally asks, how long have you been in practice, or where do you practice, as a common exchange.
While all of these make sense, I had never considered practice within the context of marriage. After hearing Mr. Ramaswamy’s answer, I have.
The common platitude is that marriage is hard. And marriage certainly is hard at times. But marriage is much more than hard. Marriage is fun — especially if you’re deep friends with your spouse. It is frustrating. It is complicated. It is ugly. It is beautiful. It is humbling. It is transformative. It is constantly changing.
Most importantly, marriage is permanent.
The permanence of marriage, the same trait that repels so many from it (and sometimes rightly so), is also what gives marriage its power.
Permanence is critical to marriage because you can’t fully practice with someone who could leave at any moment, with someone who isn’t locked into the arena of life with you.
You can’t be in a complex, living, dynamic relationship with someone to whom you don’t have committed daily proximity, because then you couldn’t spar, and consequently grow from that sparring. You couldn’t share your joys and fears. You couldn’t challenge their ways of thinking, and refine them.
I don’t necessarily, or even primarily, mean physical proximity, although I think this is very, very important. (A great book on this subject, if interested, is Our Bodies Tell God’s Story).
There are unfortunately plenty of relationships that have more proximity than a married couple who live under the same roof. We all know examples. I have seen it first-hand, often.
While there is a time for the role of functional roommates between a married couple, you’re missing the point if this is what you settle (or aim) for.
As Matthew and I prepared for his wedding speech, we encountered this idea of the importance of practice, of staying in the fight, over and over again — both in theory and in practice.
We had a ton of fun in the process. Many nights my abdominal muscles hurt from laughing. We also had our fair share of disagreements, a handful of arguments, hurt feelings on both sides, and moments of reconciliation.
Somewhere in the process, it hit me that we were practicing. We were living out the theoretical takeaways of the material we were studying on marriage.
The idea of practice is common to hear about as a young married couple. I remember it was emphasized in Pre-Cana counseling and from already-married friends that, “the first year of marriage is hard, but it’s only because you are not yet practiced.”
In a literal way, young married couples are constantly practicing. They are learning for the first time how to live with someone else and love them, which can be awkward at times – mentally, emotionally, and physically.
This is where couples who envision marriage as a perpetually spontaneous, passionate, and effortless experience inevitably encounter a rude awakening. It’s not.
But while the practice phase is emphasized for young couples as a way to anticipate the learning curve of marriage, I think practice is overlooked, except for perhaps, by Mr. Ramaswamy, as an integral part of the entire lifespan of a marriage.
Marriages grow old when one or both cease to practice.
This is the case not only in the context of marriage, but also in the context of God, and our relationship with Him. The former is a metaphor, and glimpse, of the latter.
I believe in a living, loving God. The God who made a covenant with Abraham, described in Genesis 15, and came to the world he created, physically as a man, to fulfill that same covenant centuries later.
I believe that God speaks to me, and walks with me, and guides me, and challenges me, and disciplines me, and plays with me, and gets angry with me, and forgives me, and pursues me, and transforms me, and loves me, and practices with me.
In its basic form, I believe God interacts with me in much the same ways as I do with my husband every day.
This is the God who CS Lewis famously describes in his chapter on the trinity by saying: “In Christianity God is not a static thing — not even a person — but a dynamic, pulsating activity, a life, almost a kind of drama. Almost, if you will not think me irreverent, a kind of dance.… The whole dance, or drama, or pattern of this three‑Personal life is to be played out in each one of us: or (putting it the other way round) each one of us has got to enter that pattern, take his place in that dance.”
Or as Jordan Peterson puts it concisely, the word Israel literally means he who wrestles with God. This idea, which is the backdrop of the entire Biblical narrative, is eternally and inexorably overwhelming to consider.
God struggles with us. He contends with us. He confronts us. He wrestles with us. He practices with us.
These are not passive verbs. On the contrary, they are very active, and interactive. God relates with us. He is relational.
This is the reason why we need relationships to grow and be loved. We are made in the image of a relational Creator. We are made to live in relationship with God and with each other.
Everyone knows this intrinsically. No matter how rich or poor, attractive or unattractive, healthy or sick, capable or incapable you are, all of us are ultimately most satisfied (and shaped) by the quality of our closest relationships.
I like to picture myself wrestling with God. I like to think that, like Jacob, I could endure all night, until the first light of dawn, and prevail.
Many times in my life I have. My loneliness after college, my never-ending wrestling match with temptation, the birth of my first child, my trying to discern my own will for my life from God’s will for my life – which is often difficult not because it’s radically different, but nefariously similar.
Like Jacob, I haven’t survived any of these unscathed. But I have survived.
I literally ache when I think about these seasons. But this is my practice. These are my own unique forms of wrestling when it comes to my marriage with God — no different than I have my own unique forms of wrestling when it comes to my earthly marriage with Matthew.
Matthew and I practice. We interrelate with more frequency and consistency than I do with any other person. We wrestle, sometimes physically and often mentally. There are few days that I don’t ask Matthew to challenge my line of thinking about one dilemma or another. It is the same with God.
As it was intended, marriage is the deepest form of friendship we have. Marriage is the best relationship God gives us to practice relating with another person. Therefore, marriage is the best relationship God gives us to practice relating with God.
We all long to wrestle with God. It’s what every human heart needs at our deepest level. Those who deny it or claim otherwise simply don’t realize it (yet). Contending with God is why we were created.
I like the quote above for this reason. The author – in this case, musician – is contending with God. Like David, he is reciting God’s promises directly back to Him. At first, it might seem accusatory, even pejorative, as if to imply that God forgets the promises He has made to us. But it isn’t. Instead, he is encouraging his own heart, while speaking to God directly to remind himself of the legitimacy of our call to trust Him.
Sometimes I think about it from an eternal perspective. I think about arriving at the wedding feast of the lamb. I’ll probably show up like I do at most weddings – tired from the preparations it took to get there, hurrying so as to not be late, all while getting dressed in the car and feeling generally disappointed by my appearance or demeanor.
It’s not pretty. I don’t expect my entrance to Heaven will be either.
But, I’ll be there. My broken, weary self will be there like Jacob was, caught in the tension of a divine hold, wrestling with God to the last undefeatable pin, refusing to give-in until He agrees to bless me and keep practicing with me.
I’ll wrestle like Job, ripping my clothes in grief, and acknowledging God’s authority while directly questioning it (Job 1:21,13:15). I’ll wrestle like David, pouring out in poetry my joys and sorrows.
I’ll wrestle like the Canaanite woman in the Gospel of Mark, refusing to back down to Jesus’s resistance and imploring that even the dogs under the table eat the crumbs in their Master’s house (7:28).
Like all these and countless others, I’ll wrestle and prevail. I’ll stay in the dance. I am able to do this because Jesus didn’t. Jesus gave up his deserved right to communion with God as he recited the Psalms (2:21), while dying on the cross.
He did it for me. He took the rejection I deserve so that I can take the intimacy He deserves, and stay in relationship with my Creator. He took my sin so I can have His righteousness (2 Cor 5:21).
It is a love I will never fully understand. And it is the key that opens the door for me to be in eternal practice – in eternal relationship – with my Creator. Imagining it is sometimes the only medicine available to treat a wounded heart. But it is also the strongest.