"Offering It Up": Self-centered or a gift?

Throughout our engagement, my wife and I must have given off the sense that we were immensely happy. A good number of our family and friends felt a burning need to remind us that “marriage is hard, too, sometimes.” It was a bit comical how often we received statements along these lines. I haven’t heard much about warning happy couples that hard times are ahead, but we certainly got it. Looking back, these folks meant well, but I wonder if they, like so many couples, have a misunderstanding of what it looks like to “offer it up” through the hard times in a marriage.

Valerie and I were no fools when it came to knowing that life has challenges, and we expected that marriage would have them too. Growing up in large families, you just get accustomed to the fact that your preferences are only preferences and “you can’t always have what you want.” For us, we were just delighted at the idea of getting to share both the joys and crosses of life together. At this stage of life more than 8 years into marriage, we are pretty convinced that what many consider to be “offering it up” when marriage gets hard, might actually be leading couples away from growth towards Christ.

By way of analogy, imagine that your home (and living room and kitchen) looks something like ours often does with four children age 6 and younger. It is filled with toys, dishes and silverware still in the sink, with bills and advertisements from recent mail deliveries and just the usual hodgepodge of mess. (Did you know, I can hear an “echo” that exists when our rooms are clean that isn’t there most of the time because all the clutter, kid’s blankets, and toys, etc. muffle the sound vibrations of day-to-day life?)

Now, someone who has one version of an “offer-it-up” mindset might tell themselves, “I am going to offer up the fact that I live in a home that is messy, the sink is a nightmare, and the food from our last meal not put away. I don’t like that the room is messy, but I am going to offer up the fact that it is, and that is how I shall be holy.” We notice the burden that our messy house is and offer up that fact that it is messy.

On the other hand, another person might look at the same messy room and offer up the time, dedication, and discipline it takes to clean and tidy up, saying, “I don’t particularly enjoy cleaning up, but I am going to offer up this effort to you, Lord.” Both people are offering up the messy room to the Lord, but which one is holiness?

When it comes to our marriages, how we communicate (or don’t communicate), how we understand (or misunderstand) each other: our shared life, our finances, our needs, our desires, our biggest hopes, our sexuality, how frequently does our notion of “offering it up” look like the first option of simply offering up the fact that we don’t like how it is without much (if any) effort made to help things change? I heard of one mother who shares that “her husband is her cross.” In this mindset, everyone is either something that is useful/brings pleasure or something that is a burden. This mindset is littered with a utilitarian view of life in which people are either useful or a burden to us.

This sad reality of this utilitarian mindset was etched into my memory from working with a pastor. I had a hard time feeling truly “seen” by him. He would frequently talk about how it was a burden to go visit people for dinner, a burden to hear confessions, a suffering to eat sausage pizza when he really wanted something else. I think he thought he was being really holy by “offering it up” regarding almost everything that other people might really have enjoyed.

One day, I was eating in the lunch room and he saw me and his face lit up in a smile. I remember how my heart rose with joy as I noticed. “Finally, he smiled at me.” This joy quickly turned to disillusionment as he said, “Do you have the keys to the office?” He wouldn’t smile for me, but he would smile for a set of keys. It was a very disheartening experience, but it taught me that when we live in a utilitarian mindset, people are either useful or a burden. When we see life in this way, nothing can be a gift and that is a sad way to live.

My wife and I recently watched a movie in which the main character said of his marriage to his wife who had recently passed, “Dorothy and I worked at it for over 60 years” (The Last Brickmaker in America). It’s not that they never had challenges, but they found the joy that comes from giving of themselves, particularly in the ways that push you out of your comfort zone and into a risk that only makes sense if one is driven by love. What if we truly embrace a vision of marriage and holiness in which “working at it” is just what it means to be in love and married? Philosopher Deitrich Von Hildebrand writes, “it lies in the nature of conjugal love to be bold, heroic, not to shrink back from taking a risk” (Marriage the Mystery of Faithful Love, 60-61). Here our mindset is focused on our spouse as a person and our primary aim is to make a gift of ourselves to them.

We are often tempted to “offer up” that we are unhappy rather than “offer up” that it is hard to overcome our selfish and self-centered ways. Von Hildebrand shares that we two persons are married, “A sublime creation burgeons which, once it flowers, makes the highest demands on the two partners” (Marriage the Mystery of Faithful Love, 24). This high demand is to see the other and their happiness as more important than ours. In short, it means truly being a gift. True “offering it up” is an invitation to see how we can push out of our comfort zones (to tidy the room of our marriage, so to speak) to work towards a more unitive and fuller communion with our spouse.

We will know we are good at “offering it up” in our marriage not by the amount of discomfort we face but rather by the presence of a ready willingness to overcome our ego centered worldview.

Looking back, I wish those who had warned us that “marriage is hard too, you know!” had instead shared with us what a joy it is to “work at it” constantly. It is not that your every wish gets fulfilled, but that you simply find joy and love whether happiness or challenge is presented to you. Your marriage is meant to grow, and when you grow in this way, your love blossoms and flowers in ways you never would have imagined. For, in the final analysis, you can still make yourself a gift even when times are hard.