I Thought It Meant We Would Agree

Nobody told you this outright. You worked it out from the way people talked.

That when God joins two people, the friction goes. That there is a kind of alignment that arrives with a covenant, and that couples who really have it do not argue about money at eleven at night in a kitchen.

So every time you and your husband go around the same subject for the ninth time, something under it says: this is what it looks like when it did not take.

That is the sentence I want to get out of your house today. Not the argument. The sentence underneath the argument.

Because the argument is ordinary and can be worked on like anything else. The sentence is doing damage that the argument never could, and it is not true.

Let me say what I am not doing. I am not going to tell you the disagreements do not matter or that they will resolve. I do not know your subject and I am not going to referee it.

I am going to take away the meaning you have been attaching to them.

What God does, He does for ever

There is a line in Ecclesiastes that is unusually blunt about durability, and blunt is what this needs.

I know that, whatsoever God doeth, it shall be for ever (Ecclesiastes 3:14, King James Version)

Whatsoever God does. Not the parts of it the people involved handled well. The thing itself, as He did it, is permanent.

Ecclesiastes is not a sentimental book. The man writing it has looked hard at how much of human life comes apart, and he sets God's work in a different category from all of it.

You are inside something set in the permanent category, and Ecclesiastes has never once put a couple's conduct on the list of things that could revoke it. Ecclesiastes 3:14 says whatsoever God does is for ever, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a floor under a kitchen at eleven at night.

So think about what an argument would have to be, in order to be evidence against a joining. It would have to be capable of undoing what God did.

An argument about a car insurance renewal does not have that power. Nothing either of you does at eleven at night has that power.

You have never once had the ability to unmake this, and the word puts the permanence entirely on His side of it. The passage sets God's work outside the reach of everything that comes apart, and the Spirit of God is the one who tells a woman her marriage was never on the line last Thursday.

Where the expectation came from

Let me name the source, because a belief with no address is much harder to move.

You did not get this from scripture. There is not one passage that promises the end of disagreement between two joined people. Not one.

Where it came from is a hundred small impressions. A couple at church who never seemed to argue in public. A sermon illustration. A phrase in a wedding address about two hearts beating as one, said by somebody who did not think about what it would do to a twenty three year old.

And an argument is very easy to hide, so what you were actually observing was the visible half of other people's marriages, which is the half designed to be visible.

You have been measuring against a picture nobody could stand behind, and no verse has ever once made agreement the sign of a joining. Ecclesiastes 3:14 puts the permanence in God's act and says nothing about the temperament of the people involved, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes an inherited expectation off a person.

You were promised a covenant and not a personality transplant, and the promise has never once included the end of friction. It is written that whatsoever God does shall be for ever, and the Spirit of God is the one who keeps a covenant standing through a ninth conversation about the same subject.

Say it, and let the argument be an argument

So here is the assignment and there is something in it to stop doing, which matters more than the thing to do.

Say out loud, alone, outside if you can: God joined this. He did it once and it holds.

Then, the next time the subject comes round again, let it be an argument about the subject. Nothing more.

It is written that whatever God does stands for ever with nothing able to be taken from it, and the Spirit of God is the one who keeps that steady at eleven at night. You are able to disagree without anything underneath you moving, and a disagreement has never once had that reach.

Do not let it become a referendum. Do not lie awake afterward deciding what it proves. Do not run the comparison with the couple at church.

An argument about money is an argument about money. That is all it has ever been.

You are able to disagree without it costing you the ground under your feet, and the ground has never once been at stake in a disagreement. Ecclesiastes 3:14 sets God's work outside the reach of the things that come apart, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present in a kitchen where two people are going around the same subject again.

And when the sentence underneath tries to start up, say the one from the assignment instead.