The Load Bearing Wall

Somebody taught you this and you never checked it.

That a strong marriage is one where two people feel it. That the feeling is the evidence, the fuel and the foundation all at once, and that when it thins, whatever is left is a shell with two people rattling around in it.

Nobody sat you down and said that. You absorbed it. From songs, from films, from a preacher who meant well, from the way people talk about couples they admire.

And now you are eleven years in and the feeling has thinned, and you are looking around at what remains and calling it a shell.

I want to take that standard down, carefully, because it is not a small thing to remove a wall from a house.

But I need to say first: I am not going to tell you the feeling is unimportant. I am not doing the thing where a preacher waves away the very thing a person has lost. It matters. It is good. Its absence is a real absence and I am not renaming it.

What I am going to do is show you it was never a wall.

An anchor, and where it is fastened

There is a line in Hebrews that uses a very particular image, and the image is chosen with care.

which hope we have as an anchor of the soul, both sure and stedfast (Hebrews 6:19, King James Version)

An anchor is not inside the boat. That is the whole point of an anchor. It does not steady the vessel by being heavy on the deck; it steadies it by being attached to something that is not the vessel at all.

The verse goes on to say where it is fastened, and it is not fastened to the person's own condition. It is fastened past everything visible, to God's own oath.

You are held by something fastened outside the boat, and Hebrews has never once put the anchor on the deck. Hebrews 6:19 calls it sure and stedfast because of where it is attached, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a floor a person can stand on.

Now think about what a feeling is. A feeling is entirely inside the boat. It rises and falls with sleep and health and workload and whether the two of you have had a hard month. It is the least stable thing in the vessel.

You have never once been held up by the most changeable thing in the house, and the word has never suggested you were. The passage anchors the whole thing outside the person entirely, and the Spirit of God is the one who moves a load off a wall that was never carrying it.

What is actually carrying this

Let me be concrete, because this is where it becomes useful rather than clever.

Something has been carrying your marriage for eleven years. It was not the feeling, because the feeling was not there for large parts of it, and the marriage did not fall down during those parts.

So what carried it?

A promise, said out loud, in front of witnesses, to God. Decisions made repeatedly over eleven years, most of them small and none of them dramatic. Him getting up with a sick child at three in the morning. You dealing with his mother's paperwork. Two people continuing to turn up.

That is the structure. It has been there the whole time. You did not notice it because it is boring, and because you were taught to look at the decoration and call it the frame.

You are standing in a house with a real structure in it, and the plain unremarkable keeping has never once been the decoration. Hebrews 6:19 fastens the whole thing to something that does not move, and the Holy Spirit is the one who shows a person what has actually been holding their weight.

You were never rattling around in a shell, and eleven years of turning up has never once amounted to nothing. It is written that the anchor is sure and stedfast because of where it is fastened, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes an ordinary decade visible to the person who lived it.

Say it, then do a plain thing

Here is the assignment and it is a small one.

Say out loud, alone: the promise is not the feeling. What I promised was presence, and I am present.

Then do one ordinary thing for him. Ordinary is the entire instruction. Sort out the thing he has been meaning to sort out. Fill the car. Take the shoes to be mended.

Small enough that he does not ask. If he asks what it was about, it was too big.

You are able to do the structural thing without the decorative thing, and it has never once been the decoration that kept the roof on. Hebrews 6:19 puts the anchor outside the vessel where the weather cannot get at it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present in a small errand done in a thin year.

And do not check afterward. Checking is looking for the decoration again.