Those of us who have been married for many years probably recognize this scene…

You were walking through an incredibly difficult season as a couple. Maybe a crisis or at least a hard time. You’re finding that your long-term weaknesses are rising to the surface regularly. They are irritating and they’re not helping the problem and they’re not really even the problem of the hour.

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You get into an argument with your spouse one day concerning something that’s happened that really is the problem. But…because your emotions are raw, because you’re incredibly frustrated, because there doesn’t appear to be an answer to the big problem, you both look for a way to get some cathartic relief.

So you do a dump.

Your disagreement moves off-topic and you begin to use the phrase “and another thing…”

And suddenly, you find yourself in a miserable position talking about every other weakness of your life right in the middle of when you’re least equipped to handle those weaknesses.

And it starts to get a little frightening and panicky. Now the miserable state that you were in because of the original crisis starts to look hopeless in a crazy sort of way.

Thought bombs go off:

“We were never able to handle that previous problem, so what makes us think we could handle this one?”

“See, I knew this was a hopeless situation.”

“Obviously, we are a mess!”

Now for any of us who’ve been married for any length of time, we find out in a rather humorous way that marriage IS a mess. It’s a combination of two imperfect people with long-term patterns of weaknesses who somehow find a way to live in the strength of God amid a lot of human frailty.

Here is my theory: Those who make it through the above challenge have long-standing marriages. Those who do too many “and another thing…”s finally get so overwhelmed and put up so many walls that they quit the process.

I see the United States of America in the middle of this analogy.

Make no mistake about it: we have known for years that the progressive leftist ideology uses strife, differences, and stirring to navigate reconstructionist change (just check out the book “Rules for Radicals”). So the bigger question is, why are we surprised we are here?

We have walked through a shocking traumatic event of a global pandemic that shut the world down.

And now, every week, it seems we’re getting a new “and another thing…” issue to throw on top.

And now you hear people saying amazing things like:

“Will we have another Civil War?”

“Will our police departments totally fold?”

“Will the violence in the street result in martial law and destruction of the world as we know it?”

I’m not minimizing the potential logic of those threats. But I am warning us of this:

It takes two to argue.

In marriage

In friendships

And even in nations.

For years, our family has ministered in a very volatile high-risk environment. When we first started our ministry, it seemed reasonable to us to use the same techniques of people-management that we have always found to work…until we got burned enough times and realized there might be some things we don’t know. There might be some new paths to learn in problem-solving.

Make no mistake about it:

The left wants us angry, divided, hysterical, and rebellious.

And so does the devil.

But it is still our choice whether we go there. We have the power of the Holy Spirit. We can walk in the fruit of the Spirit while others are losing their heads.

We really do not have to buy into the model of “and another thing…”.

But we might have to do things a new way. We may have to learn some rules of de-escalation. We may not get to have the “last word”…

…but in the end, the union can be saved.

(Used with permission from Project 7000. Article by Lisa Cherry.)