The Promise (3 of 3)

Remaining in Christ is the only way to love your wife in this way, because apart from Him you can accomplish nothing. Nothing includes the boring tasks of an ordinary marriage — the conversation you do not want to have, the night you keep your phone in the kitchen and stay in the bedroom with her even though she is already asleep, the morning you put down the device and pour her a cup of coffee before she asks. These are not heroic acts. They are the slow return of stolen time.

Your wife cannot be your vine. She cannot produce life for you. Only Christ can. That is good news for her, because it means you are not asking her to carry what only God can carry. It is also good news for you, because it means your neediness has a place to go that will not use you up. When you stay needy before Christ in the present, you come to your wife as a branch bearing fruit, not as a vacuum demanding sap.

Mercy toward your wife keeps you from the coldness that porn trains into you. Porn teaches you to see a body as an image to use. Covenant marriage teaches you to see a person to know, over decades, in the slow accumulation of small choices. Mercy is remaining in the vine toward her when she is tired, distracted, or not interested. Mercy is also telling the truth about your own neediness to God so that you do not show up to her as a problem to be solved.

The honest practical move is not a ten-second prayer. It is a slow reclamation of the hours. The phone in the kitchen at night, the laptop closed by nine, the alone time that you do not protect from her presence. The evening that is hers because it is no longer his. These are not techniques to fix the marriage. They are the offering. The marriage may take years to recover from the theft. It may not fully recover. But the theft can stop in this evening, in this minute, with this choice.

The past is closed. You cannot give her back the years of evenings she did not know she was losing. The future is hidden. You live here, in the puff of smoke, before God, with your wife across the table, in the only place where the offering can be made.

Honor the promise now. Stop the theft now. Stay present now. Remain.