Lately God has been revealing to me the destructive power of “should” in my life. For you to understand what the heck I’m talking about, let me back up.

As I mentioned a couple of posts ago, I recently read this great book called Classic Christianity by Bob George. I’ve really enjoyed it, and in it he challenges this common but misguided notion that many Christians hold:

Salvation is by faith, but sanctification is by works.

Sanctification refers to the growth of the Christian disciple. As we follow Christ we are made more and more like him. That is sanctification. Unfortunately, many Christians mistakenly believe that sanctification is our job to achieve. While salvation comes through faith alone, there is a sense that once you’re in you’ve got a lot of work ahead of you.

As a result, Christianity ends up looking like a bad credit card deal. It’s free to join but there are a lot of hidden fees. We have forgotten that faith is not simply the entry point; it’s the engine that drives the Christian life. You don’t have to justify yourself before God as a Christian anymore than you did when you first put faith in Christ.

Now here’s the tricky part–I KNOW all that. I have known all that for a long time. In my head, that is. Intellectually, I understand that I don’t have to do a single thing to be accepted by God. However, there is an apparent breakdown between what I know and how I’ve been living. And that breakdown can be summarized with one word: Should.

I know that I don’t have to do anything for God to accept me, but there are still a lot of things that, as a Christian I should do. I should go to church every Sunday. I should go to Bible study each week. I should have a daily quiet time. And the list goes on and on.

It’s not that any of those things are bad–they’re not. In fact, all of those things can help a Christian to grow and experience greater fellowship with God and others. The problem is not the activity, but the motive.

If we don’t start with love for God, and we simply dive into the Christian life out of a sense of obligation, then we’ve short-circuited the whole process. While discipline is an important aspect of the Christian life, it should always, always ALWAYS begin with love for Christ.

To give you an illustration, the Christian faith should look more like a passionate marriage than an arranged one. In a passionate marriage, two people delight to love and serve one another. Yes, discipline is involved and sometimes you have to do things that you don’t always like, but it all ultimately stems for your great love for the person. It’s all on an overflow of the heart. An arranged marriage, on the other hand, puts duty first and love second. There is a hope that one day love will grow, but it might not. Obligation tends to stifle passion.

With all of that in mind, be careful of the “shoulds” because they will stifle your passion for God. It doesn’t matter where you started–even if you were the most radical Christian around, the obligation of the “shoulds” will start to weigh you down. Your faith will feel more like a burden than a joy, and it will hinder your love for God in the process. You might even become bitter toward Him.

“Should” is the language of legalism. It is the language of the Pharisees. Those guys had more “shoulds” than you could possibly imagine. They were “shoulding” all over the place, so to speak. And as a result they didn’t even recognize God when He came to earth and stared them in the face. So cast off the shoulds and focus first on loving Christ. Spend time in His Word. Meditate on His love for you and pray that He would help you to love with an unquenchable passion. Out of that love will flow the fruits of discipleship, not because you should but because you cannot help yourself. And be on your guard because legalism is always just around the corner. When you least expect it, should happens!

Just over a month ago Christianity Today published an interview with Gayle Haggard, the wife of former President of the National Association of Evangelicals and pastor of New Life church, Ted Haggard. In 2006 Ted Haggard was exposed as having paid a male escort for sex and methamphetamine. As a result of the allegations, the leaders at New Life church asked Haggard to leave the church and the state of Colorado altogether. Since then, Ted and Gayle have fought for their marriage and are now speaking openly about the experience. Gayle has also written a book documenting the ordeal entitled Why I Stayed: The Choices I Made in My Darkest Hour.

I highly recommend reading the interview. Gayle’s example is both inspiring and humbling. The Haggards’ story challenges us to consider what it means to be God’s church and it raises some important questions, such as the nature of church discipline when dealing with a repentant sinner.

But for the intents of this blog I want to focus on one particular issue that that this story raises: How should the church respond to the wife of a man who strays?

It is difficult to imagine what it was like for Gayle to not only suffer the betrayal of her husband, but the abandonment of her church as well. Though her husband was the transgressor, her injury was two-fold.

What is even more tragically ironic is that she was essentially punished for doing the right thing. Rather than divorce her husband, she chose to fight for her marriage. Had she decided to leave her husband and stay at the church, she might have had a support system to lift her up. But because she made the decision to stay with him, she inherited his outcast status. This cannot be right, can it?

Even more troubling (or should I say disgusting) was the fact that many Christians blamed her for her husband’s infidelity. While marriage is indeed a two-way street that requires the hard work and dedication of both husband and wife, there is NEVER an excuse for a man to have an affair. Nor are we in any position to conjecture.

Which is why it disturbs me greatly that, in the midst of such a dark time in her life, a time when her husband and her local church betrayed her, that the larger evangelical community denounced her as well.

Their story is a wake-up call for the Christian community. It compels us to reconsider the nature of Christian love. Scripture tells us that we are to be known by our love for one another (John 13:35); the way we love one another should look different from the world. We do not stop loving when we are betrayed. We seek to restore when someone is broken. Our love should defy the reason of this world, and it should require us to sacrifice. It means loving when it is distasteful to us, when it gets our hands dirty. When it is hard.

That is the kind of love we must show if we are to be “known” by our love. Too often we respond to the sin of others in the same way that the world does. What we call “church discipline” is sometimes just old-fashioned judgment. We are washing our hands of the things and people we don’t want to deal with. So rather than restore, we crush.

Remember this story. Your friends and leaders in the church will disappoint you in monumental ways. So be prepared for it, not as a cynic but as one who is ready to love them through it. Reach out to them and lift them up so that the watching community around them will see your good works and glorify their Father in Heaven. And don’t forget to care for their spouse, who is going through their own private hell. Rather than be an additional source of brokenness, be a source of healing and grace. That is what it means to be the church, and I am thankful that the Haggards’ humility enabled that message to arise out of their ashes.

As a newlywed who has witnessed many marriages in my parents’ generation dissolve, I entered into marriage with a small degree of anxiety. Although my parents have been married for over 30 years and I thoroughly trust my husband, one never ceases to hear stories about pastors and other respectable men who one day reveal that their entire lives have been a lie. In an instant, everything their wives had known was shattered. That terrifies me.

However, I’ve noticed an equally startling as well as puzzling trend among married couples my age. At this stage in life, I already have a number of friends whose marriages have ended in divorce, but not because of the men. Within my own circle of acquaintances, every single instance has been a result of the wife’s decision to exit the marriage. Whether she was unfaithful or simply felt trapped, I have been shocked by the number of women who have chosen divorce relatively early in their marriages.

What has been even more startling is that their husbands were good men. This isn’t always the case, of course, but many of these women left husbands who were godly, faithful men. Any woman would consider herself lucky to have a husband like them. So what’s the deal? Whereas men seem more prone to have affairs in conjunction with a mid-life crisis, why are so many women leaving their husbands at such an early age?

I did a little research on this topic to find out if my experience is unique, but it’s not. Psychology Today estimates that while 50-70% of men have affairs, 30-60% of women do as well. A separate study published in the New York Times reported that this number is particularly on the rise amidst young women: In new marriages, about 20 percent of men and 15 percent of women under 35 have admitted to cheating. So while infidelity is stereotypically attributed to men, statistics indicate otherwise. What is unclear is the reason behind these rising numbers.

The New York Times article offered several possibilities. Due to past cultural pressures, it’s possible that women have always been as equally unfaithful as men but were more likely to lie about it until now. Others speculate that as the number of women in the workforce increases, the late nights in the office provide opportunities for temptation that women never before had. Even women who do stay at home have the added temptation of internet, e-mail and text messaging.

While researchers have yet to establish a conclusive consensus about these “early exits,” I have my own theory. Based on my own experience in marriage thus far, I suspect it’s a result of several cultural influences. To begin, women grow up absorbing unrealistic stories about fairy tale romance from movies, t.v. shows and books. However, these romantic fantasies never provide us with a glimpse of the “happily ever after.” We see the pursuit and the climax, but then the movie ends.

As a result, we enter marriage subconsciously expecting that the same hot pursuit will define the rest of our lives…only to quickly realize that it doesn’t. Even six months into my own marriage I find myself sighing as I watch movies like the Notebook. There’s a part of me that’s sad I’ll no longer experience the newness of love and the hot passion of that initial stage. My husband is incredible and he pursues me every day, but it’s different now. There’s a small part of me that misses that.

Compound that disappointment with the very real challenges of marriage and every day life, along with a culture in which divorce is pretty normal. The result? Young women suspect they got married too quickly. “This isn’t how it’s supposed to be!” they think. “I must have married the wrong guy!” Either that, or they suddenly feel they’re missing out on the passion and romance of their single friends. No more exciting first dates. No more thrill-of-the-chase.

And so they feel trapped. That word, “trapped,” has been the common denominator among the young women I’ve known to leave their husbands. She thought she knew what she was signing up for, but then she got married and felt she’d been duped. She felt stuck and she needed a way out. Then a handsome co-worker or family friend caught her eye…

Perhaps I’m totally wrong, but this “theory” is based off of my own battle with the culture’s influence on my expectations. I never realized how powerfully my understanding of romance had been shaped by media until I actually got married.

While psychologists and sociologists are still unclear about the cause for this growing trend, there are two ways in which we can go ahead and be on the defensive when it comes to fighting for our marriages:

1. Be discerning about the messages the culture is feeding you. Romantic movies may seem innocent enough, but be wise to the ways in which they are shaping your expectations of marriage. If you’ve read my blog for any amount of time, you know that I think about this stuff ALL the time and it has STILL affected me. It’s hard to resist getting swept up in fanciful dreams about what your life should be, all the while sabotaging the life you actually have. Marriage is a blessing and a gift, but we ruin it by imposing unnatural expectations upon it.

2. Don’t forget your Heavenly Lover. Even in the best marriages, it’s not all romance and steam. Some days you feel ordinary and plain, and your husband may not pursue you the way he did when you were courting. So on those days when you feel trapped, or at the very least forgotten about, remember that you have a Father in Heaven who never stops being enthralled by you. His extravagant loves puts the Notebook to shame. No one knows you as intimately, loves you as unconditionally, and will ever sacrifice more for you than Him. No man will ever pursue you as consistently or perfectly as God, so let Him be your satisfaction on the days when you might be tempted to look elsewhere.

Regardless of whether you are single or married, it’s time that we start talking about the fact that more and more women are sabotaging their marriages through infidelity. Women are just as likely to be tempted as men, so we must be on our guard against it. None of us is any safer than the woman next to us. Let’s be realistic about that fact, and pray for grace and wisdom all the while.

Last night my husband and I went out to dinner to celebrate 6 months of marriage, as well as the second anniversary of our first date. It was a very special Valentine’s Day to be sure! As we sat across from one another at dinner, he slid a folded piece of yellow notepad paper across the table. I opened it up to read a wonderful love letter expressing his commitment to me and repeating his vows.

Now before you say “blech” and then click the “exit” button on this window, I promise this isn’t going to be a mushy gushy tribute to Valentine’s Day and my husband. The reason I mention this letter is that there were two things in it that were challenging to me, not only in the way I view my faith but the way I view my marriage as well. On the day after celebrating a holiday about love, Ike provided me with a thoughtful perspective that I think is helpful for us all:

1. Love is a Lifelong Commitment, Not a One-time Promise: What follows is a quote from the letter. Those of you who know Ike are going to crack up. He’s the only one I know who would quote Soren Kierkegaard in a love letter:

“Kierkegaard once quoted the saying, ‘To promise is honorable, but to keep is hard.” And then commenting on a generation that he saw make a lot of promises that it didn’t keep, he added his own corrective: ‘A promise is only honorable if someone does the hard work of keeping it!’ As I began to think on this, I thought of the promise I made to you and to God on the day of our wedding. I thought of the way in which it becomes so easy to pat myself on the back for making the promise as if the making of the promise itself is somehow meritorious. But in fact, the failure to keep such a promise would void the promise altogether and it possibly would be better not to have made the promise in the first place. The promises I made that day are honorable if and only if I keep them every single day.”

The truth of his words cannot be understated. In a culture that no longer views promises as binding commitments–more like a solid “I’ll do my best”–we as Christians have the opportunity to stand out by letting our yeses be yeses. (Matt. 5:37) This is true of our marriages, our friendships, our work commitments, and most importantly our commitment to God. The sincerity of a one-time promise to follow Him will be found lacking if it’s not followed by a lifetime of allegiance.

*I should also add that Ike’s commitment to love me is in no way encouraged or eased by who I am as a person. I am not super lovable, somehow making his promise an easy one to keep. On the contrary, I’m often a VERY difficult person to love, but that’s what gives meaning to his promise. A promise means little when it requires little of us. The promises that we must work to keep are the promises that say the most about our commitment.

2. Love is a Lifestyle–Ike closed his letter with the following words:

“The experience of Valentine’s Day cannot be created in a single day if it is not cared for and nurtured throughout the rest of the year.”

As romantic as his words were, the first thing I thought as I read them was, “So it is with God!” No woman should have to wait an entire year to be romanced by her husband. While we can’t all afford to go out to nice restaurants every night of the week, the affection displayed on Valentine’s Day should not be a once-a-year event. Otherwise, it doesn’t seem incredibly sincere. It’s more like a payoff to make up for the other 364 days of mediocrity.

And so it is with God. A once-a-week or once-a-year trip to church is no substitute for a lifestyle of adoration. And like a faithful wife, God desires our constant affection. The hour or two we spend in church should be a natural continuation of all that you do to love Him the rest of the week.

So those are just two lessons that I was reminded of on Valentine’s Day. On a day that is often cliché and superficial, they helped me to reflect on love in a fruitful and edifying way.

And for those of you who don’t have an aversion to sappy-ness, I will close with the this final tidbit from our date: As I read the letter in the restaurant I started to cry, and of course our waitress walked up right at that moment. She looked at me and asked if I was alright. (Looking back, I think it would have been funny if I’d told her that Ike just broke up with me, just to see how she’d react!) But anyways, I told her that we just celebrated 6 months of marriage and that it was the 2 year anniversary of our first date, so Ike had written this beautiful love letter to me in honor of the day. Well apparently our waitress was a hopeless romantic because SHE began to cry. In fact, she had trouble keeping it together as she collected our plates. She kept saying how beautiful it was and how she loved romantic gestures like that. All the while her bottom lip continued to quiver. It was very sweet, but also very funny!