On My Family Watch

ON MY FAMILY WATCH

By D. Dean Benton

Copyright 2014 D. Dean Benton

Smashwords Edition

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface

Chapter 1—Irrevocably Broken

Chapter 2—Redundancy

Chapter 3—A Preference For China

Chapter 4—I Wouldn’t Have Missed It

Chapter 5—Come, Sit At My Table

Chapter 6—Where Panthers Prowl

Chapter 7—When Your Family Dustbuster™ Has A Minesweeper Attachment

Chapter 8—Sent Packing

Chapter 9—A Quality Difference

Postlude

Notes

Acknowledgements

About D. Dean Benton

Other books by D. Dean Benton

Connect with Dean

PREFACE

The house is still there. It is still green half-a-century past my dwelling there. The new houses on Evergreen Avenue are big with multi-angle roofs dwarfing the little green house at 1901.

My wife and I drove past it a while back. It was a dirt road when I lived there, now it has three concrete lanes. I parked across the street overwhelmed by the memories and nightmares. The fights, threats, goodbyes. A car pulled up behind me insisting I move or I would have sat there until I turned to dust, or at least until dark.

Mom, my sister and I stood in front of the white, porcelain, kitchen cooking stove at late dusk. I recall it being cold in the house. Mom told us she was filing for divorce and Dad would not be living with us. I couldn’t grasp what it all meant. I had never heard the word before. Divorce.

On the right upper front corner of the stove, the porcelain was chipped; blackness showing through. Although I didn’t know the full meaning of the word, my soul looked at that chip and I knew something was now gone from my life that would never be replaced. I was marred in a way that could never be fixed.

Whatever caused Mom and Dad to be drawn to each other and to marry was never resolved. They should never have married. The wounds that preceded their marriage and the accumulated wounds during and after were never healed. I hurt for their unresolved and unfinished business. I hurt when I see how it influences me. I have frequently cursed—not Mom or Dad, but the third element—the divorce—and how it made me feel strange and odd in school and how my reactions built an inadequate emotional network.

When we moved Mom into assisted living, I found her divorce decree. One of the strangest events of my life was reading the property disposition. Mom got one hundred thirty-two quarts of canned vegetables and fruit. Dad got a wagon of unshelled corn. There was a car, and other things, and the green house that sat on a street. A lie. It wasn’t Evergreen for my family.

I read that divorce decree and felt great pride in my parents. Each took a small pile of belongings and parlayed them into their own businesses, and each became moderately successful. The divorce was the worst and best thing that happened to them.

Me? There is the matter of the chipped porcelain.

Carole and I have been leading marriage and family seminars in churches for many years. Most of the productive work in our pastorates happened in small groups discussing these topics. We have sat around tables in restaurants, churches and homes as visiting seminar leaders in hundreds of communities. I have shoehorned a chapter about family and marriage into each of my books, regardless of topic.

When my wife was away on family business for an extended time, I missed her grievously. During her absence I read a letter Andrew Jackson wrote to his wife. In his handwriting:

My Dear Heart, It is with the greatest pleasure I sit down to write you. Tho I am absent My heart rests with you. With what pleasing hopes I view the future period when I shall be restored to your arms there to spend My Days in Domestic Sweetness with you the Dear Companion of my life, never to be separated from you again during this Transitory and fluctuating life.

I’m not going to be talking from the cheap seats in these conversations about family and marriage. I’m not giving threadbare advice. That reminds me of a Sunday afternoon when I was lost in Kentucky. A convenience store clerk gave me these directions: Take the road in front of the store all the way to end. To the dead end. And keep going straight.

My intent in sharing our experiences and what we are reading is to stimulate conversations and personal contemplation that will lead to healing, where needed, and celebration of rough patches smoothed and terrible times survived and surmounted.

Chapter 1

IRREVOCABLY WHOLE

During the two or three years after Mom and Dad divorced, my mother, sister and I lived with relatives. The timeline is fuzzy. I’m sure my memories are protected by a foggy veil. My grandparents were also divorced. We lived in a house with Mom’s father and later, after Granddad died, Grandmother bought the property and we moved into that house with her.

There was the house and a garage on that land next to the railroad tracks. Yesterday, I remembered there was also another building. It was like a carriage house with double doors big enough to drive a car through. I’m remembering through the eyes of a ten-year old, but I think it was the size of a two and half car garage with a loft. The doors had colonial style windows.

I do not believe I was ever in that building. That stuns me. I was always into some kind of mischief or trouble, why, then, would I have not ventured in?

I don’t recall ever being told to stay out. I don’t remember scary stories that would keep me away. Although I doubt the doors would have rolled smoothly on their tracks, I don’t remember the building being a safety hazard. It wasn’t about to fall down. Did something happen in that building that was so terrible that I blotted the whole building out of my mind? I don’t think so. There are no foreboding thoughts connected.

Do you ever dream that you discover a room in your home that you didn’t know was there? Why has that building shown up in my mind after all these years?

The double doors are at the center of my memories. Doors invite us in. Why didn’t I go inside?

Unexplored is the central word in that episode.

Do people become fonder of each other the longer they are married? How do couples keep from just being constantly aggravated and irritated with each other? A report at Valentine’s Day said that the happiest of couples are those who have been married less than five years and those who have no children.

Routine, repetition, boredom, predictability and history. Carole and I have been married over fifty years. I refused to be predictable, so we didn’t do the things connected with Golden Anniversaries. I think I’m in serious denial. I can’t admit I’m old enough to be married that long. Much of our lives together have been about as secure as walking on an icy roof. I have dreamed large, attempted many things and crashed and burned in more ways than I want to remember. Those failures go to bed with us, accompany us to the dinner table and sit in the chair between us. Regret, embarrassment, assumptions, dissatisfaction with self, addiction to some day.

Unexplored. All that crap just continues to gather mold. Why don’t we talk about those things? Explore the territory? Figure out why we act and react in predictable, but non-helpful ways?

Many of us wrap up those events, feelings, dumb behavior and non-productive choices with our parent’s screwed up marriages and it feels like we are irretrievably broken.

I accompanied a parishioner into a lawyer’s office. The attorney said, This is a ‘No Fault’ state. All that we have to prove is that the relationship is ‘Irretrievably Broken.’ My friend said, Nothing could better describe my situation.

What a horrible phrase. What a contradictory phrase. If the relationship is broken, it didn’t just happen. Someone or something caused the fracture. What an accurate phrase. Once it is shattered, can it be mended? Is it irretrievable? Is it irreversible?

Going into that attorney’s office with that friend uncovered sewer lines in me that I didn’t know were still there. It was as if I was eight-years old again, and the dark wood paneling and big leather stuffed chair of long ago had been moved into that room. After fifty-five years, I haven’t forgotten. The wound is among the most formative events of my life. It affects or determines the way I feel, think and act. We cannot allow those events go unexplored.

My wife, Carole, wrote a perceptive song about divorce several years ago.

Love turned to war, one went out the door; someone had to go.

A part of life ripped out, it’s hard to figure out just where it went bad." ¹

It’s not all that hard to figure out. My concern is not just about divorce courts and the subsequent garage sales where treasures are sold ten cents on the dollar. It is also about couples who divorce emotionally and live parallel lives—living as singles together under one roof. It is about those of us who have no tools to make marriage and life more than existence.

If betrayal and abandonment are trip triggers for the rage, hostility and hurt that destroy relationships and keep individuals from being all they know they could be, how is it to be avoided? If we (you and me and this generation) are to come to our 60th Anniversary without regret that we got married in the first place; if at that anniversary dinner we hope to toast our spouse and not apologize for years unexplored and just survived, what shall we invest in the relationship?

For a starter, I call your attention to 1 Peter 3:1 & 7:

Be good wives to your husbands, responsive to their needs.

Be good husbands to your wives. Honor them, delight in them. As women they lack some of your advantages. But in the new life of God’s grace, you’re equals. Treat your wives, then, as equals so your prayers don’t run aground. ²

COVENANT

The legal world sees marriage as a contract, but God sees it as a covenant. A contract says, You do this, and I’ll do that. As a result, I have certain rights and claims upon you and any produce. We sign contracts to delineate responsibilities, and protect our rights. A covenant denotes the uniqueness of Christian marriage, Dr. Gary Chapman contends. How outrageous this is can be seen in Chapman’s list of Covenant Characteristics:

Covenants Are Initiated for the Benefit of the Other Person. ³

Chapman defines this in precise terms.

Covenants are born from a desire to minister to the other person, not to manipulate the person or to get something, …in a covenant marriage each spouse is committed to the other’s well-being. The attitude of steadfast love…is the single most important factor in a covenant marriage.

The choice is to think of your mate in the most positive terms and make decisions based on the mate’s needs.

Covenant love cannot be understood in marriage without using God’s covenant relationship with us as the model. God always sees the best in us, and always deals with us out of His absolute love for us. Chapman reminds us that such love includes confrontation, responsible living and forgiveness. He even goes so far as to say that marriage is to be seen as a tool to enhance our growth as disciples of Christ.

That does not describe yesterday. I reacted to my wife’s comment, which I intentionally misinterpreted. It wasn’t pleasant for her. I didn’t enjoy it either. If yesterday is measured against biblical teaching, then Carole and I do not have a covenant marriage. If it is one strike and out, then few, if any, qualify. It is outrageous to think that God initiated a covenant with us and then told us to have covenant relationships with the person we live with day-after-day. But, that is what the Bible teaches us Christian marriage is. Carole and I do have a covenant marriage. As long as yesterday is an anomaly and not the norm.

I was discussing this with a man whose emotional abuse of his wife is reprehensible. I asked him what solution he suggested for the broken relationship. He said he had been praying about it. The scriptural truth is the only prayer God will hear from that man is, I REPENT!

I recall apologizing to God for an argument I had with my wife. As if with two Altec Voice of the Theatre speakers pointed at me, God’s voice said, Don’t tell me! Go tell Carole!

God does not take kindly to the breaking or abusing of covenants. I hate divorce, says the Lord God. So guard yourself in your spirit (Malachi 2:16). When that covenant is broken, the trust may not be rebuilt. God is so serious He refuses to hear our prayers if we insist on living in rebellion.

…prayers may be unrestrained. (Weymouth) (1 Peter 3:7)

…that nothing will interfere with your prayers. (Goodspeed)

…your prayers must not suffer interruption. (Knox)

That is the marriage God desires for us. That demands the man and woman have an image of what they will look like if they were conformed to the image of Christ, and how they are to get there.

That kind of man …only comes through unexplained suffering, excruciating brokenness, and deep repentance. ⁴ I’ve seen men willing to fight and kill over their rights that can only be earned by being a serving father and sensitive husband. It is the excruciating brokenness or deep repentance that rebuilds the man and resolves the alienation. The same can be said of women.

How do I get to be the kind of man who lives in covenant with wife and children? What do I do to ignite vision and creativity in them, setting them free? What is my role in making them irretrievably whole?

I concluded I had to become a totally new man! I even wondered if I had to cease to be me. How do I change my name, my history, location and start over without carrying all the crap inside me onto the journey?

The process begins and is maintained by brokenness and repentance within a covenant.

I am what I am, and if you don’t like it…, men tend to say. As long as there is no physical violence, a preacher said, divorce should not be considered. I disagree. Physical violence is one symptom among many. My criterion is: as long as there is a willingness to work on changing, divorce should be avoided. The New Testament