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The beginning of strife is like the letting out of water, so quit before the quarrel breaks out. (Proverbs 17:14)

Many of you know that I work in the biotech industry of human genetics and cancer diagnostics. Tiny genetic changes cause cancerous tumors and death. This is a great metaphor for the tiny changes which cause big problems in marriage.

My premise in this series is that there are few true marriages because we don’t know ourselves, nor do we know what love is or how to love. Thus, a tumor is essentially, that area in our life where we act in unloving ways, or where our pain has not been touched by love. Tumors and love grow for the same reason: they want to take us completely over. Cancer is simply a normal cell with a tiny change that loses its ability to stop dividing. Love is also a tiny change that grows exponentially, where we regain our ability know and love ourselves and others.

We wrongly think our problems are big, so we go around looking for big solutions. The world offers big and elaborate contraptions which send us down the wrong road. As a result we dismiss or skim over the tiny part. If you understand how one tiny change in a cell can bring death, then you can understand how learning to love can heal every expression of relationship dysfunction. I’m not exaggerating here, but I know how it sounds simplistic to those who are suffering.

Below are the top ten causes for marital strife:

1. Poor communication
2. Lack of intimacy
3. Infidelity
4. Jealousy
5. Boredom
6. Disrespect
7. Boundaries
8. Stress
9. Values
10. Money

The Marriage Foundation lists these as the top 3:

1. Overfamiliarity
2. Poor Communication
3. Business Deal Mindset

Is your pain on this list? Would it help to ad your spouses addiction? What about couples in different stages of life? What about the spouse who wants to move? The over-spender? Extended families? The checked out spouse? The shopper, hoarder, or quick tempered? The violent, the condescending, sarcastic or the cold hearted bastard? Love dissolves them all.

But how?

Our marriage functions like a mirror, revealing those parts where need each other’s help to heal and grow. The Bible says a marriage is a foundation of “one flesh“, we are “like opposites,” we are inter-dependent. We grow in love through vulnerability or what the Bible calls “naked and unashamed.” Instead of hiding our unbearable parts of weakness, sins, failures, and pain (fig leaves), we receive them from our beloved and bear these burdens. Pain is compassionately shared where it is healed in the context of love and understanding. Where pain is known, grace prevents its transmission and the marriage grows into the safest place, where our pain is transformed into expanding love. Instead of being offended by the other, these unredeemed parts become beautiful and necessary for our completion.

This is unimaginable to our backwards world whose propaganda says we can get further in life on our own. Not true.

If we dismiss sacrificial love, we don’t escape sacrificing. When we desire hiding more than healing, we sacrifice the transformed version of ourself that our marriage is designed to bring about. This “mutation” is the tiny infidelity few people can see, but why Jesus said divorce makes us all adulterers. (Matthew 19:9) Marriage will either become a three-sided prison where we clutch firmly to captivity, or the vehicle that opens us up to freedom before us.

“Above all, keep loving one another earnestly, since love covers a multitude of sins.” (1 Peter 4:8)

Love is an act of the will not feeling or emotion. We won’t love because we don’t want to. We are afraid of losing ourselves, so we hold back to avoid getting hurt. But that is how we forfeit the redeemed or true version of ourself.

For what does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses or forfeits himself? (Luke 9:25)

“A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another.” (John 13:34)

Most of us are simply too self centered, too focused on our wants, our needs, our plans, our agenda, our goals to ever experience true love. Despite a world that talks so much about love, we have very few guides to show us the way. Our intrinsically selfish pseudonym must die and marriage is the place the independent, selfish person takes up their cross, and follows in the footsteps of the one lead to slaughter. To the blind this looks horrifying.

“If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.”  (Luke 9:23)

When Kimberly and I were early in our marriage, on the rare occasion that we would argue about something, I was obsessed with being right. My arguements were logical and linear, I left emotion out of it. I’d build my case and it’d get stronger if she multiplied the points of the discussion. In my head I was winning, but in my marriage I was losing. One day, in her wisdom and love for me she said: “Did it ever occur to you that I just needed you to hold me, and comfort me?” I remember in that moment, I didn’t want to. But with one tiny act of the will, I went to her and held her. What I thought was a gesture for her sake, was her loving me back into OUR LOVE STORY. She’s “loved me back into us” countless times in our marriage. A foolish part of me died and as I learned to move toward love and not hide from it, a new “me” emerged. Nearly twenty-seven years later, I hold her every single day that I can, and I hold her until she joins me in our love again. That tiny reconnection is absolutely HUGE.

“Only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another.” (Galatians 5:13)

I’m going to ask some question to help you see this another way.

1. Are you familiar with any examples of self-sacrificing love? If so, have you tried to emulate it? If not, what are you basing your understanding of love upon?
2. Would you give up everything you possess, or have worked for, or hope to get in life, for the sake of your spouse? If not, what things are more important to you than love?
3. If you lost every single thing you have but were able to keep the love between you and your spouse, would that be enough?

If these three questions seem like a rom-com flavored dose of sentimentality, then I invite you to explore what part of you doesn’t want healing and why? How is your life propped up by transmitting your pain rather than transforming it?

Those of you who know love, can immediately see how these three questions become non-issues in the flow of self emptying love. If your beloved shares the same high-view of love, it’s obvious they would never seek their own interests above yours, nor you theirs. “(love) does not seek its own way.” (1 Corinthians 13: 5) This is our clue about how to heal every problem in our marriages. Everything the world says is a big problem immediately becomes a non-issue when we live from and toward love. Every wound can begin healing in less than 5 minutes.

Relationship Hell is real. It’s a living Hell and you’re in it if you or your spouse will not love. Distract, avoid, medicate, or leave. None of these are great options. Holding back, hiding, or ignoring do not actually preserve us…they cause us to lose ourselves. Whether we go all in, or settle for something comfortable, we all lose something of ourselves. Let’s ask ourself: “How do I handle my spouses unredeemed parts? Do I get offended? Do I judge them? Do I blame and get upset? If compassionately receiving them is untenable, I must inform you, the large problem may not be your spouse, it’s the overgrowth on your heart.

Finally, I know it takes two people for the flow of love to work, and I’ll address the options available for those who are in a living divorce. Until then, we can do our best to understand the counterintuitive way of love, and invite them to read or listen to this as a way to start.

Now that you have a complete solution that is small and within your power to change today, what will you do with it?