“This is kinda funny, isn’t it?” I said.
We weren’t new to this.
Back in the wild, raw land of Africa, we had taken turns falling ill before. When we got lucky, our ailment schedules would overlap each other romantically in cosmic synchrony, like two intergalactial bodies finding their way through the universe to meet each other in a rare eclipsal union. In those times, we bonded like superglue.
We both laughed: I was heaving with discomfort from an allergy storm- my nose, glowing with a bright Rudolf shade of red, was runny with unending snot; my husband’s right eye, bloodshot, was swollen and tearing rivulets from a painful, undislodged irritant. It was impossible for either of us to sleep.
With synchronic rhythm, bleary-eyed and yet wide awake, we both got up from bed.
From all those nights practising as an Ophthalmology doctor at the Emergency Department, I could see his eye problem right away. One cotton bud and two bold swabs later, I dislodged the stubborn culprit embedded in his eye. Yet, as his eye continued to tear, I knew he needed some medication for a good night’s rest.
Close to midnight, driving around the neighbourhood as we looked for a pharmacy, we both laughed.
If it weren’t for the fact that I couldn’t sleep from my discomfort, my husband wouldn’t have woken me just to tell me about the splinter in his eye. If it weren’t for his offer to drive me out for some medication relief, I would have gained no respite either. We had both sacrificed something precious for the other- our sleep, time and effort.
Yet, it felt completely natural, far from what we counted as “sacrifice”.
Sacrifice- it is an act of giving up something dear to us, a loss to self, for the sake of something else, a greater good.
“Yea, it’s funny,” he echoed. “Us both being ill. Us helping each other -while- being in so much discomfort.”
Three years of marriage later, one of which was spent in Africa serving as missionaries, we knew God had knit us as one. Yet, just weeks ago, stuck in a deadlocked argument in the wee hours of the night, we were burning with frustration. Veiled with wilful ignorance to each other’s sacrifices for the other, we were seething.
A cross-cultural marriage mixed with a liver transplant, dreams for further study, serving the poor in the mission field in a full-time capacity and family planning, ignited by a relatively small spark, had resulted in a chemical reaction of effervescent proportions.
As ungrounded accusations pelted across the room, our previously crucified flesh resurrected with vengeance:
How could you not realize I sacrificed this for you?
Well, so did I.
Do you not realize that my life revolves around yours?
Well, mine does too.
Why do you act as if none of my dreams or life or plans are ever impacted by the choices you make?
You aren’t fair. Life isn’t fair. I hate this.
Arguments like this spiral. They descend into a bottomless pit of despair, tears and hurt because they aren’t grounded in love, or truth, or reality. They are based on unfounded dreams, painted with whimsical hopes, through rose-tinted, shape-shifting lenses: if you weren’t like this, I could have been like that; if you didn’t feel this way, I could have done that.
If you didn’t, I could have.
At the end of the day, all such arguments come down to this: you don’t realize how much I’ve sacrificed or given up for you.
In between the full-stops of the angry sentences, we discovered exclamation marks caught in the silence, unexpressed in any of our previous conversations. In the peace of our everyday lives, we had chosen, intentionally, to lay them to rest, where they belonged.
As time crept into the wee hours of the morning, our exhaustion paralyzed us. Words, frozen in fatigue, found their own way into two cold hearts. Two bodies, heaving with hurt, synced themselves into a harmonious rhythm as sleep overpowered us.
When we came to our senses the next day, we realized the futility of our words.
The truth is this- no marriage is founded without sacrifice. Before the other, we each had individual goals, individual dreams, individual lives etched in singularity. The plural in marriage was not a single addition of a letter ‘s’ in occasional nouns, but a linguistic revolution transforming every pronoun, every tense, every word written in the stories of our lives. It not only changed the words, it changed sentences. It changed the whole plot, really.
Where “sacrifice” had once been a word signifying pain and loss, it no longer was.
Where it meant having to give up, let go, surrender for the price of pain, it now meant doing the exact same things with the reward of joy. Joy, not to oneself, but to the collective pronoun of “us”.
Sacrifice, now stripped of its sense of aching loss, no longer had its glamorous place in our dictionaries.
We learnt, that unless we were willing to let go of the main plot revolving around our individual selves, which we had spent all our lives writing, editing and perfecting, there would be no story of “us”, but just a story of “me”, scattered with an occasional “you” circling the peripheries of a hard-handedly-written, already circumscribed plot.
The seemingly-unconvincing fact is that when two lives are intertwined as one, the collective good is the singular good. What I consider as my sacrifice for your good, is for our common, greater good, which ultimately is for my good. After all, how can two walk together unless they be agreed?
When we came to our senses, we realized how drastic a turn each of our individual lives had taken. While we occasionally mourned certain paths not trodden, they were better left to die than to be entertained by what could never be, even if we were on our own.
Out of God’s will, we would never have made it on our own.
When we came to our senses, we rediscovered in awe the divine orchestration of our lives, colliding into each other. In colliding, we were awakened to the necessary actions we each had to take for our best- together.
With me, you have the added weight of constantly thinking of us and our future family – it enshrouds all your choices, outweighs all your personal goals and hobbies. With you, I have the inconvenience of constantly shaping my circumscribed career around your healthcare challenges, all the time.
With each other, in no uncertain terms, we have had to make drastic adjustments.
But through those twists in the plot, we have rediscovered adventure. We have rediscovered joy, and more importantly, we have discovered the depths of the fullness of God’s plans and purposes for each of our individual lives, through seeking God’s will together as a couple.
I am learning, that in the dictionary of marriage, the word sacrifice is replaced by submission- submission to each other, and to God.
After all, when Christ died on the Cross for us, He who became the ultimate sacrifice, counted it not a sacrifice, but mere submission to His Father, to fulfill His life’s purpose for us to be reconciled to one another, and to God.
Where sacrifice signals subjugation, submission signals surrender; where sacrifice implies unwilling ingratiation, submission implies willing deference; where sacrifice requires a bent of will, submission requires a gentle, pliable yielding.
Such is the beauty, protection and comfort of coming under the divine order of submitting to one another, especially the wife to her husband.
As the Holy Spirit speaks from Jesus, who then points to the Father, even the Trinity paints the perfect picture of submission, a picture as calm and peaceful as a silent, holy night, which brought forth the Savior of the earth.
Truly, our lives have been forever changed, and will, in the next few years ahead, continue to undergo seismic shifts, as we cross continents, cultures and climates.
But when they are in submission to His perfect will and to each other, surely it cannot be counted as sacrifice laced with pain and loss, but only joyful submission, and joy to the full.
Thank you, for spending a lifetime with me.
Merry Christmas.
“Submit yourselves therefore to God.”
– James 4:7
“…Giving thanks always for all things unto God and the Father
in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ;
Submitting yourselves one to another in the fear of God.”
– Eph. 5:20-21