Christopher's Story

I want to tell you about a wedding day before I tell you about anything else. Two young people, raised in the same quiet Anabaptist world, standing in front of family and church and promising to love each other for as long as they both lived. Nobody standing in that room could have told you what either of us was carrying inside. We didn't fully know ourselves.

That's the thing about getting married young in a close community. You know the family names. You know who sits where at church, who brings what to the potluck, whose dad has the best garden. What you don't know, not really, is what happened behind closed doors in the houses where your future spouse grew up. You don't know what was said to them at the supper table, or what wasn't said, or what got buried so deep they couldn't have told you about it themselves if you'd asked.

Emanuel and I didn't know. We just knew we loved each other, and we believed that was enough to build a life on. In some ways it was. In other ways, we had a lot to learn, and some of it we learned the hard way, through years of friction neither of us understood at the time.

I've come to believe that every marriage carries two sets of parents into the room, even when only two people are standing at the altar. You bring your father's voice. You bring your mother's way of handling conflict. You bring the small child you once were, the one who learned very early what love looked like and what it cost to get it. I brought mine. Emanuel brought his. And for years, without either of us meaning to, we kept reacting to each other's wounds instead of to each other.

I grew up the daughter of an energetic, commanding father, a man with more energy than the day had hours to hold. He moved fast, worked fast, and expected everyone around him to keep up. If you were slow, in his eyes, you were lazy. There wasn't much room for an in-between. My mother was serious and unyielding, and the two of them, both strong-willed in their own way, often found themselves locked in quiet contests over who was really in charge of the house. I grew up watching two capable, hardworking people love each other and also wear each other down, without either one of them fully understanding why.

Emanuel's childhood looked different from mine, but it left a similar kind of mark. His father was quiet, exacting, and reserved, a careful, orderly man who ran a small carpentry business and valued things done right and done neatly. He wasn't loud. He wasn't harsh in the way some fathers are harsh. His weapon was a quiet kind of negativity, a steady drip of criticism that never let up long enough for a boy to feel like he had done anything well enough.

Emanuel told me once, years into our marriage, what it felt like to grow up under that kind of quiet disapproval. "I could never do anything right," he said. "I felt like a failure from little up. I never liked myself." He wasn't being dramatic when he said it. He said it the way you'd mention an old injury, something so familiar you almost forget it's there until someone presses on it.

His brothers, from what I understand, handled their father's criticism differently. Most of them carried a fierce stubbornness in their makeup, and a strong-willed child tends to respond to being told he can't do something with a kind of fire. I'll show him. One of Emanuel's brothers told me once that their father shot down nearly everything they ever wanted to do, and that it only made them more determined to prove him wrong. "And when we do," he added, "he's so proud of us." There was real affection in how he said it, even some humor. Their father's hardness had become fuel for them. It pushed them forward.

Emanuel was different. He was the oldest child, and he carried an easygoing, gentle disposition. He brought warmth, good humor, and a quiet desire to make people laugh, alongside a peace-loving nature that wants nothing more than for everyone around him to simply get along. Put those two together in a tender-hearted boy, and you don't get someone who rises to meet criticism with fire. You get someone who absorbs it. Internalizes it. Shuts down. And when the pain had nowhere else to go, it could come out as withdrawal, and even as anger and bitterness, rather than love. He carried it for years, convinced that the problem was something wrong in him rather than something wrong in the way he was spoken to.

That contrast in spirit explains, I think, part of why his father's negativity had such a different effect on him. The same house. The same man. The same critical words spoken at the same supper table. But where fire met fire and produced determination, warmth met coldness and it produced something closer to collapse. A soft heart doesn't fight back. It just quietly believes what it's told.

There's a story Emanuel told me that I've never been able to forget, and I think it belongs here, early in this book, because so much of what came later traces back to it in one way or another.

He was around eight years old. His father often took him along to job sites, which should have been one of the good memories of his childhood, a boy riding along with his dad and uncles, feeling important, feeling included. One morning they stopped for fuel. His father, his uncles, and the driver all climbed out and went inside the station, leaving Emanuel alone in the truck for a few minutes.

He and his brothers loved comic books the way most boys did back then. Sitting there waiting, he noticed a folded page stuck into the magazine rack mounted near the pump. He thought it was a comic. He reached over, pulled it out, and opened it.

It wasn't a comic. It was pornography, and he was eight years old, sitting alone in a truck, with absolutely no framework for what he was looking at and no idea what to do with what had just happened inside him.

He put it back. Of course he put it back. But you cannot un-see something at eight years old. The image stayed with him, burned into a mind far too young to process it, and he carried it forward with no one to help him carry it.

That's the part that breaks my heart every time I think about it. It wasn't only the exposure itself. It was the aloneness of it. A little boy, sitting with something shameful and confusing lodged inside him, and no trusted adult anywhere in reach to tell. Not his father, whom he already felt he could never please. Not his mother, whom he may have sensed wouldn't know what to do with it either. Not his brothers, who likely would have simply been curious rather than concerned. He had nowhere to take it. So he did what children do with things too heavy to carry and too shameful to speak. He buried it, and it sat there in the dark, quietly shaping how he saw himself for the rest of his growing-up years.

I didn't know any of this when I married him. I knew the sunny, easygoing young man who made people laugh, who avoided conflict the way some people avoid a hot stove, who wanted, more than almost anything, for the people around him to be at peace. I didn't know I was marrying someone who had quietly decided, long before I ever met him, that he wasn't worth very much.

And he didn't know, I think, exactly what he was marrying either.

I came into our marriage as a serious, driven young woman myself, much like my own mother had been. I liked order. I liked a plan. I had opinions about how things ought to be done, and I wasn't shy about voicing them. Where Emanuel wanted peace at almost any cost, I wanted things done right, and if they weren't, I had no trouble saying so.

You can probably already see where this was headed.

An exacting, driven wife, raised by a father who equated speed with worth and a mother who quietly competed for control, marries an easygoing, peaceable husband, raised by a father whose quiet criticism convinced him he could never measure up. On paper, we looked like two people who loved the Lord, loved each other, and wanted to build a good home together. Underneath, we were two wounded children standing in grown bodies, each one bringing an old, unhealed ache into a brand new marriage, without the first idea of how to name it, let alone heal it.

When I pushed for order, for a plan, for things done the way I thought they should be done, Emanuel didn't hear a wife trying to build a good home. He heard the same voice he'd grown up under, the voice that told him nothing he did was quite good enough. And when he pulled back into silence rather than argue with me, rather than risk the conflict his tender heart couldn't bear, or when the old pain hardened into anger and bitterness instead of love, I didn't see a husband trying to protect himself. I saw a man avoiding responsibility, letting things slide, leaving me to carry the weight alone.

We weren't wrong about what we felt. We were wrong about what it meant. I genuinely believed he didn't care enough to try harder. He genuinely believed that nothing he did would ever be enough for me anyway, so why try at all. Neither one of us was looking at the actual person standing across from us. We were both looking at ghosts, mine shaped by a father who called slowness laziness, his shaped by a father whose quiet disapproval never let up.

I didn't understand temperaments back then. I didn't have language for sanguine or melancholy or phlegmatic or choleric. All I had was frustration, and a growing sense that I had married a man who wouldn't rise to meet me. He, I would guess, had something similar going on in his own heart, a growing sense that no matter what he did, it would never satisfy me, so what was the use in trying.

That's a hard, lonely place for two people to live, even two people who love each other. And we did love each other. I want to be clear about that from the very start of this book, because what came later, both the hard years and the healing ones, only makes sense if you understand that the love was real even when the friction was real too.

Scripture tells us that a house divided against itself cannot stand. I used to read that verse and think of it in terms of obvious conflict, raised voices, slammed doors, open rebellion. It took me years to understand that a house can be just as divided in quiet ways. Two people can share a bed, a table, and a last name, and still be standing on opposite sides of an invisible wall, each one waiting for the other to be the one who changes first.

I spent a long season of our marriage trying to change Emanuel. I wanted him to be more decisive, more driven, more willing to speak up and take charge the way my father always had. I didn't understand that I was asking a gentle, peace-seeking man to become a driving, assertive one, and that no amount of pressure from me was ever going to make that happen. All my pushing did was confirm, in his mind, the old lie he'd carried since he was eight years old. The lie that said he would never be enough, no matter who was asking.

I believe now, looking back with the kind of clarity that only comes with years and a lot of prayer, that God was present in all of that friction, even when we didn't invite Him into it. He wasn't surprised by my critical spirit, and He wasn't surprised by Emanuel's quiet withdrawal. He was using the very friction between our temperaments to show us both something we desperately needed to see: that we could not fix each other, and we could not fix ourselves. We needed Him.

That lesson didn't arrive all at once. It came slowly, the way most real lessons do, through years of small disappointments and small surrenders, through nights where I had to choose whether to keep pointing out everything Emanuel was doing wrong or whether to lay that list down at the foot of the cross and ask God to deal with my own critical heart instead. I won't pretend I chose well every time. Many nights I chose the list. But little by little, God kept drawing me back to the same quiet truth. I was not placed in that marriage to reshape my husband into someone more comfortable to live with; I was there to be shaped myself.

I think that's true for most marriages, honestly, not just mine. We tend to walk into marriage believing our spouse is the project and we are the finished product, just waiting for them to catch up. God tends to have the opposite plan in mind. He uses the very differences that frustrate us most, the slowness, the sharpness, the silence, the pushing, as tools to wear down our pride and show us our own need for grace.

I didn't know, in those early years, where this was all heading. I didn't know about the little boy who would one day be born into our home and change everything about how Emanuel and I saw each other, saw ourselves, and saw God. I didn't know that a baby named Christopher was waiting somewhere just ahead of us, a baby who would require more of both of us than either of us thought we had to give, and who would end up teaching us more about love than either of our childhoods ever had.

I didn't know any of that yet. All I knew, standing at the beginning of our marriage, was that I had married a man whose heart was tender and bruised, and he had married a woman whose heart was driven and guarded, and that somewhere underneath all our friction, God was already at work.

Before the years that tested us, Emanuel and I had to start here. Two young people from the same small world, carrying very different wounds, standing at the same altar, promising the same vows, with no idea yet how much those old wounds would shape the years ahead, and no idea yet how much God intended to use even our mismatched natures for a purpose far bigger than either of us could have imagined on our wedding day.

That's where this story begins. Not with Christopher's birth, and not with the hardest years of our marriage, but with two ordinary young people, each carrying an unseen weight, who had no idea that God was already preparing a gift that would one day soften both of our hearts in ways nothing else ever could.