When my son was in the Marines, the culmination of his recruit training was a 54-hour ordeal called The Crucible. The Crucible is designed to challenge recruits both mentally and physically, consisting of food and sleep deprivation along with a combat assault course, a casualty evacuation, a night infiltration course, and much more. I prayed my 18-year-old son through it from 2,000 miles away, knowing that he must complete this challenge in order to attain his dream of becoming a Marine.
The word “crucible” comes from the Latin word crux, meaning “cross” or “trial,” and it’s often used to describe any very difficult test or trial. In a literal sense, a crucible is a container used for melting or testing metal or other substances at a very high temperature. A crucible must be made of the right material in order to maintain its structural properties without being damaged from the intense heat within. The contents inside are transformed, but the container itself remains undamaged.
And so it is with a Christian marriage of many years. After decades together, you and your spouse are transformed, but the container of your marriage, Lord willing, remains undamaged.
Marriage has been very much on my mind recently. Over the past couple of years, my daughter reconnected with a young man she had known in childhood and they were married within 10 months. My son and daughter-in-law have been deep in the trenches of raising very young children and were recently refreshed and refocused at a Christian marriage conference. My own marriage experienced a renaissance of its own during one of my hardest personal seasons … and I was so inspired by all of this matrimonial positivity that I wrote about it to encourage people to just get married, already.
But the crucible of marriage is something quite different, isn’t it? Over decades of day-in, day-out life with another person, we’re likely to discover some unpleasant things about them … and about ourselves. Do any of these sound familiar?
- She has a tendency to want to control everything.
- He has a temper, and it’s not pretty.
- She is critical of the way he does things—even most things.
- He is passive-aggressive, withdrawing rather than working things out.
- She becomes resentful when he can’t read her mind.
- He spends more time on his phone than in conversation with her.
- She brings up things he’s done wrong in the past.
- He sometimes treats her like one of the children.
You’ve probably seen at least some of these tendencies in your own marriage or in the marriages of others. Maybe they’re accurate as written … maybe you have to flip the “he” or “she” … but the list resonates because even though we’re all different, our sinful natures give us all too much in common.
Marriage is the crucible—the unique vessel—where those sinful natures are on full display, where they’re put to the test, where we bear our crosses and endure our trials over and over, together, till death do us part.
During that recent time of matrimonial positivity that I mentioned above, my husband must have also had marriage on his mind. “What makes a marriage last? What makes it successful and happy?” he would muse aloud. “Forgiveness. It takes forgiveness.” He said this several times in the presence of our two married children—a declaration spoken from a 30-year crucible of marriage.
Because it hasn’t been easy, this marriage road of ours. We weren’t Christians when we got married, but becoming Christians early on didn’t solve all of our problems. Far from it. We’ve had some serious ups and downs, and over the years I sometimes found myself, tongue in cheek, echoing Ruth Bell Graham’s famous comment on her marriage to Billy: “I’ve never considered divorce,” she said. “Murder, yes, but not divorce.”
Every marriage, even the very best marriage, is made up of two sinners. The more recent the marriage, the more we’re able to see clearly the speck in our spouse’s eye; the longer the marriage, the more we’re able to see the log in our own. Or so we should.
A few days ago, I reminded my husband about his statement that a successful marriage is all about forgiveness. “When you said that,” I asked, “were you mostly thinking of the times you’ve needed to forgive me, or were you mostly grateful for the times I’ve forgiven you?”
“Both,” he said. “I’ve made a lot of mistakes, things I wish I could go back and do over. I’ve gotten better about a lot of things, but I’m not where I should be yet. I never will be in many ways. So I’m glad we’ve forgiven each other for our past mistakes.” He paused. “But after 30 years of marriage, you also realize that there are some things about the other person that are just part of who they are, and you learn to live with that more easily than you did before. You accept them and you don’t let those things about them bother you as much.”
He’s seen me forgive him, accept him, and love him despite his mistakes. I’ve seen him do the same for me. We are both “already and not yet,” and that’s the way it’s going to remain, this side of heaven. We can live with that more easily now than we could 25 or 30 years ago.
God’s design for marriage is a reflection of the marriage of Christ and his church, and mutual forgiveness in the crucible of marriage reflects Christ himself, because “In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace” (Ephesians 1:7). When we ask for and extend forgiveness in marriage (over and over and over), we display the riches of God’s grace to one another, to our children, and to those around us.
This repentance/forgiveness/grace cycle is mutual, of course. It isn’t accomplished overnight, and it’s in constant need of attention, which can sometimes be exhausting, especially during the first twenty years of marriage. The good news is that in a healthy Christian marriage, the process becomes almost second nature—more natural and much easier as the years go by. When the nest is nearly empty and the years ahead together are fewer than the ones behind, it’s so much easier to thank God for the crucible of your marriage—that you and your spouse have been transformed, but the container remains undamaged.
“A happy marriage is the union of two good forgivers.” ―Ruth Bell Graham
Image by Erdenebayar Bayansan from Pixabay
Great and Noble Tasks 
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