How to Be Married (to Melissa) by Dustin Nickerson

Author:Dustin Nickerson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Published: 2022-03-29T00:00:00+00:00

Life on Mars

When we moved to Seattle proper, we found the opportunity to leave the church, but that led to one of our first married fights. Melissa wanted to switch to a closer church. I wanted to go, too, but people liked me at the church we had been going to, and I had (still have) a crippling need to be liked. But since the first church was far from where we’d moved, I caved pretty easily. Nothing like a commute to blame for leaving your church. “It’s not you, Pastor; it’s the traffic.”

Religion has the potential to be the biggest point of tension in any marriage. This makes sense, right? Because even though money discussions can be tense, they pale in comparison to “I think your mom is going to spend an eternity in hell” discussions. Because of the nature of religion and faith, the weightiness of the questions they strive to answer, and their potential ramifications in daily behavior—I can think of no issue in marriage with greater ramifications. “Hey, what time do I pick up the kids, and do you think God is real?”

By no means does this imply you have to agree on everything. That’s impossible and not even remotely healthy. But you do have to be open and you have to discuss it. You can’t have an agenda to convince the other spouse to join your team, and you can’t make isolated decisions on how to raise the kids.

Melissa and I have had more than our fair share of disagreements over religion, the Bible, prayer, and their impact and execution in our family. But I look back on that first little fight, and it might have been the last time we had a disagreement to do with our faith. Since then when we disagree, it’s not a debate—it’s a discussion. And I think that’s the key. Because faith is so personal, it’s easy to feel attacked and condemned when someone as close to you as a spouse has contempt toward you. Our faith is not something we do; it’s who we are. People don’t just practice Islam; they are Muslim. It’s an identity, so in a marriage it has to be handled delicately with the utmost love and respect for the other person.

Our new church was called Mars Hill Church, which was then pastored by a guy named Mark Driscoll. If you’ve never heard of either, well, enjoy that Google search. Much has been said about Mark and Mars Hill, and even though this is a marriage book that is hardly even about marriage, it’s also not the platform for a church scandal tell-all. But the circumstances that led us to Mars Hill and away from Mars Hill are pretty telling of our respective faith journeys.

Mars Hill represented a lot of things, but the main thing it offered us was that it was something different. It was cool, the music was loud, the preacher was funny, the walls were black, and it felt like Seattle. It felt like us.

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