Realizing I thought I was a First Hour Worker

At the end of this May, Steve and I will celebrate our 45th wedding anniversary. Someday we hope to celebrate it in a big way. We had planned to do so this year with a trip to three beautiful old world cities in Europe. But alas. Plans changed when the Lord directed our steps differently. “The heart of man plans his way, but the Lord establishes his steps.” (Proverbs 16:9.) The Lord’s plans are always for our good. 

I’m still thinking about this milestone - it’s not 50 years, but it is a thing - and am wanting to acknowledge it in some way. What I have decided to do is to write a short recommendation for four of the books that the two of us have read together during the last 45 years. A trip down memory land for me, and hopefully an encouragement for others.

Steve was a gift from God. God graciously brought the two of us together. And it has been through my marriage to Steve and his preaching that God began to do some plowing and foroughing of my soul.

I grew up watching the classic movie Cinderella as a little girl believing with all my heart that one day my prince would come and we would live happily ever after. 

Steve is wonderful. But he is not a perfect prince charming. 

We fell into typical patterns of dealing with hurts. I would set up some kind of unrealistic expectation - usually involving Steve being able to read my mind and take away all my feelings of sadness, insecurity or insignificance. Invariably Steve would fail. He should have been praised for the times he miraculously figured all this out. But instead, I would take offense. I would suffer as a martyr in silence. You know, the loud kind of silence that is hard to not notice. 

Eventually everything would burst out into the open. Tears lots of tears on my side. There was little attempt to try to understand things from each other’s perspective. I wanted my hurt to be validated. He had to share my pain. But the more I pushed and clawed, the more he backed away. His backing away frightened me into a willingness to take all the blame to myself. We would end in a stale mate. Eventually the fuel died down and we remembered why we loved each other. And life would go on. 

Little deep growth occurred during this season. The idols of our hearts were left pretty much in place. We did learn what set us off and avoided those areas as much as possible. We learned little tricks to communicate better. 

We prayed. And God answered. In His way. In His time. Round about and wise.

The round about way first had me reading a book by Larry Crabb, Men and Women. The first half of the book is called, “Why Relationships Don’t Work; The Problem Men and Women Share.” What is that problem? Justified self-centeredness. What is the cure to such a problem? An understanding of God’s amazing grace.

I was reading this book in the evenings at Family Camp at Mount Hermon in California. For the first few nights I had been interrupting Steve’s reading to say, “You’ve got to hear this.” Crabb was describing the pattern of relating we had adapted and showing the negative consequences we were experiencing. I kept reading. My eyes were opened to my prideful mindset that assumed I knew what was best for me, that I could change someone else, that others should orchestrate their lives around my needs, that I deserved to be the center of the universe.  I felt hopeless and stripped of all that I deeply longed for.

Then I got to the chapter on grace. I remember telling Steve, “I don’t think I understand grace the way he is talking about it.” The next day we went to the conference book store and bought Transforming Grace, by Jerry Bridges. 

Why? Because of what was written on the back cover:“Grace is amazing because it is God’s provision for when we fall short of His standards. Unfortunately, too many of us embrace grace for our salvation but then leave it behind in our everyday lives. We base our relationship with God on our performance rather than on His love for us, even when we intuitively know that our performance cannot earn us the love we so desperately crave.”  

Oh the kindness of God to put this book in my hands. And to open my heart to receive its message. The realization of the ugliness of my sin of pride had made me ready to hear the truth about God’s grace. I wept at the greatness of God’s grace and my foolishness to think I could have done or accomplished or earned anything apart from His grace. 

The change in me was so “transforming” that Steve bought his own copy. As he read it, he would reread sections to me. This book is in my top five greats of all time. I have led book studies on it several times. I pick up good used copies whenever I see them to give them away. To this day when appropriate and needed, Steve (and a good friend of mine who gets it) will gently remind me of grace by asking, “Might you right now be thinking or acting like a first hour worker?”

You’ll have to read the book.