All In: We're Better Together
By Caroline F. Daniel
Shakespeare’s As You Like It begins with a metaphor: “All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players.” More than half of the men and women in America wed at some point in their lives, making them protagonists in the drama of marriage.
When Cherry Hills Elder Mike Henshaw and his wife Martha Lynn first walked down the aisle, they had no idea of the settings and scene changes, or the cast of characters with entrances and exits that would appear on the stage of their life together. Eventually they ended up at Cherry Hills teaching young married couples in the Rock Solid Marriages class, but for them God had scripted a marriage of comedy, drama and tragedy, and it’s the tragedy that makes them better together.
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Stage Directions
Whether you are married, engaged, single or single again, here is a baker’s dozen of Mike and Martha Lynn’s thoughts that may help keep you from a midpoint meltdown in your own relationships.
1) Differences and Needs: You were reared differently and your personality makeup is going to be different. But you can learn and you can improve. That’s a very important ingredient in marriage.
2) Communication: Sometimes there’s a lack of compassion or understanding on behalf of the other person. You have a choice. Am I willing to share my deep feelings and my thoughts? Are you going to receive them in a positive, open way? After we were married the second time, we just walked every night. We opened communication and just began the process. We kept stepping toward each other.
3) Expectations: Fifteen years into a marriage and your heart is hardened over just a bit because of mixed expectations and resentment, some bitterness, misinterpretation. It’s all about performance. “He’s not living up to what I want.” “She’s not living up to what I want.” And that’s not even the equation in a marriage. That isn’t even the question in a marriage. The question is whether or not we reflect Christ and the church to the community that’s looking.
4) Respect: Respect is a word we really center in on. Respect is usually the most important thing to a man, but it applies to both men and women. We all want to be loved. But if you aren’t respected, it diminishes everything else.
5) Listening: The whole issue of letting somebody vent and letting them process something without you interrupting or getting mad yourself, is not natural. But you have to learn to do it—particularly in marriage.
6) Acceptance: We learned from our own disaster that you really do have to accept the other person for who they are. You almost have to begin there: you’ve got to accept them and let them know you accept them. Get off the judgmental, critical, performance track. There’s no grace, there’s no mercy, and it will ruin the marriage. We’ve learned to love each other unconditionally, to accept things. That’s the way they are and I’m going to love that person anyway.
7) Commitment: These days, when younger couples commit to each other, I don’t think it’s meant for a lifetime. The thing is, however, the rough spots are what draw you together. Just hang in there, go through it together, letting the Lord carry you, and it will make you stronger. As the years go by, those are the things that will weave and blend you together in your relationship.
8) Midpoint Marriages: I’ve been struck by the number of couples I’ve seen who have been married 10-20 years and are unhappy, bitter or resentful, with hardened hearts, growing apart. That’s what happened to us in many respects. We’ve seen midpoint and late-point couples be so cranky with each other, so petty and worked up over small issues. They are so down in the grass they are missing the horizon up here.
9) Confrontation: When we knew there were cobwebs, we’d ask, “Is there anything we need to talk about so we can clear out a cobweb? Is there anything we need to talk about so we can let go of something?” The Lord led me to understand that we don’t have to know everything. Only confront the things that really matter—that will help you let go of things or just get on with life.
10) Intimacy: We like to say that intimacy is recreational, intellectual, emotional, spiritual and physical. When you have more intimacy, you have a better partnership. That is just so true in our case.
11) Assumptions: There’s a mixed message here that we’ve got to be careful with. If you just assume the Lord is going to take care of the mechanics between the two of you, it’s a dangerous place to be. He could, but he depends on us to do it.
12) Gratitude: The most grateful thing I know is Mike’s heart. It’s a good heart and it’s a heart for the Lord, and that affects everything else in our life and relationship. God has brought us so far, more than we ever imagined, in restoring our love for each other. We do have happiness. We do enjoy each other. The Lord is a vital part of our lives every day. We never thought that he would gift us with the privilege of teaching young families, or young couples, in hopes that they won’t experience what we did or even worse. He’s just been good to us. |
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Two young Christians, Mike, 17, and Martha Lynn, 18, met through a friend at the University of Tennessee. “At the end of that freshman year,” Mike says, “I called up Martha Lynn and asked her if she would like to marry me. She said yes, so we were engaged at the end of our freshman year and married at the end of our sophomore year. Still, somehow, we finished with degrees in engineering and business.”
Though they had finished their studies, the most important class for their marriage hadn’t even been offered. “In the mid-sixties there wasn’t a lot of premarital counseling,” Mike says, “at least we didn’t have any.” “Back in those days,” Martha Lynn recalls, “you didn’t discuss things personal and private. You were just more guarded with your lives.” Before the wedding, they’d met their officiating pastor only once.
After graduation, Mike figured he’d be drafted into the Vietnam conflict anyway, so he joined the Air Force and the world of rockets and space. “We were there 12 years,” he says, “the last four of which were at the Pentagon.”
Mike and Martha Lynn ran Bible studies, were involved in their church and had strong Christian friends. “But,” Martha Lynn says, “when you’re in the military and you work at the Pentagon, they can tell you to do something and you can’t say, ‘No, I can’t do that. I’m not going to be there.’”
Mike describes the Pentagon as a “meat grinder.” “I was away from the house 14 hours a day. We had two little boys and we were churched people, but I lost my way.” “We had lost control of our life,” Martha Lynn adds. “The job was controlling it.” Both Mike and Martha Lynn say they were simply naïve and immature. “We knew the right things, but we couldn’t get the right things done.”
At the midpoint of their marriage, Mike’s way of thinking changed and so did the things that were valuable to him; he’d caught “Potomac Fever.” “You just start to think you’re somebody. It’s pervasive all over Washington, because you begin to believe it. The lure of something better is always in front of people who are in that environment. We were still very young,” Mike says, “and I gave in to some real temptations of the world that pulled me away from Martha Lynn, and I left her.
The Henshaws were separated for two years before they divorced.
“I was definitely part of the problem,” Martha Lynn admits, “I wasn’t meeting Mike’s needs in many ways and we didn’t seek any help outside. He was gone so much. He barely saw the children, and he traveled. I resented living like a single mother and I had trouble accepting the lifestyle that we found ourselves caught up in. Our selfishness is what caused the divorce.”
Asked to describe the impact on their sons Chris and John, Mike answers, “I think the carnage was so great that it continues to haunt me today. Martha Lynn and I at least stayed civil and we did everything I think we possibly could: except I fled from her. Every time she would move where I was, I’d move.”
At the same time, Martha Lynn was investing herself in her sons, giving them as normal a life as possible under the circumstances. “One was very angry and the other one was just a little basket case,” she says. “I finally got to the point of believing that we would never get back together because Mike was living in Florida and I was living in California. I finally just turned everything over to the Lord, learning that he was sufficient and was going to take care of me.”
For Martha Lynn, the plot was thickening. “I was in brokenness before the Lord, asking him to change me and make me into the person he wanted me to be. I always added this little footnote, ‘If you could make me appealing to Mike, that would be nice too.’ But my emphasis was just being who God wanted me to be. He changed me and healed me, and the Lord was leading me to believe that our marriage would be restored.”
Mike, however, never asked for the support he needed. “We served in a very strong church, but I didn’t let anybody close enough to me to say, ‘I’m in trouble here, Joe, you need to help me.’ I’d never come around to facing what I had done, the path I had taken and the impact of the world on me.” He didn’t fully accept the consequences of his actions until February of 1985, about 4 years later.
At some point God had to bring them both to the same place. Psalm 51:17, one of Mike’s favorites, reads: The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit: a broken and contrite heart. “I was lonely, in a hotel in a snowstorm in Washington, and the Lord spoke to me, ‘I’ve had enough of you,’ it wasn’t audible, but as good as audible. ‘I’ve had enough of you. It’s time to try to make this right.’” That moment was a powerful turning point. The houselights were flashing. The intermission was coming to an end. Mike took his seat and picked up the phone to call his wife
It wasn’t going to be easy for Mike and Martha Lynn to come back together, but as they would say, their hearts were aligned for what God wanted. “It was out of obedience,” Martha Lynn says. “We were threatened by getting back together. What’s this going to look like? Is this going to work? We both said, ‘Okay, Lord, whatever it takes, we’ll do it.”’
The couple began pre-marital counseling where they took the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and explored other forms of support. “Both of us were open to what the Lord asked of us in this new relationship,” Mike says. “God had our hearts in the right place at the right time.”
Mike and Martha Lynn began working out the basics of their new marriage, whether it was joint agreements, how they were going to raise their boys or where they were going to worship. “It’s better if you do that before you get married,” Mike points out, “but the Lord blessed us. He brought me around. He brought her around. He brought the boys around as much as they could be.”
But it was going to take more than making agreements or being open to a new living arrangement. This time being married had to include a better appreciation of human nature. “I never did understand the differences between men and women,” Martha Lynn says, “and that’s something you can’t just get past. Once you understand that, you can accept some things and be more understanding and work with the person.”
The Henshaws married for the second time in May of 1985. Martha Lynn and the boys were living out west and Mike was in Florida. “We just sold everything in California, our sons and I got on a plane and we moved to Orlando,” says Martha Lynn, who had never been to there before, did not know where she was going to live and didn’t know anybody but Mike. “We just moved in and the Lord took care of the rest of it. It was complete faith.”
The rewards of keeping the faith did come. Mike remembers pulling into the driveway and being overwhelmed with the blessing of having his family back together. “That went on for…I don’t know…I still feel overwhelmed occasionally. I was just overwhelmed by God’s goodness as the result of brokenness and obedience.”
According to Martha Lynn, the marriage continues to evolve, “I know that he truly loves me. I know that he wants the best for me. And we both know that one person will forgive the other. Unconditional love is there. It’s not to the point that we would take advantage of it, but we know that we’re committed and that we will work this out.”
Are Mike and Martha Lynn better together? They think so. “We need each other badly for balancing,” Mike says. “We’re better together because we can do things together that are better than if we did them on our own. I’m blind when it comes to certain things, and Martha Lynn’s a good set of eyes. We’re coming up on 26 years, and there were 16 years before that,” he adds, “and that’s a lot of years.”
Finale
Mike and Martha Lynn’s desire is to grow old gracefully, and to like each other all the way through. They want to have not only a deep love for each other, but also to like and accept each other. “The horizon for me,” Mike says, “is to grow old together without resentment, without forgetting the blessing of coming back together, without pettiness and critical spirits.” He prays Psalm 51: Create in me a clean heart, oh God, and renew a right spirit within me. “We want to finish well. We didn’t do so well the first time, but from midpoint on, we want to finish well.”