Part Two
Now we get to the core. A dear friend of mine suggested that I focus on the tide pool and how the ecological make up-if you will- is necessary for the survival of the occupants. This tide pool-our blended family- will survive the ebb and flow of the tide and what it will bring because it is God who commands each outgoing tide and incoming surge. It is designed to capture the cool water which is necessary for survival. It may also capture other creatures that will walk with us on our pilgrimage for a time. It is designed to withstand the natural storms of life.
But if someone were to hurl a large object into the tide pool, let’s say a boulder, it would be something that the tide would not normally bring in. Several things would then occur.
This has occurred in our tide pool, just as it has occurred in many blended families. Some boulders that might invade the family are;
I will use my own mother as an example because she has since then gone on to Glory. But I was her long-distance care-taker because there was 400 miles between us and I was her only child and she was widowed. In the spring of 1997, after my single parenting years and being remarried, Mother moved in with us. Due to her health issues, she could no longer be by herself. She was with us for two years before she went home to Glory.
I had not told her all the ugly details of my first marriage, and there were a lot. But she still played that parent of the divorced child role, and our relationship changed. I needed adult companionship even if it were just over the phone, and many times it was Mom. I did communicate with her more, though still being cautious because of her physical and emotional problems {she was severely depressed}. Yet, she was still my mother.
She was not ready for the change after I re-married. She had commented after my divorce that she would have never considered living with me when I was with my ex-husband. I had never brought up to idea of her living with us, and after my divorce I would never have been able to afford it without God’s intervention and it never happened. But after moving into our home, she challenged everything that was a decision for my husband and I to make. There were things that had nothing to do with her, but because she was living in our home, she was privy to it.
There were issue about the children-lots of them! We have a large enough home that she was able to have two rooms of her own. One served as a living room/bedroom combination. The other was a kitchenette where she had a microwave, a small refrigerator, kitchen cabinets, and a small table. So she was able to close the doors and close off the hustle and bustle of family living, which is something she had never really experienced in her own life.
My husband and I had times when we had to be away from the house and this left our teenage children at home watching the younger ones. Our philosophy is, if no one gets hurt, the cops aren’t called in, and the house isn’t burned down, they've done well............... Mother didn’t see it that way.
There were several times that I had to, as lovingly as possible, explain that if she were not here, the kids would still be kids and we had all survived up to that point. “And Mom, you need to close the door, turn off your hearing aid, and just accept that. Even though you are here, the children are still solely our responsibility even when you think we‘re wrong.”
This could happen in any family. It is very common when elderly parents have to live with their adult children. But as far as she was concerned, her daughter and grandchildren had changed for the worse because of THAT MAN! i.e. my beloved, bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh. The person with whom I am one with. The person that SHOULD come first. “My Lord” as Sarah referred to Abraham. There were other situations too. As I said, she was severely depressed and everything coming from her and going in to her went through this veil of depression.
One situation was when she was in counseling and tried to get us to go into counseling with her. Without going into the reasons why we chose not to do so, she became very, very bitter with our choice. Even if I had thought it would be the right thing to do, my husband would not and my first priority is to my husband. She could not accept that. As far as she was concerned, my husband was coming between her and I, and my right mind.
The hardest part of this was that she was emailing anyone who would listen and complaining about us. She was complaining to people that I had also been close to both short term and long term. The scriptures clearly warns us not to do this. She made a choice to involve this person and this person and this person, putting us in a position of feeling like we had to defend ourselves, but also feeling very hopeless. And all of it had to do with the fact that my husband and I made choices that didn't fit in to her way of thinking.
When my mother passed away, she had just gone through open heart surgery. A doctor, we had only just met through that surgery, was a great blessing to us. He is a Christian, and incidentally a home schooling parent. {we home school} He was able to look at the situation from a different perspective and was very supportive. I really thank the Lord for this doctor and His timing during all this turmoil.
But, my Mom’s regular heart specialist had heard all these ugly things about us, and we never felt it was our responsibility to counter what she said. I had only met him briefly coming and going from my mother’s appointments there and he would brief me on my mother’s visit with him.
But what do you say? "Hey Doc, all that stuff my mom says isn’t true?" The morning that my mother died, this doctor, reacting to what my own mother said about me was very cold, and I’m not going to repeat the things that he said. But it certainly made the moment of my mother’s passing so much more traumatic. I watched her die and it was not a peaceful death by any means, and I was there by myself. On top of that, her doctor was adding to the misery by letting me know that I was a neglectful daughter. When I returned home and the funeral had come and gone, and I began sorting through Mother's things, she left remnants of her bitterness. There were letters, emails, and written pieces still in her computer the shouted how disappointed she was with me and my family and how remarriage had ruined me and my spiritual life.
Satan's darts were being hurled. This brought out struggles in my own heart that had nothing to do with the circumstances.. Doubts and Sorrow became my companion, and they stop in once in awhile even now.
I visualize them sitting on either side of me with cigarettes and blowing smoke in my face. The have a Bronx accent-no offense the folks from the Bronx. These companions are not with me due to my mom or the words said by that doctor, they are here by way of Satan's assaults, and I let them in through the back door.
This is how Satan works. He will lull us into the false belief that our misery is due to others’ mistreatment of us...............Though, this fact does not excuse those who mistreat.
This type of “treatment” was also what were getting from my husband’s family. I will not elaborate too much out of respect for them. But added to this is the fact that an in-law has family that is friends with my husband’s former in-laws, and consequentially, the former wife...{You follow all that?} With this fact in place it created a grape-vine possibility that we quickly learned was quite active. This was another portion of the big old bus that came hurling into our tide pool.
At this point, let me interject that as we prepared to be married, I had little concern or interest in my step-child’s mother. Having abandoned this child and my husband when the child was three, she played such a small part in the child’s life that it had minor significance. But when she found out that we were going to be married, she suddenly had great interest, and still, I had no intentions of having any part in anything concerning her.
Like my past, my husband’s past was gone, and so was this person for him. As far as I was concerned, my step-child would continue to have the routine of visiting with the maternal-grandparents,{and mother if mother was in the mood} though some things might change like holiday timing for obvious reasons.
But she, the ex-wife, did not leave it at that. There was an immediate bombardment after we were married. It began the very day we all moved into our home. It was so extreme that we couldn’t even catch our breath. There was immediate, constant, phone calling, which had not gone on before this. There was constant nagging. There was constant insistence to know our business. There was a constant voicing if her opinion. Keep in mind, to the this day I have not yet met this woman so she knows nothing about me or my relationship with my husband beyond bitter gossip.
Our entire family became caught up in this person's hysteria as we all answered the phone. She didn't seem to care what she told to whom, even our then 6 year old daughter. We asked on many, many occasions that they, the ex and her parents, respect that we’ve just been married and to understand that they needed to back off a little bit for a little while at least. We asked them to just let the child in question call them when it would be convenient to visit. Our intentions were not to interrupt their relationship - only to keep them from drawing our entire family into their insecurities.
We understood their insecurity and tried to work with that somewhat. But their problems really were not our responsibility. They were a part of my step-child's life and it was our intent from the beginning to keep that in tact. But they were not a part of our personal life, though they did all they could do to force themselves in. This, no doubt, was due to their inability to deal with the changes that did effect them, but it was not something that would be part of their decision making. Even after trying to reason with them for a period of several months we kept hitting our heads against a brick wall.
They didn't back off and they pushed even harder. But this wasn’t nearly as disheartening as the fact that my husband’s extended family, knowing the heartache and problems that this woman caused to both my husband and his child, thought they had some say in how we chose to deal with the situation. It wasn’t just advice. There was much bitterness about how we chose to deal with it and other matters. And man oh man, did this ever escalate! This left us, mostly my husband, very bewildered and feeling betrayed by his extended family and questioning the relationship he thought he once had with them.
As for me, I have always been a person who has jealously guarded my privacy. I was an only child, and until my children came along, I never really had to share my life with anyone and, of course, I did so joyfully with them. When I was with my ex-husband, we were isolated. When I was on my own with my children, I still did not need to share my life with anyone except my children. My character is such {like many} that I require "space." I am not the type of person who prefers to have someone around all the time, though I need companionship as much as the next person. I do not respond well to people who ignore those road signs. DO NOT ENTER, PRIVATE DRIVE, NO ACCESS! Our marriage, parenting responsibility, and how we related to the former spouses were, and are, clearly behind those boundaries. Quite honestly, I felt like I moved into a fish bowl after my husband and I married... This was the boulder that slammed into our environment, crushing and separating and robbing us of our life-line-water/joy.. It was the instrument that the joy stealer used to assault our marriage and family.
There are always casualties. There are always consequences for everyone involved. The children are put in the middle and they may even find a degree of control that no child should ever have.. It is a warfare that is absolutely nuts! The problems that can come up are often times no different than what a lot of parents have with their teens. But it can be made into something much more by well-intended people with only love in their heart for their family member..
Younger children can and do struggle. There can be, at first, the anticipation of added or new family, grand parents, aunts, uncles, etc. But the bitterness and quickly voiced, mean remarks can run right over a young child without any thought at all. This can greatly hinder healing when a child does not want anything to do with that family after knowing what has been said about, or to their parent.
As a couple, that relationship-during a time that they should be blissful newlyweds is shattered by this boulder in their tide pool. We had to work around it to communicate, and we did eventually accomplish that.
So, these people deserve our anger, yes?
No, they deserve our forgiveness............ I was listening to David Jeremiah one day recently and he explains this as..
Forgiveness does not stamp out the right to have justice, it stamps out the right to have vengeance.
And where does justice lie? With God... So that kind of moves us right out of the picture...We are called to love and nothing more. Forgiveness does not exonerate that person from their wrong-doing, it allows us to release our bitterness.
Many people struggle with forgiveness because they think that will mean that the person who hurt them will no longer be accountable. That’s not the case. They are accountable to God until they seek His forgiveness and make things right. But we must forgive even when they do not seek it. Bitterness in our heart will choke out the fruits of the spirit and this is why we must not hold on to un-forgiveness. God gives us a way out of this. He gives himself. He says, “Let me deal with this and you remove that thorn from your heart.”.
They, or we, when we‘ve done wrong, will still have to work things out with our Heavenly Father. But when there is forgiveness, you leave it with God. And when you are dealing with people that Satan is using to tear down your God-ordained, originally-pre-fall-perfect union, you will struggle with forgiveness. Those companions, Doubts and Sorrow will put their knee on your back so you are burdened even more. They’ll blow their smoke in your face so that is the only air you are getting into your lungs.
Let me turn things around a bit..
Let me share with you the blessing of not driving a bus through your child’s {sibling’s, friend} marriage union. When you have a child who is married or remarries and you support that union first and foremost, you create a bond of trust and acceptance that will continue through a life time. Although, from outward appearance, you may see things that you believe to be wrong or harmful, you understand that you do not live in their home and do not know all that there is to know. You also understand that there are some things that are not for you to know, that are personal between that man and wife within their home. You have chosen to edify and build them up in all things and this is especially important when it is Christian parents/siblings/friend involved with Christians couples.
The very worst possible thing that someone can do is to judge a person’s relationship or spiritual condition as lacking simply because they make a different choice concerning their own family than what you would make. Doing this, you can create a gap that might never be repaired.
This means; {making this commitment the edify and support}
1; We can never encourage that son or daughter to have ill feeling against his/her spouse when they are having troubles. We can’t say, “He is a bum , you should leave him.” or, “ You are not the same person since you married her, or she is just like your other wife!”
In the event that we are asked for advice, we have to say, “ Ok, but what are you doing to make it work?”
2; We can never speak ill of him/her/their union to others. We can ask for them prayerfully-our daughter and son in-law are struggling, but we can not divulge deep details in gossip, and if we know that that person is prone to gossip, we must not share anything...
3; We can never question or argue with them concerning their choices for their family even when we think they are "stupid." If asked, we’d offer an honest opinion, but we are not to pressure them to accept that as their own or continue to hammer them with our opinion. {nag} We can drive them to complete frustration when we do that.
If they needed help, we are to be there to help if it is appropriate to do so. When the help is longer needed, we have to step back.
4; We have to support their union in all things.{with the exception of any abuse} This is biblical even in a non-Christian marriage.
Do we do it all right all the time? No, we don‘t. We're human
But in not burdening our son, daughter, sibling, or friend with our disapproval {at times we do disapprove quietly.} it leaves the doors open to our heart and theirs. They can trust us not to be judgmental-when we are actually simply trusting in God’s will for their life.
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We have often remarked, or made note of the fact, that over the past several years it seemed like that when we got married it ruined our relationship with those people who had been in our life. We are so very saddened by this and hope that in time it will change. People had grown so accustomed to our un-attachment and involvement in their life that the sudden focus or shift to home life and each other really threw them through a loop.
Before marriage our first priority was of course our children. But we spent a lot of time filling up lonely hours with other people and activities. We gave more of ourselves to them. We were both constantly on the go and the reality was that we were very lonely and were willing and able participants in everything. We filled our time with service, and that involved other people and what we could do for them. People got used to that.
Before marriage, my husband spent all the holidays with his parents and siblings...I didn’t because of the mileage between us and them {my family}-but that was normal. But when we married, our focus shifted to our home life and to each other and adapting to each other which is a scriptural translation for submission..
We wanted to do our own thing for some holidays, and we ran into the conflict that most married couples run into during the holidays....{This is why we have instituted an open house kind of thing during Christmas week that can spill over into the entire month as far as we are concerned. It is not about the day.}
But also, the road signs were put up. There were certain areas of our life that were not to be accessible to other people, and other areas that were no longer accessible. Within our marriage, between the two of us, we had to place those boundaries where we felt comfortable as a couple. Baggage from our past experience may have made some of those boundaries appear rigid to others, none-the-less, they were our boundaries to have to make us feel "safe" in our marriage. The family did not understand, support, or respect that.
I Corinth. 7- that an unmarried man or woman is concerned about the affairs of the Lord and their first priority would be that services. But a married man or woman is concerned about their spouse, how they might please them.
And, this was the change that occurred that other folks were not prepared for, and in many ways have fought bitterly against it. It would be easy for us to fester in our own hurt over this bitterness that has been hurled at us. We could question it.. Hey God, did you fall to sleep at the wheel or something? Is this some kind of mistake?
And we have questioned it and we have cried over it.
But then we are reminded of His providence and we know that somehow His will is perfect and is being worked out through this. And what about lost relationships? How long must we carry that pain? Why hasn't the extended family realized biblical principles and supported us... Why do they keep the bitter coals burning now even after the many of the situations that they disagreed about are in the past?
Again, we are reminded that God’s presence and sovereignty is always faithful, and He does not fall to sleep at the wheel. Each individual in what we see as chaos is being uniquely molded by the Potter, and so are we.
There is a beauty within the tide pool through different situations... wind causes ripples that reflect more light; sunshine causes glittering; night reflects even the smallest lights; raindrops cause concentric ripples and growth of the tide pool; waves overflow it with abundance of blessing.. and maybe even carry some away to their destiny or the bigger world... And through it all the formation of the Rock surrounding it, still holds the essence of the pool.
And I also want to add that in blended families, as with the make-up of God’s kingdom, a step-parent makes a choice to be in that partner’s life and their children’s lives. It doesn’t come to us biologically as the result of momentary passion. It’s a pre-meditated choice. My ex walked away, and my husband made a choice to take on my children and not walk away. I chose to take on my step-child and also not to walk away when the mother did so many years ago.
That choice as a step parent is a big responsibility and is often times taken for granted. I look at my son in-law and I see that he is willing to take on all the baggage that is in my daughter’s life, and in my grand children’s lives. It makes him a very special person and he works double time as a father. He is constantly put down by the biological father who only provides visits and no stability at all, not to mention no child support.
I realize that in today’s society step-parenting has a rough reputation and that is so sad. I wonder how much of that stress is caused by this boulder in our pools that becomes a stumbling block in our life. Without God, in all honesty, I don’t know how blended families survive. The bottom line here is that in all marriages, biblical principles must be applied in order for them to survive and thrive. This means, as Christian parents, we must also apply these principles to our children’s union even if we think we know better than they do.......and God. And at times, when we apply them, we are met with adversity that may come in many forms..
The marriage and family is the foundation of our nation and God’s kingdom. Satan doesn’t like it when it works and he will throw his very best at you. As a man and woman within a second marriage struggling with similar issues as described here, you might not see resolution right away. And, unfortunately there is no quick-fix solution if all parties concerned do not focus on God's truth and principles for marriage. This is why, I believe that God hates divorce, but not the people of divorce. He saw that it shatters the couple involved, but He also understands all this other emotional chaos that comes in to play. It is a bus loaded with many people who all have their own unique perspectives, needs, and influence. A married couple can easily get caught up and lost in all this, as we did for a time.
But again, I want to validate that your marriage is not inferior to those who have been married to one person all of their life. God hates divorce, but you will find no place in the scriptures that tell us that He hates the people of divorce. If you are struggling with the pain of un-acceptance from in-laws, and wondering if your marriage is inferior, don't despair. God loves you with any ever-lasting love, and has given you the same privileges and responsibilities within your marriage. It is a wonderful gift of love. If you have been blessed with a second chance at love, praise the Lord!!!
If you are a parent, adult child, sibling, or friend that has been a stumbling block, or boulder, that has slammed into that tide pool, you can make it right. Acknowledge that "their" marriage {whoever they are} deserves the same respect and nurturing that any marriage founded on God's principle should have. I'm certain that you would find the couple willing and eager to receive your support....
Copy Rights Reserved to Margaret Hoffman/Within The Ark Ministries...