When Perry and I first became friends all those years ago and eventually started dating, I never let him harbor any illusions that I was perfect. There had been countless mistakes and bad roads I’d taken in my late teens and early twenties, including the broken engagement that left me raw and scarred. In fact, I think one of the scariest parts of finally running back to Christ at the age of twenty-two was looking around during Bible study and wondering who would want me when I felt so damaged. I knew God had forgiven me, but could a good man look at me and want me to be his wife when there were other girls who seemed so much sweeter and softer and might even rise while it was still night to prepare food for their families like in Proverbs 31, when I knew that cooking a big breakfast before dawn wasn’t ever going to be part of my skill set?
But then Perry came along, and we fell in love. I was honest about who I was and where I’d been, and so was he. Neither of us had been angels, but there was also that line in my mind of how much detail to share about where you’ve been and what you’ve done. Do you just give a rough overview of your past mistakes, or do you throw all those skeletons out of the closet and see where they land?
(Bones! All over the place! Big mess!)
So I spent a lot of time praying about it and felt God was assuring me that Perry knew the things he needed to know and that the rest was part of my past —dirty water under the bridge.
So we got married and had a child and spent the next twelve years living life together. Then I went to a Beth Moore Living Proof Live conference in New Orleans in April of 2009. I can’t even remember exactly what she talked about. I could go back and look in an old notebook, but that would take a lot of effort, and it isn’t the point of this story. Quit being so impressed with my attention to detail.
As I sat in that audience, I knew with all certainty that God was telling me I needed to tell Perry a few things I’d never told him before. Things that had happened years before I’d even met him. And my stomach began to hurt. Why now, God? Why, after all this time? This doesn’t even make sense. I don’t want to do this.
I flew home after the weekend and spent the next week wrestling with God. I told myself I was just imagining the whole thing, because it didn’t make sense. It was just one of those ideas that seemed right while I was listening to Beth Moore talk, but it didn’t translate to reality. The past is the past, and I didn’t want to dredge it up. It seemed pointless, and truth be told, I was a little terrified of the whole idea.
But finally one night, about seven days later, Perry and I were in bed watching TV, and I knew I couldn’t avoid it any longer. I knew that to continue to ignore God in this was complete disobedience, and it was driving me crazy. I was going to have to throw any remaining bones out of my closet. Look! Is that a tibia?
I was a wreck. I cleared my throat to begin to talk and then decided I’d better go to the bathroom first because that’s always a good stalling strategy, not to mention that I felt like I might throw up. I’d worked myself into a frenzy. I was convinced that I was about to share things that would make Perry walk to the closet and pack his forest-green Eddie Bauer duffel bag and leave me forever.
Isn’t that what fear does? It grows and magnifies everything to the point where all rational thought is lost and we can only see the city limits of Worst Case Scenario, which borders Crazy Town.
Finally I gathered myself enough to look at Perry and say, “We need to talk. I need to tell you some things, and I’m really scared.”
Listen. If you need to get your husband’s attention, this is a highly effective opener.
He immediately sat up straighter, turned off the TV, and looked directly at me. I could tell his face was a little paler than it had been a few minutes before. My voice was cracking, and my hands were shaking. “First of all, this was all years ago,” I began. And I tearfully told him everything God had put on my heart to share with him.
I made my confession, never looking him in the eye because I knew I couldn’t without falling apart. And then I finally looked at him, cautiously waiting for his reaction. Waiting for the hammer to fall. Waiting for him to get up, hurl words of condemnation, and walk out of the room.
Instead he looked me straight in the eye, never wavering, and said, “And?”
I don’t know when any reaction has caught me so completely by surprise or when one word was ever filled with so much grace. Perry said, “That doesn’t change one thing about you to me. That’s your past. I don’t care about that. I love you.”
And in that moment I understood at least part of why God had me tell Perry a part of my past that didn’t really seem to matter after all those years. It wasn’t even about our marriage. It was to give me a tangible realization that even though I thought I understood what grace looked like, I really had no idea how deep and wide the mercy of Christ is. That he looks at us when we lay ourselves bare before him, with all our ugly truths and realities, and says, “And?”
Not one thing we’ve done changes that we are his. That he created us and loves us with a love more fierce and loyal than any we will ever know. He isn’t looking for perfection. He’s looking for humble hearts that know we are nothing without his lavish grace.
In Psalm 103 we are told that God redeems our lives from the pit. Verses 11-12 proclaim, “As high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is his love for those who fear him; as far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our transgressions from us.” I once heard someone say that those words represent the beams of the cross —reaching all the way up to the heavens with his love and stretching out to remove our sins as far as from where the sun rises to where it sets. That’s how much God loves us. That’s how far he goes not only to save us but also to crown us with his love and compassion (verse 4).
So, yes, forgiveness is important in a marriage. If you’re married, you’ll have to forgive your husband many times during your life together, and he’ll have to do the same for you. But then there’s grace. Which is the greatest gift of all. It’s the thing that says, I see you for who you really are, and I love you anyway. In fact, maybe, I love you even more now than I did before.
It’s grace that allows us to look at the flawed person before us and say, “And?” the same way God looks at us.
CHAPTER 22
Deck the Halls
YEARS AND YEARS AGO, when Perry and I were just two cute young kids falling in love, I dreamed of the day we would finally be married and get to share every aspect of our lives together. Specifically, I couldn’t wait for Christmas as husband and wife.
As a child of divorce, I experienced some amount of anxiety and stress during the majority of my Christmas celebrations from about the age of nine on, as my sister and I were shuttled back and forth to make sure we spent equal amounts of time with our mom and our dad. I always felt like the burden was on me to make sure no one’s feelings were hurt and that everyone was happy. This wasn’t really something my parents put on me, but I took it on because I am the oldest child and it’s what we do. We’re pleasers. Everyone stay calm. I can make this holiday MAGICAL with my own two hands!
Then, as a single woman out of college, I just felt like I didn’t really belong anywhere. It wasn’t because my family didn’t make me feel loved; it was just that I longed to be somewhere else sharing the holidays with someone special.
I’ll never forget driving home from the ranch with Perry right around Thanksgiving one year. We’d been dating almost six months at that point, and as we listened to Christmas music on the sweet sound system in his 1990 Ford Bronco, I began to daydream about our future Christmases as husband and wife. My fantasy world was significantly helped when Rich Mullins’s song “You Gotta Get Up” came on. Especially the verse that says:
Mom and Daddy stayed up too late last night
Oh I guess they got carried away in the Christmas candlelight
And you gotta get up . . .
It’s Christmas morning
It made me all swoony. It was all so
romantic. I envisioned many Christmas Eves with Perry and me snuggled up by the fire in our matching plaid pajamas as we got ready for Santa Claus and lovingly assembled a Barbie Dreamhouse.
(I have no real explanation for the matching plaid pajamas portion of that scenario. That really isn’t Rich Mullins’s fault as much as it was my slight obsession with the Garnet Hill catalog. All the best families wear matching pajamas.)
When our first Christmas as husband and wife approached, I was giddy with all the giddiness. I made plans for us to go eat dinner and then head to the Christmas tree lot to pick out our first official Shankle Family Christmas Tree. Imagine an excitement level of ten and then ratchet it on up a few notches. That was me. I could have scaled ten Christmas tree lots in a single bound on pure adrenaline.
We arrived at the lot (only because I didn’t know of any Christmas tree farms where we could cut down our own tree, because I would have absolutely gone that route had it been a viable option) and began to peruse the possibilities. And this is when the first problem arose. Perry came from a Noble fir family, whereas I came from a family that believed in Scotch pine. We were in a mixed-Christmas-tree marriage and had no idea. No one covered that in premarital counseling.
But I was swayed by the Noble fir. It had some appeal. So we focused our efforts in that section of the tent. And then I saw it. It was like when Charlie Brown sees his tree, except the tree that captured my heart was about eight feet tall and almost as wide as it was tall.
“This is THE ONE,” I breathed with deep reverence.
Perry gave it a once-over and announced, “You are delusional. Do you know what our house looks like? This tree is enormous.”
“It’s not that big. And we have nine-foot ceilings. Those ceilings are begging for a good, tall tree. This is the one.”
Perry shrugged his shoulders and sighed. “Okay, if it’s the one you want. But I think you’re forgetting about a geometric principle known as circumference.”
I hugged him tightly and proclaimed, “I’ve never had a tree of this magnitude, and I barely passed geometry so I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Everything was all fine and good and deck-the-halls fa-la-la-la-la until we got home to our house that must have shrunk while we were at the Christmas tree lot and I realized there was no possible way we were going to get that tree through our front door. Or our back door. It became clear that we had two options: we could cut a hole in our ceiling and lower it down on a mat like those men did for their paralytic friend so Jesus could heal him, or we could make the drive of shame back to the Christmas tree lot and throw ourselves on their mercy.
We chose the latter because we didn’t believe Jesus could heal our enormous tree. They let us choose a different tree that we wouldn’t have to keep in our front yard, and then we drove back home to get the tree in the stand so we could decorate it while listening to festive Christmas music and drinking hot chocolate.
How could I have known then that Christmas tree selection day in our home would henceforth be known as the day of the year we are most likely to file for divorce?
In my defense, I totally thought the tree was leaning to the left and that it was secure in the stand when Perry went to adjust it.
But if we really want to engage in a Christmas activity that has the potential to put us on the fast track to marital counseling, then hanging the outdoor lights is the most obvious choice.
One year I made the executive decision to buy all new colored lights because Caroline enjoys a home that looks like it belongs on the Las Vegas strip, and I really wanted to go retro with the enormous bulb lights of ye olden days, otherwise known as my childhood.
I showed Perry the boxes of lights I’d purchased, and he began to waste precious minutes —minutes that could have been spent illuminating our home —reading the instructions.
Seriously. I can’t even.
I didn’t even know Christmas lights came with instructions.
He said, “It says that you can only string sixty lights together at one time. That means only two strands can be connected.”
“And?”
“Well, that means to do the house the way you want it done, we’re going to need about eleven extension cords.”
“And the problem with that is?”
“To do that we’d need to go buy eight new extension cords.”
This was foolishness. I boldly proclaimed, “Listen. Those directions don’t know what they’re talking about. All the boxes say that. It’s just a suggestion. A GUIDELINE, if you will.”
Perry looked at me skeptically and began to hang the lights.
Before long, he got into the whole spirit of proper outdoor illumination. The real beauty of lighting your home with Christmas lights is the moment of flipping the switch a la Clark Griswold, then basking in the glow of maximum wattage while feeling the sense of pride from a job well done.
And knowing your lights are so much better than your neighbor’s.
That’s the true spirit of Christmas.
But that moment isn’t the same if it involves plugging in eleven different extension cords. That kind of industriousness and attention to detail ruins the whole thing.
So we climbed ladders and hung lights until FINALLY! the moment arrived. We plugged in those bad boys, flipped the switch, and they all came on.
For about two minutes.
And then we were cast into total darkness. Except not really, because it was only four in the afternoon and still light outside, but that takes away from the drama of the story, so pretend with me that it was pitch-black outside.
Apparently they were not kidding about the whole sixty-lights-maximum thing. We did the only thing that could be done. We went inside and ordered sushi.
And the next day found Perry shopping for eight new extension cords in order to revamp our lighting system. I also feel like he spent some of that time wishing he weren’t married to a crazy person with dreams of Christmas illumination grandeur.
The reality is (if our first fifteen Christmases together are any indication), holiday seasons as a married couple aren’t necessarily as romantic as what I’d envisioned when I was single. In fact, sometimes it’s more stressful because you have to think about things like budgets and the fact that one person thinks buying the pink Pottery Barn retro kitchen for your two-year-old is excessive. (In hindsight, he was totally right.)
And it’s hard to get carried away in the Christmas candlelight when one of you is crying because the Polly Pocket Mall Roller Coaster is a device of Satan meant to ruin Christmas forever with its vague assembly instructions, and the other one of you is snoring on the couch offering little to no moral support.
However, there is a different kind of sweetness. I’ll never forget our first Christmas with Caroline, when she was only four months old. Santa brought pacifiers and some Gerber plastic bowls that year. It was a simple Christmas morning celebration, just Perry and me with our new baby girl and a fire in the fireplace. But I remember it so clearly because I finally had the family I’d always dreamed about all those years ago, when I was driven back and forth across town in an attempt to make it all seem even and fair, feeling like I didn’t really belong anywhere.
I fed Caroline her rice cereal and just let it wash over me that God had given me a home. And a husband I loved dearly along with a little bundle wearing an elf hat and Santa Claus house shoes that were way too big for feet that never touched the floor anyway. There have been Christmas gifts before and since, but other than the gift of Jesus that started the whole thing, none have ever meant as much as that Christmas when I realized that God had fulfilled his promise in Psalm 68:6 to set the lonely in families.
Even when your Christmas tree leans a little to the left.
CHAPTER 23
The Antelope in the Living Room
A COUPLE OF YEARS AGO Perry returned home after a weekend of hunting. I knew he was home because Caroline and I walked into the house to find a set of deer antlers
recently belonging to a deer sitting on the island in our kitchen. Like an appetizer. Except they were attached to a skull.
Sadly, this doesn’t even faze me anymore.
Because there was a time when Perry actually decided to boil an entire deer skull in a pot. On the stove. In our kitchen. Which is located inside our house.
I know. I don’t understand either. But at least now I can say I have experienced something that is certainly akin to the smell of boiling feet in a stew made of garbage.
The fresh deer antlers caused me to remember and reflect on a little incident that happened right before Thanksgiving a few years ago. There was a time I didn’t believe I’d ever be able to tell this story because the subject matter was too sensitive and we may or may not have been on our way to divorce court over the entire incident. But enough time has passed that I can bring it up. What was it that Mark Twain once said? Humor is tragedy plus time. And also, sometimes if you don’t laugh, then you will cry and remember how you grew up in a family that believed golf was an adventurous outdoor activity and you accidentally married a man who is like one long Wild Kingdom episode.
Gulley and I had spent the days leading up to Thanksgiving in Bryan with the kids. There was all manner of fun to be had, but there was also a fair share of drama. Especially toward the end of the trip, as the stress of the kids bickering back and forth and various people being put in time-out began to wear on both of us to a degree no amount of nerve medication could cure. I’d give you all the details, but I think I blacked out sometime Monday afternoon and didn’t wake up until it was time to drive home on Wednesday.
By the time we were packing up the car, Caroline was in full meltdown mode and insisting that her life was very hard and full of sadness. Which isn’t something you really have patience for after days spent at places like Santa’s Wonderland and Aggie football games. I told her to get over it and GET IN THE CAR.
The Antelope in the Living Room: The Real Story of Two People Sharing One Life Page 16
