his eyes said yes, but his wife said no

On Wednesday, for small group, we were going over Ephesians 5:21-33 (you know…that one passage on marriage). In the discussion questions, the application ones were pretty much geared toward married people (which our group conveniently has none of), so…what exactly were we to do? Well, one of our guys suggested altering the question to how can we support those in Acacia that are married.

Of course, for me, this presents challenges when it comes to practical application. After all, aside from going up to billy or geo and saying in the deepest voice I can muster while avoiding direct eye contact: hey bro…I support you …what other ways can I apply this? Then dave brings up a point that I never really thought before. A lot of times, we will do things without thinking about potential downstream effects on a buddy’s marriage. For example, if I say: hey let’s play some board games to everyone around me. It could be very possible that I can see that Geo may really want to go, but I also see Lisa is shaking her head because maybe that day was their weekly scheduled his/hers pedicure day. Well, that difference of opinion could easily cause (unintended) tension at home.

So how do you remedy that? One possibility suggested was to go straight to the wife (or husband). Now granted, this does sound like the start of a ball-and-chain joke, but here me out here. If you approach the other person first…just to check before asking your buddy, then, if there’s a prior engagement, you won’t be causing any tension by asking the guy.

Another possibility is to maybe not give the guy a hard time. I know…for us guys it’s easy to give our friends grief for being married (i.e. ball-and-chain jokes)…sometimes it’s unintentional, sometimes not. But I’ll bet at the heart of that laughter, that kind of joking could still get really annoying for said married guy. I guess I never really worried about this kind of stuff before, but now that more of my friends are married…this does come up quite often these days. I dunno…just an observation that was sitting on my mind since Wednesday night.