Free Lifetime Guarantee by Bill Gillham Page B

drawbridge up, I began to show my true self. This loving, caring, tender, compassionate, attentive, young man became sarcastic, hateful, critical, indifferent, self-centered, self-indulgent, and downright mean at times. I began to pour all my years of pent-up frustration against strong women out onto one of the dearest women God ever created. I was a strong woman hater.
    Someone may be wondering why I would be dumb enough to marry a strong woman. Why not choose one who would submit to my every wish?
    Remember the rattlesnake illustration back in Chapter 1 that demonstrates how your emotions get stuck? Well, since I had spent twenty-three years doubting my masculinity and my ability to have it all together as a male, as a leader, how did I feel by now? Inadequate. Oh, I wanted to be the strong leader at home, but I didn’t feel I could do it. I felt more like a boy. I felt I needed a combination wife and mother. My feeler was stuck on about an 8. So I married a woman who would run the ship, discipline the kids, manage the money, make wise decisions, and so on.
    I married according to my feeler, in other words. But bless her heart, Anabel had not married my dad. She had married someone who was out to destroy her. I didn’t know this. I didn’t lie in bed at night and plot it. I didn’t know what was driving me. All I knew was that I felt frustrated, threatened, and unhappy with myself. It all looked hopeless.
    Here’s the way the cycle went. I stayed frustrated with myself, say, at level 5. Show me someone who’s frustrated, and I’ll show you someone who’s hostile. I had a deep need to ease that frustration. As a Christian, I knew it was not of God and wanted to overcome it, yet the hostility sat in there like a bomb waiting to detonate. (Some Christians have “implode” flesh, some have “explode.” I have explode flesh.)
    Anabel, meanwhile, kept doing things that irritated me, and I cut her down to size with my tongue. She, laboring under the burden of performance-based acceptance, made like Avis and tried harder. Stung by her husband’s criticism of her performance, she felt rejected.
    Remember, though, that Anabel also felt self -rejection. She couldn’t love herself as well as she could had she not received this negative feedback on her performance. What was her old, fleshly remedy for the situation? Try to improve! So she doubled her effort, and more often than not, she made improvements on her already yeoman production.
    This in turn threatened me even more, as it was a continual reminder of my own inability to accept myself as male. Her competency increased my self-rejection since I was being “outdone” by a woman, and my hostility accelerated. What was my way of getting relief? Strike out at the “cause,” Anabel.
    Being rejected again, she tried to do better (to get her need for love met), and the cycle began again. We were two people walking after their unique versions of the flesh.
Thorns in the Flesh
    In 2 Corinthians 12, Paul speaks of having known a man who was lifted up into heaven. He then says that he, Paul, was given a thorn in the flesh to keep him humble. Most would agree that the man who was lifted to heaven was Paul, else why would he have been given a thorn to keep him humble?
    It is irrelevant to our discussion to speculate on what the thorn was. The emphasis in the passage is not on the thorn, but on its purpose. It was to make Paul’s flesh trip (pride) unproductive.
    The Lord has designed your marriage so that each of you completes the other. There have been many books written enumerating the positive ways spouses complement or complete one another. But I’ll bet that if you examine your situation honestly, you will discover that your spouse’s flesh in some way is a “thorn” in your flesh. There will be something about his or her flesh patterns that bugs yours or makes it unproductive for you to use them. God’s purpose is that you be broken from walking after the flesh,