You look like you’ve got some experience

A man came in late last night. As he stood at the counter he looked at me and said, “You look like you got some experience (being translated, that means, You’re old!), you married?”

“Yeah.”

“How long?”

(Oh great, I can’t remember how long…) “Since 1975.”

“How do you make it last?”

What a question for the middle of the night in a convenience store! And what a person to ask!! But I could tell he was serious and troubled, so I attempted to answer . . .

I told him about love, and doing unto others as you want them to do to you, and doing these things even if the other person doesn’t respond. I talked about how we are so sweet and considerate when dating and the temptation / tendency we face to stop doing that and the subsequent danger of speaking roughly or harshly to our wives and how once we start it can become a fixed pattern. Not only should we treat our wives as kindly and respectfully as we do others, we should actually treat them better than we do others . . . (this is the Reader’s Digest version).

“The second thing,” I continued, “is God. He created marriage and wrote the Book on it. So you need to pray a lot.” I confessed that my prayers are mostly for God to work on her, but that God had been showing me that I needed to pray for me to be a better husband. And that we needed to love as Christ loved the Church and gave Himself for it – we need to lose our lives for our wives. (I know, I know, I’m talking to myself as much as to him!)

“How long you been married?” I asked.

“We’re not married yet,” he said. “We’ve been together for three years. We’re getting married soon, though, and just had a baby.”

“Ah, one of the advantages of being married is commitment. When you get married you make a commitment to stay married “for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer…” ” I told him that we’d had problems, but that my wife was committed to the marriage and to me and stuck it out...

We are talking between customers, what are all these people doing out at 2 am?? He starts to leave, but hesitates, he has one more question. Finally, he asks it, “When do you know it’s over?”

Wow!

“When you commit to someone the question is not, “When is it over?” but “How can I make this work?”

So easy to say when you don’t know the people or their struggles or even how they are getting along. So I tried to get practical. I told him how the time right after a woman gives birth is often difficult for her and subsequently for him, "but love her and hang in there, it gets better!"

I said, “Man, you asked a simple question and I’ve given you a long answer” (much longer than I’ve related here).

He said, “That’s OK. It was good. Thank you.”

This happens often. People are really hurting. I am thankful that I can be there for them from time to time and that they feel safe to ask me these kinds of questions. Of course, the hard work is when he gets back home.