MARRIAGE AND FAMILY – Priorities of a Professional by Randy Jordan
Reprinted from Chapter 9 of the book A Profession of Faith, Volume 1, Bringardner & Jordan Eds. (2002) with permission from the author and publisher.
Perspectives and Priorities
During my first semester of law school, I met Bill, a single Jewish man who was willing to befriend me as a slightly older married law student with two small children. I remember reflecting on the academic advantage that Bill had because he did not have to split his time between school and family responsibilities. I even admit to having a little jealousy as I saw Bill log hours of study time in preparation for exams, while I had to concern myself with the needs of a wife, daughter and son. I acknowledged in my mind that family commitments were important for a Christian husband and father, but my ambition to succeed in law school carved out room in my heart for the belief that family life was burdensome.
One evening I invited Bill to our home for a spaghetti dinner. As the conversation moved from topic to topic, Bill commented on how great it was to be in a family setting. Pushing the subject further, he stated that I was fortunate to have my family to come home to each day. Bill confessed that law school was his only focus and that he feared that he was becoming isolated from “real life.” Finally, as I sat in convicted astonishment, Bill admonished me to never take my family for granted and to always be thankful for the balance to life provided by my wife and children. Few conversations have taught me more about the importance of maintaining God’s priorities on marriage and family and I am forever grateful to my Jewish friend.
In a more recent conversation with John Partington, a fellow Elder, I was being open about the internal pressure that I sometimes feel between my commitment to work and to my family. John pointed to the early chapters of the book of Genesis and showed me that this problem had been around from the beginning of time. John’s brief history lesson gave me another new insight about God’s views of work and marriage.
In Genesis 2, we find God addressing Adam’s need for friendship by saying “[i]t is not good for man to be alone, I will make a helper suitable for him” (verse18). Then, God miraculously creates a new human being out of Adam’s rib and calls her “’woman’ for she was taken out of man” (verse 23). To complete the union, God proclaims that these two distinct people will “become one flesh” (verse 24) as husband and wife. The Garden of Eden had become the home of the first marriage.
Sadly, we find in Genesis 3 that sin made its way into the world to destroy Eden when Adam and eve ate of the forbidden fruit. We learn that God’s sense of justice demanded that the first sinners pay a price. The serpent was condemned to crawl the earth, the woman was placed in submission to her husband and the man was sentenced to working for the rest of his life. God explained Adam’s curse by saying:
"Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return." Genesis 3:17-19
As one who loves work and considers it a blessing, I was shocked by the realization that God had used work as a means of punishing Adam for violating the sacred terms of life in the Garden of Eden. Indeed, work was part of the curse that God applied to the ground, forever changing the dynamic of marriage for Adam and Eve.
When God set the original priorities for man and woman in the Garden of Eden, it is clear to me that the marriage relationship was second only to man’s relationship with God himself. After facing the consequences of his sin, Adam now had to divert his attention to toiling in the fields to provide for his family instead of focusing his full attention and desires on Eve in accordance with God’s original design. When we let our commitment to work invade either one of these top two priorities, we too are succumbing to Adam’s curse. Clearly, God expects Christians to be diligent and responsible workers, but work must exist within a Godly context and the Bible tells us in Hebrews 13:4 that “[m]arriage should be honored by all.”
Growing Together as a Couple
I have never been completely comfortable with the extra degree of respect that is afforded those who attain professional status. My parents taught me that everyone puts their pants on one leg at a time. However, I have come to accept that higher levels of education and job titles do communicate something about a person’s potential to make a difference. I have seen this phenomenon sometimes transfer subtly to relationships within the church.
In my case, I practiced pharmacy for five years before entering law school and have worked as a lawyer for the past seventeen years. As I achieved some modicum of success professionally, I found that others would seek me out to serve on professional and community boards. Even in the church, I seemed to be called upon for public speaking and various leadership roles with increasing frequency. Frankly, it was gratifying to find that I might have something to offer that was considered valuable by others.
My wife, Jan, on the other hand, assisted me in the operation of our pharmacy in the early years of our marriage. Although she had graduated as an elementary education major, she chose to pursue motherhood rather than seek employment in her chosen profession of teaching. Jan is a gifted woman with many talents, but it became apparent to her over time that her opportunities to serve were not as frequent as mine. Even in the church, there became a disparity between Jan’s leadership role and mine. Subtly, her personal confidence began to erode and she started questioning our compatibility as a married couple. To my shame, I was oblivious to her concerns – after all, everything was going great for me.
One day during a particularly painful discussion, Jan shared with me that she sometimes wondered whether I would have been better off marrying someone else. She wondered whether she was holding me back. I was scared and embarrassed at the same time. Scared that my wife was experiencing so much insecurity and unhappiness and embarrassed that I was so unaware and insensitive. Such is the plight of a selfishly ambitious married professional.
I realized on that day that I had led our marriage under a flawed assumption. I assumed that Jan shared equally in any victories that I experienced. Looking back, I can see clearly that I had observed only half of the instruction in Ephesians 5:28 for husbands to “love their wives as their own bodies.” I had loved myself, but in my drive to succeed, I was blinded to her needs for personal victory stories and benchmarks of success. I committed to Jan that from that moment forward, I would only go places from a leadership perspective where we could go together. Slowly, Jan’s self confidence returned and our relationship began to grow in new and exciting ways. Ironically, I found that I began to achieve a greater sense of accomplishment from her successes than mine.
Four years ago, we took the principle of growing together to a new level when I resigned my law firm partnership so that my wife and I could work together at the faith-based charity, HOPE worldwide. Today, we also have the privilege of serving together in the Eldership of the Greater Philadelphia Church of Christ. It is glorious partnership that we now share, but we would not be where we are today without the decision to grow together.
Respect One Another
One of the most penetrating questions that can be asked of a husband or wife by their spouse is “Do you respect me?” Husbands are offered some advantage on this topic by the scriptures when Paul instructs in Ephesians 5:33 that “the wife must respect her husband.” Wives are not ignored, however, when husbands, in I Peter 3:7, are encouraged to be considerate of their wives and “treat them with respect.” Nevertheless, true respect between spouses is often elusive, particularly so when one or both spouses are professionals.
For professionals working in their area of expertise, respect is assumed. By definition, professionals have specialized skills and abilities that are not common to most men and women. We are trained to gain confidence in our abilities, because others are wholly reliant upon our competence. Our credentials are intended to support the notion that our advice is worthy of respect.
Interestingly, no matter how married professionals are viewed in the work setting, they go home every evening to a place where respect must be built, not on credentials, but on service to others. In the prelude to the most extensive discussion of the marriage relationship in the Bible, the apostle Paul encourages Christians to “[s]ubmit to one another out of reverence for Christ. Ephesians 5:21. What follows is a challenging discussion by Paul of how the marriage relationship should be like the relationship between Christ and the church. Wives are charged with submitting to their husbands, “as the church submits to Christ” and husbands are commanded to love their wives, “just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.” Ephesians 5:24-25. Admittedly, the degree of love and respect that is required to serve at this level is no easy task for married couples under the best of circumstances, but when a touch of “professional” pride is added, it can seem nearly impossible.
I find that the issue of disrespect expresses itself in my marriage in three ways. First, and probably foremost, is failing to seek and trust in her opinion. Although I have grown accustomed as a disciple to seeking advice from others, at heart I am an independent thinker. I sometimes find it inefficient to include others in decision-making, particularly if I think that their input is unnecessary. If you are beginning to sense a hint of arrogance in this approach, I have to plead guilty as charged. In marriage, however, I have discovered that more than just poor decision-making occurs with this degree of independent thinking. Separation and distance results. When I have excluded Jan from decision-making, I send the message that I don’t really value her thoughts and ideas. However, as we have grown in our openness with one another, I have made an amazing discovery. I have found that my most trusted advisor and confidant is my wife. Although her analytic skills have not been honed by the Socratic method and she has not been trained on legal advocacy techniques, she knows me better than anyone and offers the best advice.
A second source of disrespect is the failure to be courteous. As a lawyer, I have been trained in the adversarial system of justice. The theory behind this approach is that if both sides aggressively argue their case, somehow justice and truth will prevail. All I can say is that what works in the courtroom, rarely works in the bedroom, or any other room in my house for that matter. In all seriousness, rude behavior, harsh comments, terse answers and thoughtless criticisms have no place in a marriage. Such conduct should be replaced by the admonition of the apostle Paul to, “not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs, that it may benefit those who listen.” -Ephesians 4:29.
The final area where I am prone to show disrespect in my marriage is not sharing my personal schedule. The busyness of professional life is challenging. Long work hours, extra business meetings and frequent travel put pressure on the personal schedules of married couples and their children. Under these circumstances, the coordination of schedules among family members will not happen without proper planning and communication. I always know that I have failed in this area when Jan says something like, “You are going to Los Angeles next week? I didn’t know” or “You didn’t tell me that Steve and Theresa were coming over on Monday.” I used to blame these scheduling snafus on being absent-minded, but I have learned that it is a matter of having proper respect for Jan and our family. Now, I have implemented the personal rule of not scheduling anything without checking first with my wife.
Open Lines of Communication with Children
I am very proud of both of my children, Mandy and Rob. They are now out of the teenage stage and have moved on to the early years of adulthood. Both of them are faithful disciples of Jesus Christ and I know that God has great plans for their lives. At various times, however, each of them has been spiritually challenged by sin that was serious enough to put their souls in jeopardy.
Although the root sins were quite different, I realized there was a glaringly common challenge for both children. My wife and I had created high expectations for our children. We had regular family devotionals and prayed with them nightly when they were young. We did our best to follow the scriptures in Proverbs 22:6 and “train a child in the way he should go.” We also tried to provide a good personal example for our children to follow and discussed with them our commitment to following God. By all accounts, we were doing a good job and both children became disciples.
However, one topic we never discussed with them was our failures. We were eager to share with them our successes in sharing our faith, but were reluctant to discuss our long bouts of fruitlessness. We urged them to do well in school, but never brought up the time I nearly dropped out of pharmacy school after being put on academic probation. When we did talk about failures, it was usually theirs that was the focus of conversation. In our family, failure was not really an acceptable option. We were not trying to be overly strict or harsh, we simply wanted to uphold the standard of Jesus Christ in the lives of our children. As a consequence, our children learned to be silent about sinful behaviors that they knew would be unacceptable to us.
When their sins were finally exposed, both children expressed great relief that the truth was finally out because they had been unable to envision telling us on their own. Once the truth was uncovered, my wife and I were eager to comfort and forgive and our family was stronger than ever. However, we had to face up to the fact that we had created an unopen atmosphere for our family. We had established unspoken rules of engagement that made some areas of their lives unsafe for discussion. In retrospect, I think we were more interested in what we wanted our children to be rather than who they really were. To them, our love must have felt like it had certain performance requirements attached to it. I am confident that we taught our children properly about the true commitment of a disciple, but I am afraid we were less careful in teaching them about grace and forgiveness. These factors combined to produce communication barriers in our family that I am just now beginning to understand. Without question, parental responsibility includes setting standards for our children, but we must learn to do so in a way that keeps them close rather than drives them away.
I believe open communication becomes increasingly important as our children age through the teenage years and enter college or the workforce. There is a natural growth process for children that involves gaining independence from their parents. Indeed, in Genesis 2:24, the act of marriage is described as including leaving father and mother. If we resist this God-ordained separation in the wrong way, I believe we will quickly drive our children away from our values and spiritual beliefs. As I look back over my life, it is hard to find a time when I grew spiritually more than during my freshman year of college. I experienced an intense period of reevaluation of my own beliefs. I realized that relying on my parents’ beliefs was no longer spiritually satisfying. I felt compelled to discover a faith of my own. Likewise, I have urged my children to be sure that their faith is genuine and truly theirs -- all the while praying that they will not reject the truth of the Bible. These times require open communication and great acceptance on the part of both parent and child. This type of openness is not built overnight, but is cultivated through repeated opportunities of showing your children that your love for them is unconditional.
The Long View
I graduated from law school in 1984 on my birthday. It was a fantastic day. My parents and in-laws had come to town to join in the celebration and my wife had prepared a glorious reception after the graduation ceremony. I remember the feeling of personal satisfaction that all the hard work had paid off. However, my greatest memory of that day is when I gave Jan an opal ring to say thank-you for her many acts of support and understanding in helping me make it through law school. Through the tears of that special moment, I gained a glimpse of God’s perspective on the priority that marriage and family should have in the life of a professional. It is a view that sustains me to this day.