Patrick Butler: Another Look

Why do guys need the Husbands In (serious) Situations, HIS manual, the marriage manual that helps hapless husbands to navigate the whitewater rapids of marital bliss?

It's because women are unpredictable, mysterious and have an incredible ability to see things from a completely out-of-the park angle. Guys like to call this "female intuition" but it's not. It's an entirely logical, pattern-repeating impression of a universe simultaneously far, far away and right here. The mind-boggling juxtaposition makes perfect sense to women, but can leave guys in the stardust of wonderment.

So consider: what brave soul among us would risk a ride to Jupiter without a star chart? No one takes a back-pack trip without calculating how much weight they can carry, how far they can go and what the goal is.

You can enjoy the "journey" of marriage as popularly preached. But the goal is to get to the end of the trail together. How are we going to do that?

Guys who would be astronauts don't have to master interplanetary travel. They can do it in the comfort of their homes. But a caveat -- there are wonders beyond description, terrors beyond imagination entwined within these interstellar marriages. Warp speed 10, Mr. Data.

And if men want to know how much they can get away with -- I mean, wisely discern the most advantageous path to follow -- they're going to need help.

The HIS manual, that gift of a guide handed down over centuries of collective husbandly trials and tribulations -- I mean, rich, rewarding marital encounters -- is a rookie or veteran husband's way to refer to a blueprint, a schematic -- something that contextualizes a wife's explanation of "because."

"Husbands need help." That's the short answer to the manual's existence. The long answer is "Husbands really need help."

This is the way it's supposed to be because any God-fearing guy knows that woman is made in his (God's) image and wasn't fooling around when he said in Genesis 2:24 that the two would become "one flesh."

Think about this. The wife is not an addendum, extension, add-on, trophy, partner, "better half" or "behind" her man. She is mixed in like white and red paint that makes pink. Try separating the red. Good luck. Try figuring out which is more important? No way. Try unmixing it. That's the formula guaranteed to make you crazy.

Maybe that's the meaning of God's thought in Genesis 2:18, "It is not good that the man should be alone." But did guys expect intimacy or responsibility at this level?

OK, let's get this straight. Guys who slap their foreheads while trying to make sense of what the woman God gave them just said, are at that very moment the recipients of God's solution to being alone.

Thanks a bunch.

So what's happening here? Maybe God knows that left to his own devices, bad things can -- and will -- happen to any given husband. Maybe there's something to learn. Enter the Husbands In (serious) Situations manual. The manual doesn't tell you how to unmix the paint. It tells you how to apply it, live with it and even enjoy it. After a while, pink isn't so bad.

Not that it was ever bad, I mean. Of course not. Never. My first, best dream came true the day I married. My time married "has been nothing less than magnificent." (HIS 3:16).

See?

Any wife knows the day you asked to marry her, you were hoping the answer would be "yes" and it was the happiest moment of your life. You had found a good thing and she knows it. Evidently God does too. (Proverbs 18:22).

So when Janet and I get tangled up in a mix of marital emotion (hypothetically speaking, of course), she may simply smile and say, "Just remember my name means 'God's gracious gift,'" and turn to her next task, her pony-tail bouncing in the breeze as she exits.

As I stare after her with mouth open and hand still in the air ready to make my next point, I take another look. There is something very deep, very spiritual happening here.

One is that I'm not going to get what I want. Not fully. Two, this paint-mixed-in woman is not only given by God, but created in God's very image and carries within her something critically important for me to learn. That means she is indeed -- God's gracious gift.

How can I look at that gift and say, "Yeah, OK, God. What else do you have for me?"

"Wait for a minute in mental silence," the manual succinctly sums up in chapter 16. "The secret is not finding a 'she' who realizes the husband's dreams, as much as the adjusting of dreams to fit the realities of being a husband. This is where oft-avoided 'spiritual guy-growth' lies."

Let's face it. Guys hate "growth" because it means putting the remote down and getting out of the spiritual recliner. But what are ya' gonnna do? To accomplish marriage, husbands will understand that being a husband is the very tool God uses to get his way with them.

And if that sounds sneaky, well ... it's a guy thing.

Patrick Butler
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