marriage

Please use your inner voice

My daughter had a dance performance at school to day. It was the result of a week-long special program brought into her school where the kids were taught different dance styles from the 1900’s, spanning from the 1910’s through the 1990’s. I have to say, having been born in the late 1970’s, hearing people refer to that era as “the 1900’s” definitely made me feel old. It’s hard to believe that there are twenty five year olds who were born in the year 2000, but I suppose that is how every aging person feels at one point or another. 

Where was I? Oh yeah. My daughter had a dance performance at school today which my wife and I were planning to attend. My sister-in-law was also going, and my wife and her were going to ride together because they had plans to go out after. 

The performance wasn’t until early afternoon, so I went to jiu-jitsu class in the morning. When I was leaving class, I got a text from my wife that said her sister was at our house and she was taking a nap in my daughter’s room. She then sent me a text that said, “When you come home, please use your inner voice.” 

English is my wife’s second language and, while she speaks, reads, and writes it as well as most Americans, sometimes she mixes up slang or common American sayings. In this case, she clearly intended to say, “When you come home, please use your inside voice,” and I knew what she meant. Still, her actual words caught my attention. 

While it is sometimes necessary for me to be told to “use my inside voice” because I can get rather excited and, with that excitement, my volume tends to increase without me realizing it, I can honestly say that I’ve never been told to “use my inner voice before,” at least not in those words. That said, if I’m being honest, it felt less like a typo or misunderstanding, and more like a sign. It’s something I needed to read and it’s been on my mind all day. 

We could all do well to use our inner voice more often. I know I could. There are so many instances every day where that quiet whisper of God is drowned out by the world or by my own selfishness, pride, fears, and desires. Temptations are loud, obtrusive, and easy to give in to. 

We don’t have to practice listening to temptation. It will gladly impose itself on us without any effort on our part. Listening to our inner voice, on the other hand, requires a great deal of discipline, effort, and time. This is why practicing silence is so important, why meditation or contemplative prayer are essential components of the spiritual journey. Without making time for silence, without making time for listening to God, we may find that our inner voice is too quiet to hear when we need it most. 

Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity

To read my poetry and shorter writing, please visit Meditations of a Gentle Warrior and subscribe to receive my daily meditations in your inbox. 

Marriage is a constant reminder of how imperfect my love is

Marriage is a constant reminder of how imperfect my love is. It is anything but unconditional. I give love and take it away for so many reasons. It’s frustrating and painful, both for me and the people I claim to love. 

I was not always like this and I’ve gotten much better in recent years, but I have a long way to go. I don’t know at what point I started using my love as a psychological-emotional weapon, but I assume it was somewhere in my teenage years. Now, some thirty years later, it’s actually a great point of shame for me. 

For a long time, I honestly didn’t know how petty, spiteful, and cruel I could be. It took having someone who vowed to never leave me and who was unwilling to settle for any less than my best to point it out to me. There’s something really powerful about the commitment of marriage that has forced me to look at myself. 

When two people take a solemn oath that, for better worse, richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, they will remain faithful and steadfast to one another, and they really mean it, it brings not only the best out in them, but also the worst. In a truly committed relationship, there is no hiding. Marriage forces you to look at yourself. 

I am fortunate enough to have married someone who feels as strongly about commitment as I do. When we took our vows, we meant it. That means we have to make it work. I think this is some small part of what God had in mind when he gave Adam and Eve to one another, and when he said that a married couple becomes “one flesh (Genesis 2:24.” The intimacy of oneness forces us to look at and get rid of the things that do not serve the relationship. 

So much of who I am and who I was before I met my wife is based on the survival mechanisms I developed over the years from being hurt, disappointed, betrayed, abandoned, and whatever else you can think of that would make a person cold, withdrawn, and selfish. Somehow, my wife saw through all of this baggage and was able to glean the deeper truth of who I am enough to want to spend the rest of her life with me. Some days it still baffles me. 

But like I said, I was not always like this. I remember being a kid and being cheerful, optimistic, and kind. While I didn’t really fit in anywhere (in middle school, I finally found a group of friends who also didn’t fit in and we were inseparable) and that confused me a great deal, I remained relatively enthusiastic and curious about life. Somewhere along the line, however, I suppose I was hurt one too many times by people that were supposed to or said they loved me, and I became cynical, guarded, and bitter. 

My entire adult life has largely been defined by the outgrowing of this negativity, or rather the returning to innocence, albeit in a more mature way, of my childhood. The lessons, however, have not come easily. I have ruined many relationships along the way and I have nearly ruined my marriage on several occasions. 

One of the main problems is that I tend to use my affection as a weapon. It’s not malicious way. It’s often not even intentional. But when I’m hurt, I withdraw and shut down, and when I do, I take my love with me. 

It doesn’t help that I’m extremely sensitive and, therefore, easily hurt, and that my wife is not the type of person to hold back her feelings or pull punches with her opinions. Well, maybe it does help because she has the unique ability to bring out the worst in me so that I change for the better. But the combination of her directness and my sensitivity creates a tension that leaves me nowhere to hide. Even if I tried hiding, she wouldn’t let me anyway. 

All of this makes it very difficult to deny my shortcomings. I have seen, over the years of trying to make our relationship work, how what were once my survival skills, the things that kept me safe in my past life, are actually tools of destruction in my marriage. When I withdraw and withhold my love from my wife, it hurts both of us because it hurts the relationship and we are not two, but one. 

This all struck me the other day when I was meditating on Jesus’s love for us. It occurred to me that, no matter what was done to Jesus, he never withdrew his love. He never shut down. He never stopped caring. He never tried to manipulate others by threatening them with emotional absence. 

Jesus was betrayed, beaten, crucified, mocked, and left to die alone on the cross, and yet he never stopped loving us. In fact, throughout all of this torture and torment, he prayed for us. And here I am, loved beyond measure and beyond understanding by a merciful, gracious God who sent his own son to die for my sinful thoughts, words, and deeds, a God who has never once withdrawn his love from me, not even for a second, and I have the arrogance to keep my love to myself when my feelings get hurt. 

It is humbling and baffling just how selfish and broken I really am. I am, however, willing to change. I pray for it daily. I want to have the kind of love for my wife, my family, and my fellows that Jesus has for me. I want to be as generous and forgiving as God has been and continues to be for me. 

It’s an impossible task, but trying, with God’s help, is better than the alternative. In fact, Jesus himself said that I must. I must “love as he has loved me (John 13:34)” and to “be perfect (Matthew 5:48)” What greater purpose is there than this anyway, to love and serve God and my fellows? 

Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity

To read my poetry and shorter writing, please visit Meditations of a Gentle Warrior and subscribe to receive my daily meditations in your inbox. 

Don’t yuck someone else’s yum

I once asked my wife how she learned to eat chicken feet, something I have never developed a taste for. She said, “When I was growing up, we had three generations living in our home and, in my country, the oldest people eat first and the youngest people eat last. If we had chicken for dinner, my grandmother took the pieces she wanted first, then my parents took the pieces they wanted, and the kids ate whatever was left. So we learned to eat every part of the chicken and, unlike here, we didn’t just buy chicken pieces. We bought and cooked the whole chicken. From the head to the feet with everything in between, nothing went to waste. I learned to eat everything because I had to. It’s all we had.” 

Hearing this was not only enlightening, but also humbling. It made me realize how easy I truly had it growing up. Not only did we generally get to eat food that we liked, albeit within reason, but we also had such an absurd surplus of food that we never really felt the burden of having to eat anything we didn’t like out of necessity or threat of going hungry. We could afford to be picky and, with junk foods, snack foods, and frozen foods abound, our cupboards reflected this fact. 

My wife, on the other hand, having grown up in post-genocide Cambodia, had way fewer options. Her family shopped, cooked, and ate, first and foremost, for survival. One chicken had to make multiple dishes, feed multiple generations, and had to last across multiple meals. They cooked and ate every part, perhaps grilling the legs and wings, making a stir-fry with the diced up breast meat, and making soup with the thighs, feet, neck, head, and the carcass. Even the organs and the blood were cooked and eaten. 

The more I thought about this, the more spoiled and insulated I began to feel. It wasn’t a sense of guilt or even shame, as I knew that I did not choose to grow up where I did, how I did, with the family I had, and the luxury to choose my food from day to day and meal to meal. We were each born into the worlds we were born into and we only knew what we knew. Rather, she helped me to understand just how little I knew about the world outside of my own culture and upbringing. 

Now, whenever I see someone eating something I don’t eat or wasn’t exposed to growing up, instead of judging or criticizing it, I take a moment to think about what my wife said when I asked her how she learned to eat chicken feet. Even though my mom encouraged us to try different things, I think about how there are entire cultures and customs that I simply don’t understand because of how I was brought up. But most of all, I am reminded, as my daughter says, “Not to ‘yuck’ someone else’s ‘yum,'” because you have no idea what life circumstances led them to develop the tastes and preferences they now have.

Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity

To read my poetry and shorter writing, please visit Meditations of a Gentle Warrior and subscribe to receive my daily meditations in your inbox. 

Capacity for love

Early in our relationship, my wife gave me this warning. She said, “Remember, the amount I love you is also the amount I can hate you.” I’ve sat with this statement for years and, the more I’ve thought about it, the deeper the sentiment becomes.

When I’ve told other people this story, I’ve gotten mixed reactions. Some people laugh, others are taken aback, and some people really get it. There’s a deep truth in her words.

Love, as I have come to understand and experience it, is more than just a feeling. It’s a capacity. In other words, there is a space in our hearts which love is intended to fill. The more we love someone, the greater this capacity for love becomes.

But what happens when that person hurts us, leaves us, or passes away? That same capacity for love then becomes filled with other emotions. Our potential for love becomes our potential to feel everything else.

So the amount we love someone is also the amount we can be hurt by them if they betray or abandon us. It’s the amount we can miss them if they leave or if we go away. It’s the amount we can worry about them if they are hurt or sick. It’s also the amount we can grieve for them if they die.

Upon understanding this truth, there is a temptation to protect ourselves by limiting or shutting off our capacity to love. If we don’t open ourselves up to love, we can’t get hurt, after all. But this is a grave mistake because any attempt to limit our capacity to feel pain, anger, or sorrow also limits our capacity to feel love, joy, and pleasure.

While these may all feel like different emotions, they have the same source. Our capacity for love is our capacity for all emotions. If we want to feel love, we get to feel everything. And the amount of love we are capable of feeling is the amount of every other emotion we are capable of feeling also. Love, after all, is a capacity.

When my wife told me the amount she loves me is also the amount she can hate me, she was really telling me, “I’m opening my heart to you. The greater my love grows for you, the stronger my feelings become for you, the more vulnerable I become in the process. By loving you, I am giving you the power to hurt me. Please don’t hurt me. I will feel it deeply. I am entrusting you with my heart. Please be kind.”

Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity

To read my poetry and shorter writing, please visit Meditations of a Gentle Warrior and subscribe to receive my daily meditations in your inbox. 

Committing to go deeper

A young monk walked into the abbot’s room where he found the abbot sleeping. 

“Father, wake up,” said the monk. 

“What is it?” the abbot asked. 

“I’m leaving the monastery,” replied the monk. 

“Today?” asked the abbot. 

“No,” said the monk, “Not today.” 

“Okay,” the abbot replied, “Be a good monk today and leave tomorrow.” 

Nearly thirty years of todays have passed for that monk and the tomorrow of leaving has never come.  

This story, a version of which I recently heard told by Father Augustine Wetta on The Chris Stefanick Show, reminded me of something a jiu-jitsu instructor friend of mine says to students who want to quit jiu-jitsu. He tells them, “You aren’t allowed to quit on a bad day. Keep training until you have a great day and then decide whether or not you want to quit. If, even at its best, you still decide jiu-jitsu isn’t for you, we can talk.” 

All too often these days, we commit to things in a lukewarm fashion. We dabble and dip our toes in, and then quit as soon as it’s inconvenient, uncomfortable, or unpleasant. But this prevents us from ever getting to the good stuff. When we quit something too soon, when we have only just scratched the surface of its depth, we never really get to learn the lessons it is meant to teach us, lessons that can only be learned through commitment.

As I have often said about marriage, “In our wedding vows, we don’t say, ‘For better or worse,’ for the better parts. Neither do we say, ‘In sickness and in health,’ for the healthy parts. Better and healthy don’t require vows of commitment. They are easy. We say our vows for when things get worse and our spouses get sick. We vow to be committed through the inevitable pain, frustration, and disillusionment that comes with every relationship.”  

When we commit in this way, we begin to realize that our day-to-day feelings don’t matter as much as we once thought they did. They get some say, but feelings are unreliable and fleeting. What really matters is that we continue, that we practice, that we go deeper, that we go beyond the superficial layers of whatever activity or relationship we are involved in and get to the essence of what that activity or relationship is trying to teach us, and then we keep going. 

It’s easy to commit to something when it’s new, enjoyable, and exciting, but this isn’t really commitment. Commitment is the decision to keep going after the newness has worn off, when the initial enjoyment has faded, and when we are bored or even unhappy. Commitment is the decision to not quit on a bad day and to not leave until tomorrow. 

Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity

To read my poetry and shorter writing, please visit Meditations of a Gentle Warrior and subscribe to receive my daily meditations in your inbox. 

My wife hit me with an egg

While I was making pancakes for my daughter, my wife hit me with an egg. Well, that’s not exactly how it happened. My wife and I were both in the kitchen this morning, rushing around, getting our daughter ready for school, my wife ready for work, and myself ready to go visit my mom in the hospital. I was making pancake batter for my daughter’s breakfast. She likes the pumpkin pancake mix from Trader Joe’s. Today, I mashed up an over-ripe banana in it just to mix things up and so I didn’t have to throw it away, but I digress. 

As I gathered the ingredients for the pancake batter, I saw that my wife was getting something out of the refrigerator. I asked her to grab me an egg because the pancake recipe called for one. She got one out of the egg bin, reached over to hand it to me, and just as she did, I turned toward her, the egg and my elbow meeting at just the right time and angle for the egg to go crashing to the floor. 

For about thirty seconds, we both blamed each other for the mess and then it turned to joking. As my wife cleaned up the egg on the floor, which I think I thanked her for doing but will thank her for later just to be sure, I mixed the pancake batter and proceeded to make my daughter’s breakfast. In spite of the whirlwind of chaos, my daughter got to school on time, my wife made it to the office, and I drove out to the other side of the beltway to meet up with my brother who was acting as my mom’s caretaker for the day, and to see my mom. 

As I sat in a local coffee shop writing, reading, and waiting for the message that my mom was out of surgery, my wife called to ask if I needed any help getting our daughter home from school later. We talked over our plans for the day and both agreed that, if the other needed anything, we would be there to help, eggs in hand. We both laughed at the beautiful chaos that is our life. 

Some days things feel like they are going perfectly. Everything runs smoothly, we are on time, and it feels like nothing can stand in our way. The wind is at our backs, all the traffic lights are green, and the life just seems to fall into place. But other days, in spite of our best intentions and preparation, nothing seems to go right. We feel hurried, clumsy, and like nothing we do is working out. We oversleep, argue, we hit all of the red lights, and we drop the eggs. 

What I try to keep in mind is that God is ultimately in charge of all of this. Of course, we play our part. We have free will and God doesn’t make us do anything we don’t want to do. On the other hand, nothing happens in this world outside of God’s will, either his perfect will or his permissive will. Whether life seems to be going well or poorly, it is all being divinely orchestrated by a God who loves us. He is writing a divine love story for us, even if we don’t understand it from moment-to-moment or day-to-day. 

We don’t always know the plan. We can’t always see the bigger picture. We are asked to trust, to have faith, and to walk forward into the dark unknown on a promise, a promise that God loves us and will not fail us. In faith, God allows us to walk across the stormy waters toward him, but even when our faith falters, when the winds and the waves frighten us and we begin to feel like we are drowning, if we call out to him, he will reach out his hand to pull us up out of the depths (Matthew 14:22-33). 

Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity

To read my poetry and shorter writing, please visit Meditations of a Gentle Warrior and subscribe to receive my daily meditations in your inbox. 

Far from innocence

When my wife and I were dating, we would talk on the phone for hours every night about everything and nothing. She would whisper from beneath the blankets in her makeshift room in the basement of her cousin’s home, trying to be quiet so that she didn’t wake up her niece and aunt with whom she shared the space. I would whisper back because, the house I lived in was so old and the insulation so non-existent, the neighbor upstairs and I could hear every word the other one said. 

We would often talk for so long that one or both of us would fall asleep on the phone. Not wanting the conversation to end, neither of us wanted to be the first to say goodbye. Having to hang up felt excruciating. It felt like we were being pulled apart, never to speak again. She was the last thing I thought about as I went to sleep and the first thing I thought about when I woke up the next morning. 

Even though I was thirty years old and she was twenty five, this experience made me feel so young and alive, like I was a teenager again discovering love for the first time. There was something truly magical about this time and, even thinking about it now brings a smile to my face. It was innocent and beautiful. We laughed a lot. 

She being from Cambodia and me from the United States, we sometimes had difficulty understanding one another. Her English was not bad by any means, but she didn’t always have the right word or the correct pronunciation for what she wanted to say and my Khmer was way worse than her English. So we would often have to spell words to each other in order to understand what the other was saying. We tried so hard to understand each other. There was so much patience, graciousness, and kindness in those conversations. 

I miss that time, those experiences, and the people we were back then. Writing this, I am reminded of how far we have come together, but also how far away from that innocence we have gotten. It’s bittersweet. It makes me want to do better, to be better for her, for myself, and for us.