The Ten Commandments can all be summed up into loving God
and loving your neighbor because if you do so you won’t break any of those
commandments. “And who is my neighbor?” Jesus was asked. In responding to this
question He tells the story of a man going down from Jerusalem to Jericho who is
mugged by robbers who strip him of all he has, beat him up and leave him half
dead. A priest comes along the way, sees him and does nothing about it. And so
does a Levite who passes by a few moments later, but a Samaritan on his journey
when he sees this wounded man stops and does something. He bandages this man’s
wounds, pouring in the oil and the wine, takes him to an inn and pays the inn
keeper to take care of him.
Grace loves this parable, “The Parable of the Good Samaritan”(Luke
10:25-37) because it depicts clearly what happens in marriage. We all like the
sojourner, in our journey in life have been beaten up, stripped and left
wounded by what we have experienced. According to Linda Graham, Marriage and
Family Therapist, if the earliest experiences we had of reaching out for
connection were met with non-responsive, indifference, disregard, dismissal, or
with anger or critical blaming and shaming, that experience of reaching out
gets paired with a feeling of hurt or rejection or confusion. We withdraw back in
to ourselves for protection and this is how we come into. Yesterday during our
men’s forum, a guy stood up and confessed how he had dismissed some things that
happened to his wife when she was young (she was molested by a relative when
she was 7), thinking and telling her that she was very young at that time and
should have outgrown those things by now. What he didn’t realize until this
point was that we don’t outgrow such painful things. Instead they become etched
in our brains and that affects us in our adult life. Negative things that
happened even thirty years ago have the potential to cause havoc in our
relationships many years later.
We ought to be our spouse’s neighbor, the Good Samaritan for
each other. How? By not being judgmental, or wishing away certain things that
happened to your spouse those many years ago. Instead we have to be keen enough
to seek to understand how that has impacted their lives and their relationship.
Look for any signs of rejection and shame from your spouse and reach out to
them. Bandage their wounds and pour in the oil and the wine by offering them unconditional
love and acceptance. Give them in abundance the opposite of that thing they
missed or hurt them growing up. Affirm and appreciate them constantly if they
grew up starved of affirmation. That is the reason you are there in their life.
Like the Good Samaritan reach out to them with compassion and do something to
reverse the hurt and bring healing to them.
