When I Learned I Manipulate
I was standing at the kitchen sink fiercely scrubbing the remains of pork chops and scalloped potatoes from a 9x12 Pyrex dish when God told me that I manipulate my husband. At the time, I was a young woman trying to figure out how to be a wife while trying to figure out who I was, and though I knew there was still a lot to learn about both; I was fairly certain becoming a manipulator wasn’t on my hopes and dreams list for either.
Yet there I was, intentionally obsessing over the list of things I did better, and more often, than Lucas just before I would underemphasize the list of his efforts in my head. The accuracy of the list wasn’t unimportant. I only needed enough arsenal to win whatever insignificant fight we were having at the time, as if to act as a playlist of pump-up songs I liked to hear in the locker room right before we ran onto the field for kickoff. Then in the middle of working up the energy for the ‘victory’ I was handed a revelation regarding my entire gameplan.
The thing that shocked me the most was that I wasn’t utterly offended. I mean I would put money on the fact that if someone told me I was manipulative during that season of my life I would have undoubtedly justified my actions with offense. But there was no need for that. I wasn’t being accused with shame but held accountable through grace. The words were delivered with a peace beyond my own understanding, and as soon as I heard them I knew they must be true. Like a close friend had just walked up to me and told me my fly was unzipped. I was embarrassed of course, but not humiliated because they knew me well enough to just be honest about what they saw.
Truthfully, I didn’t know I had a tendency to be manipulative. I wasn’t approaching arguments in my marriage like this on purpose, but nonetheless, I was approaching arguments in my marriage like this. That moment changed the way I understood myself but more than anything it changed the way I understood my relationship with God. I believe God has a deep desire to help us discover who He created us to be to this world, and if given permission, He finds joy in accomplishing this task with truth, grace, and a relentless refusal for shame. He is proud of who he created me to be, and I believe he cracks up at my inventive efforts to re-establish control and become my own voice of “truth” from time to time. But it is in the instances when he continues to meet me ‘at the kitchen sink’ with love and overwhelming honesty that I truly understand the Father he hopes to be in my life.
I would love to attempt to be clear. This isn’t a blog about marriage. This is a writing about a girl who learned to hear the voice of God as she longed for a deeper understanding of herself and in order for her to find the beauty she was desperate to find, she had to admit some ugly truths about herself along the way. [Isaiah 61:3 He will bestow on them a crown of beauty instead of ashes.]