Tag Archives: marriage

Talking and Listening Biblically, Even in Old Age

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Talking and Listening Biblically, Even in Old Age

Frank, an older man, was telling a friend who had come to visit, about the excellent dinner he and his wife had enjoyed in a local restaurant the previous evening.
“What restaurant was that?” the friend asked.
“I have a hard time remembering names,” he replied, “What’s the name of that red flower with thorns on its stem?”
“A rose.”
With that, Frank turned and called into the kitchen, “Rose, what’s the name of the restaurant we were at last night?”

I am not quite that bad, but both Jo and I help each other in memory lapses. Every evening after supper, I read aloud from one of the three current books. Jo likes to stretch out on the couch to rest her legs and back and does some artistic picture colouring on her tablet, enjoying the stories I read. We had finished one book and tried to remember the name of the popular author of a funny book we wanted to read.

“Dave is the main character in his stories,” I said.
“Right, and his wife’s name is, uh, Morley!”
“And his stories often mention The Vinyl Café.”
“Right, oh I know, the author’s first name is Stuart. Yeah, Stuart McLean!

Our interaction is not always so successful. Whereas I tend to forget names of people and refer to them by description or “What’s-his-name,” Jo simply uses a generic noun like “thing” as in “Hand me that thing there, I can’t reach it.”
This irritates me, since she is looking or pointing in the general direction of half a dozen “things”, leaving me to guess which one she wants. If I ask her, “What thing?” she looks irritated, “The sieve, didn’t we just talk about needing to drain the vegetables?”
Yes, she had said something about veggies, but I had listened with only half an ear since I was thinking about something entirely different and was starting to talk to her about that.

At this point, a Scripture passage popped into my mind, “Be quick to hear, slow to speak, and slow to anger.” Jas. 1:9.
Here both of us were irritated (angry) with each other, because we each accused each other of not communicating clearly, whereas it was my fault for not listening attentively to her.
Jo does need to say the actual name of the object, but I need to “treat my wife with respect,” (1 Pet. 3:7), and when I tell Jo, “stop saying “thing”, use the name!” I need to speak that truth in love.” (Eph. 4:15,) not in an irritated outburst.
Sometimes my “rash words are like sword thrusts, instead of wisely speaking healing words.” (Prov. 12:18.)
We probably both need to remember that “A soft answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger.” (Prov. 15:1).
Remembering some of the hundreds of wonderful, deeply satisfying experiences we have enjoyed together throughout our married life also tends to soothe our upset feelings.

One of those wonderful experiences last fall was the publishing of our fourth Memoir, The Great Adventure: Our Life Among Brazil’s Canela People. I wrote it and Jo critiqued and edited it. Yes, another marriage growing experience!

Buy it on Amazon, The Great Adventure. Jack Popjes

Why Jo and I Did Not Get Married a Year Earlier Than We Did

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Why Jo and I Did Not Get Married a Year Earlier Than We Did

 Grateful for Our Marriage
This week, we celebrated Valentine’s Day and Jo’s birthday. Next month, we’ll celebrate my 86th birthday and our 62nd wedding anniversary. No wonder we kept thinking about our life together and giving thanks to God for the wonderful life He has given and is still giving us.
“I keep kicking myself for not proposing to you in our last year of Bible School,” I said to Jo, “so we could get married right after graduation.”

A Memory Rather Forgotten
“Well, remember what happened in your first year,” she replied.
“Oh, right.”
I deservedly was expelled for one semester because I had broken more rules, than any other student in the school’s history. I graduated a year after Jo did and finally proposed.
“Yeah, if only I had not been such an idiot, we could have started our lives together a year earlier,” I confessed ruefully.

God Turned Negative into Positive
“True but  God turned something bad into something good.”
“How do you mean?” I asked.
“Well, don’t forget, while you were finishing school, I went to the Bible Institute of Los Angeles, (Biola) and studied Missionary Medicine and Dentistry. And that is why we had such an effective dental extraction ministry among the Canela.”
Right! “Thank you, Lord God, for turning my foolishness into such a positive and encouraging outcome!”

Dental Surgery (brown flecks in top left is fungus on the photo)

Jo Trained Me
Jo taught me about each tooth, how many roots it had, and whether to take it out towards the tongue or towards the cheek. And where to inject the anaesthetic and how to loosen the tooth before extracting it without breaking a root. And how to care for the patient afterwards. I started practicing dental surgery immediately, the first week we were in the Canela village. I kept on showing love to the Canelas in this way long before we could speak with any degree of fluency.

I Trained a Canela
After several years, we trained a young Canela man in these dental surgery skills, and he performed under my supervision for many months. He became so skilled and was so careful that the Canela people trusted him as they had been trusting me. I turned over all our dental tools to him, and Jo taught him how to clean and boil the instruments after each use and before the next patient. She gave him a pan to boil them in and our medical kit with a tight-fitting lid to keep the instruments clean. He continued these dental services during the following year when we were on furlough and through the years when political pressure exiled us from the village. More than thirty years after we had taught him, we visited the Canela village with our family and grandkids, and he was still serving the Canela villagers in this work!

God at Work! All Honour Goes to Him.
So, this week, we reminisced how God used my foolish behaviour to move Jo into getting that dental training which resulted in such a long-term blessing for the Canela people. Of all the dozen or so village teams that worked among indigenous people from the Belem missions centre, Jo and I didn’t know of any that had a dental extraction ministry among their people group.

Yes, looking back, that year of waiting to get married was certainly worth it, both for us and for the Canelas. What an amazing work of God!

God’s Plan and His Leading

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The Rules.
Jo and I met in Bible School in our teens. After graduation, we began to see each other quite often. One time I hugged her and kissed her on the forehead. “Jack,” she said, “You can hug me and kiss me anywhere on my face you want, but don’t kiss me on the lips unless you love me. And don’t tell me you love me unless you truly mean it.”

I understood clearly. Jo had been hurt in a previous relationship and did not want a repeat. That was okay with me. I just loved being with her.

The Story.
One summer, Jo and I worked together as counsellors in a youth camp at Chestermere Lake near Calgary. During a break between camps, we, and several other counsellors, were left to look after the facility.

On the first evening, we enjoyed a tasty supper Jo had prepared. Then we went for a long canoe ride on the lake as the sun prepared to set late in the mid-summer evening. We talked about our future, working at camps for the summer and Jo returning to Oliver, BC, and me to Red Deer, AB, so both of us could look for jobs in the fall.

Returning to shore, we sat leaning against a log and watching the sun disappear over the lake. I lit a cozy little fire, and we wrapped a blanket around our shoulders. More accurately, it was around my shoulders since Jo lay with her head on my chest.

The Important Question.
As we relaxed in the stillness of the evening, a thought popped into my mind, “If I were going to marry, what girl would I pick?” My thoughts flew back to two serious relationships that flared for a while and then ended. There were several less serious dating experiences with other girls during my years of attending Bible school. But those memories took only seconds.
The answer was almost immediate. “This girl here with me, of course.”

Another Important Question.
My next thought was, “She is going back to Oliver after the summer. Will I ever see her again?” That thought motivated me to lean over her and, for the first time, kiss her on the lips. Jo kissed me back. “I love you,” I said and kissed her again. “I love you, too.” We kissed again. “Will you marry me?” “Yes,” she said. We kissed again and again.

From that first thought, “What girl would I marry?” to Jo’s, “Yes” took probably no more than twenty seconds. Then it hit me. Hey, Jack! You are engaged to be married! Wow! A few minutes before, when I lit that little campfire, I had no idea that I would be making a life-long commitment that evening. Now the deed was done—a God-led decision!

And today, Thursday, March 31, we are celebrating sixty years of marriage!

God is so Good.
He has worked together with us throughout our lives, first giving us a wonderful, growing family and constantly helping us grow in love, joy, and appreciation for each other. Then, for all these many decades, God led Jo and me to work together as a team, bringing His Word to a whole people group in Brazil for the first time. Then he used us in leadership ministries, and to speak and write, promoting the ministry of worldwide Bible translation, even raising hundreds of thousands of dollars for Bible translation, and God only knows how many people joined that task as a result.

None of this would have happened if God Himself had not brought the two of us together in a love and marriage commitment sixty years ago.
What a day to celebrate!

Commitment is Not Enough

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A song popularized long ago by Dean Martin has the lines,

Try standing on a corner, watching all the girls go by.
You can’t go to jail for what you’re thinking,
Or for that wooed look in your eye.

True, you won’t go to jail for mentally ravishing those girls, but you may go to a worse place.

A God-given Talent
We human beings, in contrast to animals, are the species with a highly developed ability to think, to imagine, and to visualize. We have the amazing God-given talent to picture in our mind something that doesn’t yet exist, to mentally create situations that have not happened.

God’s gifts are perfect and meant for our good. But Satan seeks to pervert these good gifts. He tempts people to misuse every good thing God provides. For instance, God gave us the capacity to use words to speak the truth and to encourage, but Satan turns that to lying and cursing.

Nowhere is that clearer than in the use of our imagination. Every kind deed, every self-sacrificing action anyone has ever done on earth, started as a thought in someone’s head. So did every evil, selfish deed.

The Power of Imagination
Jesus, knowing the power of imagination, warned his male hearers to stop looking at women and imagine having sex with them. “Anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart,” he said. And He could have added, “If you keep on thinking that way, you will eventually commit the actual, physical act with her or someone like her.”

Over time, we human beings tend to accomplish the things we think about imaginatively. The stronger and more emotionally we respond to our focused thinking and visualizing, the surer the eventual outcome will match our mental picture.

Researchers showed that our imagination is even stronger than our will. They drew a vertical and a horizontal line on a square sheet of paper dividing it into four equal squares. They asked each subject to hold one end of a half-metre long piece of string with a small weight at the bottom, extend their arm and firmly commit to holding the weight directly above the intersected lines in the centre of the paper.

The researcher then told him, “Close your eyes while holding the weight steadily over the intersection, but imagine it is swinging back and forth from left to right.”
In nearly every case, the weight would soon start to swing from left to right.

Marriage as an Example
Imagining and fantasizing overrides firm decisions and commitment. Marriage is an excellent example. A couple will make a firm decision to be faithful to each other and make a public commitment during their wedding ceremony. But if either of those spouses consistently fantasizes about being intimate with other people, that marriage is doomed. Over time, the tendency is for that fantasy to become real. The poet Emerson was right when he said, “People are what they think about all day long.”

So, what should you and I think about? Here’s the apostle Paul’s advice: “Whatever is noble, right, pure, lovely, admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things. Phil. 4:8.

Reinforce Commitment with Imagination
My wife and I committed to serve the Canela people of Brazil by translating the Word of God for them. We then reinforced that commitment by using our God-given imagination as for over twenty years, we mentally pictured Canela villagers reading the Bible in their own language and applying its truths to their lives. Decades later, what we had consistently imagined so strongly became a reality as Canelas read the Scriptures and started cleaning up the negative, destructive and messy things that Satan had introduced into their culture.

To build enduring, satisfying marriages, both spouses need to commit to spending the rest of their lives with each other. That is a given. But how many of us married folk commit every day to fantasize, dream, and imagine intimacy only with each other?

And do we keep that commitment even when we are standing on a corner and happen to see an attractive person of the opposite sex going by?

 

A Valentine Bouquet: Seven Ways to Improve Your Marriage

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Jo and I were so poor when we got married in March of 1962 that we couldn’t afford a lifetime marriage license. We opted for the cheaper 50-year short-term marriage license instead. I am pleased to say that a few years ago, when our 50-year-term license expired, I was able to persuade Jo to sign up for another 50 years.

J&J wedding car copyNow to be serious for a moment. It’s Valentine’s Day and an ideal time for you to think about your relationships. Since Jo and I are approaching our 54th wedding anniversary, and presumably know something about staying married, younger couples sometimes ask us for advice.

We usually respond by asking, “Do you read the Bible to each other and pray together?” That’s basic. After all, God invented marriage and He wants yours to prosper. But here are six more bits of marital advice for you all:

2. Ask for advice. Ask long-marrieds how they handle the kind of problems you are struggling with currently.

3. Read books on marriage. There weren’t many up-to-date, helpful ones when we got married. Later, as Jo and I read and discussed books on various aspects of marriage during our last decade in Brazil, we often exclaimed, “Where was this book twenty years ago?”

4. After returning to Canada, we participated in a prayer soaked weekend marriage enrichment seminar. It resulted in putting us on a high plateau of marriage. Jo and I both felt loved and cared for by each other as never before.

5. After nine months of bliss, however, we made a fatal mistake. Three unexpected, high-stress situations impacted us almost simultaneously. Coping with them drained our energy and diverted our attention. We were foolish; instead of keeping these emotionally exhausting stresses outside our relationship, we allowed them to come between us and our marriage deteriorated. Eventually we made those stressful pressures push us closer together and our marriage improved. The whole experience, however, left me wondering.

6. We get thorough medical checkups every year, we take our vehicles in for routine maintenance and inspections, and we ask financial advisors to look over our financial situation. Shouldn’t we routinely go to a marriage counselor and ask him for a marriage checkup? So we did.
“What’s the problem?” the counsellor asked.
“We don’t know.” I said, “We want you to tell us what our problems are and how to resolve them.”

He asked us a number of questions, and got us talking about ourselves, and each other. He then recommended a course of a dozen or more actions. For instance: I needed to tell Jo, not just my thoughts, but my feelings. Jo needed to be my coach to help me get in touch with my feelings and share them. When Jo had something she wanted to talk over with me, I needed to “vacuum my mind” clearing it of all ideas and thoughts, and, with full eye contact, focus on Jo and listen to her.

7. The counsellor also recommended a new book by Dr.GaryChapmanThe Five Love Languages, now a classic. It speaks to relationships of every kind, not just to people in a marriage relationship. The basic idea is that every person has one or two ways in which he or she receives love.

For some people Words of Affirmation make them feel loved.
Others respond best to Acts of Service,
still others to Receiving of Gifts,
others to Quality Time,
and others to Physical Touch.
Each of these is like a language. The lover must speak the language his beloved understands. No use giving gifts to someone who wants to hear some affirming words. No use hugging a wife who would prefer that you showed your love by doing the dishes.

These are the seven ways Jo and I stayed happily married.

What are yours?

 

A Couple’s Most Important Day

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Jo and I are about to celebrate our 52nd wedding anniversary on March 31. We can attest that a successful, long-lasting marriage means falling in love many times, (most frequently with the person to whom you are married!)

52 Years Ago

52 Years Ago

I remember our wedding, held in my home church in Red Deer, AB—a small white, wood frame building that accommodated perhaps one hundred packed in tightly. The reception was in the basement which held maybe fifty, probably fewer. It was an extremely simple affair. My younger sisters helped Jo and me to decorate the basement the night before the wedding. The reception meal was salad and buns provided by the ladies of the church. And that was about it.

It was a small, plain, and simple; an almost insignificant beginning—a mere acorn wedding compared to some of the watermelon ones we have attended since.

Compared to the early 1960s, Canadians today are much more affluent. We also have better credit ratings and thus more money to spend. No wonder the business community invented the popular slogan, “Your wedding day is the most important day of your life.” They spread this lie because they need people to spend lots of money on the wedding.

Wedding Debt
Many couples, unfortunately, swallow this lie and spend themselves into debt for the wedding. They should get some advice, not from their newlywed friends, but from some oldyweds. They will be reminded what they already know deep down inside—what’s more important than the wedding is the marriage that follows.

In spite of this deep down knowledge, and in the face of the advice from oldyweds, some couples just don’t get it. I have heard several stories from pastors who during pre-marital counseling heard the couple say, “Oh, we can’t afford to attend a marriage seminar,” yet spend ten times the amount on flowers. Some won’t even buy a good book on marriage.

Why Get Married?
Here’s one aspect of marriage that Jo and I have proven true many times over the past 52 years of growing our acorn wedding into a sizable marriage tree. Judith Viorst, one of my favorite philosophers said it this way, “One advantage of marriage is that, when you fall out of love with him, or he falls out of love with you, it keeps you together until you fall in love again.”

Newlyweds have the aura of youthful beauty, enthusiasm, vigor, sex, fun, future. Oldyweds have the quality of inner beauty, wisdom, joy, history, stamina, endurance. Newlyweds become oldyweds, and oldyweds are the reasons that families work.

That’s why the day-to-day work of becoming oldyweds is vastly more important than the romantic event of becoming newlyweds.

Oh wait, I think I said that already. . . . four or five times.

Important notice for you who live in northern California
I will be traveling and speaking at Wycliffe Associates banquets in 25 cities in northern California and Nevada for the next six weeks. I didn’t include the URL links in this emailed column since spam blockers might react. So I will send the URL links in a separate email. If you are in the area, please come to a banquet, it would be great to meet you.