Telling Old Adam to Shut Up…

Being married is not easy.  If it was, everyone would do it and marriages would last forever.  And it does not matter at all what kind of marriage you have, whether you are traditional or LGBT, you are going to run into a conflict of egos.

So what is the ego?  Well, boiling away mountains of psychology, its “me, myself, and I”.  Its where we focus on ourselves, our wants, and our perspectives.  Your ego will get in the way of your marriage.  That’s just the way it is.  So how do we counteract that?

Well the starting point for understanding our ego is to go back to Adam, in Genesis 3:12

“¹²The man said, “The woman you put here with me—she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it.”  Immediately we see the ego in action, where Adam does the classic maneuver “defend and deflect”.  What is “defend and deflect”?  This is where we avoid responsibility for wrong doing by claiming our actions were sound the actual fault for the situation lies with someone else.  We are actively redirecting blame elsewhere.  In this specific case we see Adam claim no responsibility because God gave him Eve and she gave him the fruit.

Moving to verse 13, “¹³Then the Lord God said to the woman, “What is this you have done?” The woman said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.”” Yes, Adam pulled a jerk move by placing the blame firmly on Eve’s shoulders but then she shifted that blame onto the serpent.  It’s one long string of tattling on someone else.  Now through the eyes of the ego, we wonder “Why are they getting punished?  Clearly they got bad advice from a talking snake.”

Well, we get bad advice a lot, but it’s up to us to take action based on our analysis of that advice.  We make the decision on what we do with ourselves.  Eve didn’t have to pick the fruit and eat it.  Nowhere in scripture did the serpent hold a weapon to her and force her to eat it.  She did that all on her own.

Now Adam couldn’t have been that far away, because she doesn’t search for him, she just goes to him and offers him the fruit.  He knows what that fruit is, where it came from.  All he had to do was say no.  Further, why was he that far away from her?  What was he doing while she was talking to the serpent?  His job was to be her protector and teacher.  She got instruction about the tree not directly from God but from Adam who interpreted God’s word.  This indicates that Adam, if anything, had become complacent in his responsibilities to his wife.  He can blame God and Eve all he wants, but it was his responsibility.

So that’s where we are on our ego, it boils down to protecting ourselves by pushing the focus and blame elsewhere.  That affects our day to day married life because there’s always something that rears its ugly head to cause conflict, whether it be bills, discipline, scheduling, cleaning, it doesn’t matter.  Something will cause a conflict at some time, and our ego will tell us that it’s not our fault, that it is the other person’s fault.  Well I promise you nothing will lead to a faster argument than blaming the other person.  Let’s follow a hypothetical situation: The kitchen needs cleaning.  It hasn’t been cleaned in a week.  Our ego says this is the other person’s fault because we’ve had stuff to do, we’ve been busy with work or school or a hundred other projects and the other person could have been doing this.

That’s us on the defensive.  We immediately raise that shield to prevent being pegged for responsibility for the problem.  Now we go to our partner and say “Why haven’t you cleaned the kitchen?”  Already that question places the responsibility for the problem squarely on one person’s shoulders.  “Why didn’t you do your job?”

Well, you’re partner has been busy with keeping track of the kids, doing laundry, bills, a hundred other things that have taken focus and energy away from the kitchen.  They respond with “Well, why haven’t YOU cleaned the kitchen?” and the responsibility has been deflected back on us.  Suddenly we have this game of hot-potato going except everyone’s mad and nobody realizes the game is actually taking care of the problem.

The kitchen is still needs to be clean.

Let’s go back to the beginning.  The kitchen needs cleaning.  Old Adam is reminding us that we’ve been busy at work and all that other stuff, and we need to shut him up.  Did we stop and think about what the other person has been busy with?  If we have enough time and energy to invest in arguing about a dirty kitchen, we have the time and energy to invest in cleaning the kitchen.  Marriage isn’t about deflecting responsibility, it’s about sharing it.  You don’t wait to be asked to clean the kitchen.  Children have to be asked to do chores, married adults just do them.  You and your partner are just that, partners.  Partners share the responsibility so that no one is overwhelmed by the things that the world throws at us.  It’s not about assigning tasks; it’s about working together to get the job done.