Nightmares into Blessings: Loving your Pastor Husband When Things are Dark

I woke up one morning with red welts on my arm. Now that in itself doesn’t seem strange; my mom always told me that our bodies did funny things sometimes. But the night before, we had been shopping for new mattresses, and call it a premonition or a leading of God’s Spirit, but I connected the dots and decided to Google it. Sure enough, we had all the signs of bed bugs!

I started living a nightmare that would affect me and my family for weeks and months to come. All the work required to prepare for an extermination of these bugs left me exhausted, because I still had my job to go to each day. The job at which I care for “at-risk” students, likely the ones who shared those little bug blessings with me.

With nearly every bag I tied up tightly I prayed God would curse the bugs and bless our home. I prayed that God would turn this nightmare into a blessing even though I couldn’t see how that was going to happen. We had faced many things before in ministry, and were, in fact, facing some challenges in our church life at the time, too. Maybe that was what tipped me over the edge, but once the first stage of the extermination was done, I was completely depleted. I had been working tirelessly to get my house ready, going about like a fiend reporting every new bug or evidence I found of them to my husband. That only served me to work myself into a frenzy of worry and fear and despair. “How were we ever going to get rid of these things?!”

When I hit my low point, I was in such a state that I was climbing into bed a few times a day for a nap when I could. My family was having to function without their “rock” of support, the one I always thought I could be to them.

So . . . what does this have to do with supporting my pastor husband?  This trial, in a sense, was his too, but he hadn’t been affected by the bugs like my daughters and me.  And besides, he was dealing with his own set of problems with the church responsibilities. He, too, had had some dark days before that morning I woke up with those red, itchy welts on my arm. He knew what it felt like to shut down physically, emotionally, and mentally as he copes daily with the stresses upon his shoulders of shepherding sinful sheep.

The question I had to ask myself was this: “How had I been responding to my husband in these difficult days? Had I lost patience with him when he did not want to talk or when that household repair still wasn’t done because he was overwhelmed and needed to rest?

In God allowing what was most important to me to be thrown out of my control – my home and ministry as a wife and mother in it – He taught me what it must feel like for my husband to not be able to shepherd his people as he would like. He helped me to see how it must feel for him when church politics and stubborn sheep leave him feeling like he can’t love and serve them as he would like. In those times he learned that he has limits.

I learned through this where my limit is: having my home invaded with creatures that feel impossible to eradicate! Why? Because I like to think that I am in control, that I have things under control in my home and family, that I can do anything to be the wife and mother and homemaker I want to be.  But God tells me to be weak. He tells me that His power is perfected in weakness (II Cor 12:9). Should I, then, criticize my husband when he is weak? I am the last one who should be doing that when his burdens are often because of others criticizing him.

No; those red welts, those piles and piles of tightly bagged linens and clothes and toys reminded me that I am nothing. That when life is dark, it’s okay to cry. It’s okay to admit weakness. And when life is dark for my pastor husband, when he is facing the temptations and trials that come with shepherding God’s people, I need to be understanding and patient and give him comfort, and keep on praying that God would turn his nightmare into a blessing.