Angrily Ever After: When the Fairytale Ends and Marriage Gets Real

By Edward C Lee

James 1:20 for the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God.

Have things in your marriage shifted since you said, “I do”? Marriage now, may not be what you expected, then. Communication has slowed, debt has risen, personality quirks have appeared, trust has been strained and anger has entered, to some degree.
In Angrily Ever After: When the Fairytale Ends and Marriage Gets Real, Edward taps into truths about anger found in both biblical and modern marriages to explore the power and promise of God available to your marriage, now:

- Learn of the more than 45 anger “cousins” that may be attacking your marriage
- Understand the spiritual impact of anger
- Develop a deeper relationship with God to transform the negative emotions of anger into a positive relationship with your spouse
- Gain a Christ-Centered Anger Management framework
- Learn to be angry without sinning
- Redefine how you will love each other going forward

• Language: English
• Publisher: Edward C Lee
• Release date: Dec 26, 2020
• ISBN: 9781736335512

Edward C Lee

Edward Lee is a Christian marriage author find the Pastor of LongView Bible Church. His passion is to share the truth and principles of the Bible with husbands and wives of today.In addition to his writing and ministry work, Edward enjoys spending time with his wife Kimber and their son

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Prayer for Your Marriage

Dear God, move mightily in the hearts of the men and women who are seeking You because we all need You. Let the message of this book be clear: that anger doesn’t come from You and unrighteous anger serves only as a vehicle to sever us, individually and collectively, from You. So bring us closer to You and then, by Your grace, closer to the husband or wife You have given us. May the name of Christ be lifted up in all the marriages around the world. Amen.

Once Upon A Time, a man and a woman stood before an official of the land in an official place. On that day, they vowed to love forever in whatever extremes of rich or poor, sick or healthy that life together would bring. It was a magical day, filled with joy and merriment. A day worth capturing with hired photographers, meaningful music, glistening rings and exchanging of vows. On that day, once upon a time, their smiles were bright, their dreams were big and their love was endless...Once upon a time, now, seems long ago. Since then, we talk all the time has been exchanged for we don’t talk like we used to, trust has been shaken and things in general, have changed.

Happily ever After weren’t words you ever actually said, but in the excitement of a new beginning of married life together, the expectations may have unwittingly been that high. Now, some time after your wedding day and start of married life together, challenges are arising that just weren’t seen in the beginning. Those challenges are now your reality and they put tension on your marriage relationship in ways you could have never imagined. In this book, I pray to point your marriage toward a deeper relationship with Christ as the singular, best hope for finding balance and peace in the truth of your marriage reality.

For the past fifteen years I have been blessed to stand at altar’s at churches, banquet halls and outdoor venues, to officiate weddings with more than one hundred couples. I have also been able to give biblical counsel and walk alongside many more. One thing that each of those couples have realized is that while all may not be bad, some degree of anger has come in, things have now shifted, and it’s not all good either. So in 2017, after coming across the words of James 1:20, for the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God, while preparing our church’s Sunday morning message, I began praying about writing what is now, Angrily Ever After. During the three years it took to write this book, I have been praying for marriage’s just like yours. Because, from young inner city couples, to middle class suburban couples to couples of extreme wealth, the fundamental struggles of marriage are basically the same. A little more money or a few more years together may change how the issues are presented. But at the core, regardless of a couple’s station in life, it all sounds like a young couple that I worked with a few years ago. Neither of them ever knew their respective father’s and they had even worse models actually in their lives, under the strain of anger they desperately blurted out, We need help and we don’t know what to do.

Marriage’s of all types come to a place where life has blurred the way forward and they need a reset. I pray that this book points your marriage to Christ in a way that begins to do just that: reset your marriage on Christ and His word. The second major thing I pray you will take away from this book is that marriage is far, far less about your husband or wife and much, much more about your own relationship with Christ.

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There will never be a shortage of reasons to be angry, yet we each will have to give an account of our own actions to the Lord and of how we have honored Him or have not through our actions. So let’s refocus our own perspective on Christ more than on our spouse. With the two points of emphasis of resetting our marriage on Christ and refocussing our perspective on Christ, in front of us, let me share how my passion for Christian marriage’s came about.

Your Marriage is in the Bible

As only the Lord can do, He placed me in a situation a few years ago that would change the balance of my own marriage and life. It was in 2006, I was in seminary and also serving full time in a local church. Two weeks after my third wedding anniversary I was asked to counsel a couple that had been married more than 30 years. I still find it hilarious, that the year that this couple got married was the same year that I was in the sixth grade, and their kids were older than me. But, being in seminary, I figured I would share some Scripture, because, that is what you are supposed to do, right? The problem was, while I was bouncing one Bible verse after another off of them, they just looked at me. I was quoting verses like, love is patient and love is kind, from 1 Corinthians 13. Good marriage passages from the Bible, but the more Bible verses that I quoted, the more they looked at each other and then back at me quizzically. Finally, I stopped flinging Scripture and actually listened to them.

Again, this was in 2006. The economy was horrible and this couple had just lost every bit of everything that they had. Hearing where they were in their marriage, I switched gears and shared the marriage of Job and his wife with them. Like them, Job and his wife had lost everything. As I related that biblical marriage with their marriage, I could see their hope begin to return. It was like their marriage had found a friend that had been where they had been and really understood what they were facing. From that point, I began studying the more that 60 marriage stories available to us all, right there in the Bible. Since then, I have been blessed to relate the marriage stories and principles of biblical marriages with husbands and wives of today. Without a doubt there are major cultural differences between your marriage and the marriage’s of the Bible. But, what remains, for example, is that the same God that shepherded a successful, well known man named Jairus and his wife through the pain and uncertainty of watching their daughter suffer through a terrible, seemingly incurable illness, in the Bible, is the same God that shepherds couples when the unimaginable and seemingly unbearable hits their marriage, today. It is stories like these and the practical, easy-to-implement principles of faith contained in them that I want to give to your marriage in Angrily Ever After.

Walking with You

Through God’s word, He reinforces that He has been walking with men and women whom He has joined in marriage since the beginning of time. As biblical marriages and principles are shared in Angrily Ever After, I pray they become both a mirror and a roadmap for angry marriages. A mirror reflecting both your reality of where you are and Christ’s truth in your reality. I also pray they provide a roadmap for angry couples. For, to varying degrees, we all enter marriage with a bit of a fairytale mist. When the fairytale shows itself to be just that, we are forced to face the reality of what and where our marriage really is. We thus need a roadmap to guide us to the truth of what our marriage has always been about in God’s eyes. Therefore, this book may be a little unconventional in that it offers very few how to’s and quick fixes to a better marriage and more anchoring to who Christ is and encouragement to seek where He is in the anger of your marriage.

Like many marriages, my wife and I have had our challenges. What I share, is only what God has grown me and my marriages through. We all would do well to realize and admit that when it comes to marriage, God is the real and only expert. On many occasions I have met with couples and formed an opinion on the viability of their relationship. Some whom I thought did not have a chance now have the healthiest marriages, and others I thought would have a great marriage are no longer together today. What I’ve learned is that I really don’t know anything and God knows everything. I’m quite secure in saying that. There’s no academic program or knowledge I (anyone) can gain that will enable me to know you as much as Jesus does. Therefore, this book may read more like a conversation, where I am pointing your marriage to Christ and His principles, than a set of advice from an expert. I would like to think that I’m walking with couples rather than counseling them.

The Couple Next Door: The Quietness of Anger

A book like this is needed because anger in marriage is so insidious. In many marriages, anger doesn’t yell, scream, break stuff, or involve late-night visits from the police. Instead, as we will discover, anger takes on many forms in relationships. And it may just be that more often than not it quietly weighs down a marriage, without making its presence known until it has done its vicious, disastrous work.

Let me share this story. Several years ago, a young couple moved in next door to us. They were great neighbors. I loved talking with them, and on a few occasions we walked to the restaurant down the street corner to hang out. A couple of times a year we would take on a project together to clean up our neighborhood. They were really a friendly, great couple. When they first moved next door they weren’t married, then at some point they got married. The sad thing is at another point they got divorced and moved away, in different directions. I always get extra bummed out when a couple I know and have some level of friendship with doesn’t make it. Being a concerned (a.k.a. nosy) neighbor, I asked the husband, What happened? The answer was more stunning than I had expected. Nothing, he dryly uttered. Nothing happened. There was no fight, no history of arguing, no mention of displeasure. In all their years of dating and marriage, they suppressed so much and never argued or shouted or cussed. They just quietly drifted away from each other under the cover of smiles and pleasantries. Until, one day, the man just politely but resolutely walked away.

A few years later, the (ex)-wife shared with us how shocked she was when their relationship ended. She never saw it coming. She told us about the anger she felt over the personal and career sacrifices she had to make for years, totally unaware that her anger was eroding the foundation of their marriage. For years she thought and he was saying that all was fine when in both their hearts it really wasn’t. What he wasn’t willing to say, she was willing to ignore.

Of course, not every marriage is bound to have this type of ending. However, I’ve encountered too many married couples suppressing their angry feelings. These angry feelings are numbing, straining, and destroying them until they quietly surrender to an unnecessary degree of separation. As I will discuss a little later, anger has about 45 cousins, which include frustration, impatience, and disappointment. Anger therefore doesn’t look the same in every relationship. It may be so dangerously subtle that it can be ignored, as in the case of my former neighbors. Or it may be loud, obvious and staring everyone in the face. It may not lead to physical separation but anger may lead to some level of shutting down from each other and emotional separation. However it is that anger and other negative emotions show up in a relationship, until they are identified and confronted they can strain a relationship in innumerable ways. As my neighbors bore witness to, if married couples do not have anywhere to direct their feelings toward, they’re likely to direct them toward each other.

Now as you prepare to read on with the two objectives of this book in mind: to re-set your marriage on Christ and to refocus your spiritual perspective, ask the Lord to speak to you and give strength to your marriage in a mighty way.

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION

Chapter 1  From Hope< to >Hope in Christ

Chapter 2 One Decision away:  Finding Christ in Your Marriage

Chapter 3 The Anger of Man Doesn’t

Chapter 4 Therefore Put Away and Receive

Chapter 5 x+y=z What Do You See?

Chapter 6 What Does God See?

Chapter 7 Dislodging Anger

Chapter 8 Christ-Centered Anger Management: In the Lord

Chapter 9 Developing a Christ-Centered Mindset

Chapter 10 Genuine Love

Chapter 11 Be Angry and …

Chapter 12 Be Angry like Jesus

Chapter 13 Jesus! Walk on Water When I Can’t

Appendix A

Chapter 1

From Hope< to >Hope in Christ

Moving from Hopeless to Greater Hope in the Lord

We spend too much time noticing imperfections in others rather than loving them for who they are.

These are the words of pain-filled regret a husband uttered as his wife of nearly 50 years lay on a hospital bed while cancer was eating away at her body. It was a singular, simple sentence that captured the complexity of living for nearly five decades in a marriage that had long ago run out of hope. For years, the husband argued with his wife over things that now seemed very unimportant while staring at the imminence of a life without her. His realization is one that none of us would want to arrive at as the end of our marriage draws near. What such a statement and others like it reflect, however, is that there are married couples who are together day by day but are not exactly happy about it. Time is passing and the years add up, but anger and negativity have long ago booted out the thoughts of happily ever after and have since been replaced with a deep sense of living, angrily ever after. The expectations and dreams that consumed the couple as they stood at the altar saying I do have been upended by negative emotions, chiefly some form of anger.

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I know that mentioning the thoughts in people’s minds as their marriage draws to an end may not be the most exciting way to start a book on marriage, but it just might be the most effective way to effect radical changes in your relationship. If we start with the end in mind, our marriage may shift its direction toward hope now, today. Because, what I have unfortunately learned standing with a husband or wife at the bedside of their dying spouse, is that too many married couples seem to realize what’s important in their relationship when they’re staring at death rather than when they’re still immersed in the vitality of their life together. In those final minutes, their comes a certain gravity that the anger and other negative emotions they