Did I Make a Terrible Mistake?: 1on1 Marriage

By STEPHEN SCHWAMBACH

You've dared to ask the haunting question that hovers like the ghost of good times over your now limp, lifeless marriage:

 

"DID I MAKE A TERRIBLE MISTAKE?"

 

Well, did you? It didn't feel like it at the time, did it? The love you had put a smile on your lips, a glow on your face, a quiver in your voice and a skip in your step. It flooded you with hope. It made that mushy heart of yours feel as though it was going to pound its way right out of your chest.

 

But now…you've lost that lovin' feelin'. Oh, sure, you still love your spouse. Sort of. It's just that the fizz has escaped from your bottle. The electricity of your marriage relationship has dropped from the kick of 220 volts to the last dying gasp of the cheap battery in your cell phone.

 

What happened? Where did it go? How can you get it back?

 

Inside, you'll find the life-changing, hope-filled, love-igniting answers you've absolutely GOT to hear.

• Language: English
• Publisher: STEPHEN SCHWAMBACH
• Release date: Mar 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215107775

Book preview

Except where otherwise indicated, all Scripture quotations in this publication are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version, Copyright © 1973,1978,1984 by the International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan Bible Publishers. 

DID I MAKE A TERRIBLE MISTAKE? 

Copyright © 2023 by Stephen Schwambach

1on1 Books

5110 Lincoln Avenue

Evansville, Indiana 47715 

Second Edition 

Portions of this book originally appeared in a previous publication by this author. 

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form, except to glorify God. I can certainly put to good use the book royalties down here – but I far prefer the majority of what I receive to be waiting for me in the form of heavenly treasure (Matthew 6:19-21). Within the Kindle edition rules, you have my full permission to share, quote and otherwise spread anything in this book that will plunge you and those you care about into Deep, Daily, Moment-by-Moment #1on1withJesus.

To Judy,

the greatest give God ever gave me – my sweetheart, my companion, and my wife.

Is There Clay in Your Pipe?

Judy and I will never forget that fateful weekend in our first house when I saved the cost of calling a plumber and decided to fix the toilet in the hallway bathroom myself. I started on it in the evening, thinking it was about a one-hour job.

As it turned out, my estimate was just a wee bit low. Nearly three hours later I quit, frustrated and exhausted. Besides, I didn’t have the right parts to finish the job, and the hardware store was closed, Next morning bright and early I plunged in again. As soon as the hardware store opened, I became their first customer. I confidently walked out of the place with a bag in my hand that contained everything I needed to make short work of this job.

Have you ever hear that old saying, Any plumbing job requires three trips to the hardware store? That estimate turned out to be a wee bit low. By the time I finished buying all the parts and tools I needed, I could’ve purchased a new toilet. I also could’ve flown in the best plumber in the country to do the job, and put him up in a four-star hotel for the night. But by the time I realized all that, I was in too deep to back out.

Along about evening of Toilet Day Two, Judy walked up to the door of what had become my private torture chamber and surveyed the scene. Grease, water, tools, and parts were smeared, puddled, strewn, and piled all over the tub, sink, toilet, and floor. Her catatonic husband sat sprawled against one soiled wall, holding a wrench that was too big for the tiny space he had to work in, mumbling faithless sayings to himself.

Stephen, she said, I can’t wait any longer. I have to have water.

Oh, did I fail to mention? Our entire household had been without water for 24 hours. In fact, after discovering that the previous plumber had not thought to install a shut-off valve in the bathroom itself, that had been my one triumph in the whole sordid affair. After a 30-minute search of the premises, I had finally located the main valve. At the time, Judy had been impressed. "Had been" are the operative words here, though, because she was impressed no longer.

Okay, okay, I replied in my monotone. I’ll, uh...I’ll work something out.

She disappeared, and I looked to my left at the water supply pipe sticking straight out of the wall, like the gun barrel of a .45-caliber pistol. The idea of going to the hardware store again to buy a screw-on cap was out of the question. I had sawed off the end of the pipe hours ago. Now it had no threads.

Gotta get something to plug it with, I said aloud, to no one in particular. Looking back, I now know I should’ve reworded that into a request, and offered it up as a prayer. But at the time my brain was shot, so I didn’t.

I rummaged through my tool box. Nothing. I rifled through the assortment of greasy items scattered all over the fixtures and floor. Still nothing. Pushing my aching body to an upright position, I exited the bathroom and went shuffling down the hall in search of something—anything—that I could use to plug that pipe.

I wandered into my son’s room, opened his closet door, and there I spied it: a can of modeling clay. Bingo! I would stuff that clay into the pipe, and this would hold back the water. Then, when Judy was through, I would simply dig it all back out with a screwdriver. Brilliant plan, huh? (For a moment there I had almost begun to think I wasn’t good at this sort of thing.)

Confidence in myself restored, I packed the pipe with clay and yelled the good news to everyone: Water’s coming back on!

I went out to the garage and opened the main valve with a flourish. I had now done two things right. I was on a roll! I threw open the door of the house, ready to receive praise and adulation from my grateful, admiring family, who now had water for cooking, washing, flushing, and bathing.

Stephen!

My wife’s bloodcurdling yell lacked the precise level of adulation I had anticipated. I ran down the hallway to the bathroom, wondering if the pipe was leaking just a little. Judy stood outside the door with a horrified look on her face, jabbing her finger in the direction of my handiwork.

Stephen, DO something!

No, the pipe wasn’t leaking a little. A powerful jet of water was shooting out of it straight across the room, where it was pounding the opposite wall in a blinding spray. I ran back down the hall to the garage, shut off the water, and returned to assess the damage.

I would’ve been better off to have stayed in the garage. As it turned out, I may as well have slept in the garage that night—but that’s another story.

The bathroom was flooded. The carpet and pad inside the room and for several feet out into the hallway looked beyond saving. There wasn’t a dry thing in that whole miserable cubicle. Even the ceiling had been splattered from the sheer force of the water when it blew through the pipe.

And there, in a mangled lump at the baseboard of the opposite wall, lay that wretched wad of brown clay. It had failed me. It had made me look bad. It had caused my family to doubt my prowess as a plumber and as a man.

It was all the clay’s fault.

My son squished up to the door and peered inside.

Used my clay to plug the pipe, huh?

I didn’t answer.

Nice work, dad, he deadpanned.

Then he snorted in helpless laughter, suddenly seized with a hilarity that totally escaped me. I reached for the clay to see if it would at least plug a smart-alecky kid’s mouth, but the chicken ran off before we could conduct the experiment.

Question: Why have so many of your friends, neighbors, family, and co-workers forsaken their marriages? Why is this runaway divorce rate wrecking the very foundation of our society?

Why are we so willing to make liars of ourselves by breaking the wedding vows we made before God? How is it that millions of us have arrived at the place where we’re willing to give up on the very person we swore we would stay with till death do us part?

When you think about it, it’s obvious, isn’t it? Our reasons for staying together just aren’t good enough.

At first, the problem isn’t apparent. We can go for weeks, months, even years without discovering this critical weakness. So long as there’s no real pressure, our lousy reasons appear to work just fine.

But when someone or something throws open the main valve, it blows our lousy lump of clay to kingdom come.

Which brings up this book. You have your own reasons for diving into this book right now:

1. Your marriage counselor may have assigned you to read it as the text which you and your spouse will follow to get your marriage back on track.

2. Your Bible study leader may have called to let you know that this is the book your group will be working through next.

3. When you noticed your spouse reading it, you became curious.

4. A friend may have read it and recommended it to you as something you would enjoy.

5. You may have watched me share my passion for its message on one of your favorite television talk shows.

6. You may be a divorced person who would like to finally sort out what really happened in your marriage that started with so much hope, only to end in so much hurt, disappointment, and bitterness.

7. You may be a single person who would like to be married someday, and want to work through what it takes to make a good marriage, in order to see if that’s really the lifestyle for you.

8. Perhaps you’re engaged to be married, or at least getting pretty serious about someone. But the divorce rate, along with the unhappy marriages you see all around you, have you scared. If you’re going to do this thing, you want to do it right. You don’t want to end up with a mediocre marriage like all those other people who act as though they’d rather be single again.

9. You may be a marriage counselor who is searching for a solid, Bible-based text that your clients will enjoy enough to actually read.

10. You may simply be a parent, a grandparent, a relative, or a friend who wants to read something that will better equip you to help improve the marriage of someone you care about.

11. You may be killing time in some mall or online bookstore, to see if you should buy this book...or one by an author whose last name you can pronounce.

12. You may be going through a marriage crisis and need some serious help fast.

13. Or, you may just be a happily married man or woman who would like to make a good thing even better.

But have you ever asked yourself:

Did I Make a Terrible Mistake?

If you haven’t, you should. Over the course of my adult life, I’ve counseled literally thousands of men and women of every age and from every walk of life. It’s been my observation that in one or more areas of their marriage, most husbands and wives have a wad of clay stuck in the pipe.

How about you?

If your splattered marriage is already standing in water three inches deep, this comes as no revelation. But if life’s main water valve has yet to send a gusher in your direction, the safety of your marriage could be relying on a totally inadequate lump of clay.

This book is the ounce of prevention that could save you a pound of cure.

In Part One, I’ll show you that you’re not alone. Together we’ll investigate 14 of the strongest stressors that threaten your marriage, and see why marital strife is virtually inevitable. I’ll throw in an idea or two along the way that may make things a little better for you...and maybe a lot.

In Part Two, you’ll get a whole new set of reasons to stay married—reasons that can stand up to whatever kind of unseen catastrophe may be lurking around the bend. I’ll show you how to remove that wad of clay, rethread your motivational pipe, and make the water-tight connection God intended all along.

Because there’s nothing like having a first-class system to flush your marriage troubles away!

PART ONE

What Are the Threats

to Our Marriage?

-1-

You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’

THINK BACK TO THAT fateful day when you stood before a judge, priest, rabbi, justice of the peace or minister, and exchanged your wedding vows. Ask yourself the haunting question that hovers like the ghost of good times past over every chapter, page and word of this book:

DID I MAKE A TERRIBLE MISTAKE?

Well, did you?

If you are at all like the thousands of people I’ve married and counseled over the past decades, you can come up with a cluster of factors that influenced that life-changing decision. But in person after person after person, there is a single driving force that overshadows all the others. In this you are probably no exception. That Reason above all reasons for taking the plunge can be expressed in four short words:

I was in love.

You were, weren’t you? Perhaps you’ve repressed it by now, but that’s not healthy. Go ahead—reach back into the dark recesses of your heart, mind and soul, and bring it out in the light where you can taste it, hear it, smell it, feel it, know it once again.

It was yours. Oh, dear God, it was yours. You had it! It put a smile on your lips, a glow on your face, a quiver in your voice, a skip in your step and flooded you with hope. It made that mushy heart of yours feel as though it was going to pound its way out of your chest.

You could talk together for hours, and it seemed like only minutes. You could spend five minutes on the phone together without saying a word, and actually feel each other’s contented presence on the other end of the line. You could walk hand and hand through a crowded room and be oblivious to everyone else.

When you were apart, you couldn’t wait to be together again. When you were together, you dreaded the moment you would have to part. Innocent bystanders unfortunate enough to witness one of the syrupy looks you gave each other were forced to either bolt for the bathroom or desperately search for an airsickness bag.

Do you remember? That kind of love was yours once. Don’t let time rob you of it! Don’t let doubt, confusion, or even honest questions pluck it from your mind. Don’t allow the screeching pain of the intervening years drown out its sweet melody. Don’t let some friend, some enemy, some well-meaning counselor/expert/stranger talk you out of the reality of its once-upon-a-time existence. Don’t let Satan himself steal your memory of its luminescent luster.

Admittedly, I may have missed you in this last description. You may be in that significant minority of men and women who didn’t marry for love. In that case, it’s possible that you were unable to identify with the picture I just painted.

You may once have loved someone else, instead. You may have found love with your spouse and then lost it again. You may have once thought you were in love, but have now decided you were not. You may have been loved, but couldn’t return it. You may have loved another person to no avail. You may have once loved a lot, and now love only a little. You may have never been in love your whole life long. You may be unsure that you even know what love really is.

But of one thing I can be certain, and in this you’re identical with every other person who also reads these soul-searching words:

You want to be in love.

Even if you have absolutely no idea what it is, you want it. Even if you fear it, you want it. On second thought,