CHAPTER SEVEN

LOGS ON THE FIRE

My wife loves a fire in the fireplace. And it better not be one of those little gas things where you flip the switch and the fire comes on in that fake wood. She wants to hear the sap sizzling, the wood crackling; there needs to be legitimate danger of the house burning down. And it doesn’t necessarily need to be overly cold for us to have a fire in the fireplace.

Because of this, every year there is a sort of two-month window of tension in our relationship because she wants a fire, and I’m saying, “It’s seventy-two degrees outside; it’s not time for a fire.”

She’ll say something like, “Well, it was sixty-four when we woke up this morning,” as though that has any bearing on anything, to which I’ll try to put my foot down. “We still don’t need a fire. You’re literally asking me to start a fire and also turn on the air conditioner.”

And then we meet in the middle somewhere, which means I start a fire in the fireplace.

Therefore, we have a wood-burning fireplace that about four months out of the year is constantly burning. We used to be able to start the fire with gas, but we ran it so much one year that the pipe the gas came out of literally melted and broke off, so I could no longer light the fire the easy way. I had to actually go out and gather kindling and build the fire. What once was pretty easy to start became harder and harder.

Then we started getting ice storms, so I’d gather a bunch of extra wood and put it on our porch so I wouldn’t have to go traipsing around when an ice storm hit. But what I didn’t think through was that the fire I started when I left for work in the morning would still be going when I came home and all that wood I’d put on the porch would be used up. So now it’s dark, freezing cold, and I’m wandering around in the ice looking for dry kindling.

I think relationships are a lot like this. For nearly all of us, the heat and the excitement of things in the beginning of marriage are fairly easy because attraction in and of itself produces zeal and gladness and excitement and a kind of nervous energy. But then, over time, the routine of knowing one another and the pace of life take a lot of that heat away. And that fire that was so easy to start in the beginning becomes harder and harder to get going.

Where there was once a roaring inferno, creativity, discipline, and pursuit, now, all of a sudden under the weight of life, the fire has died down somewhat. Maybe it’s a nice little glowing fire, and that can be good. You can work with that. But maybe it’s smoldering now, and there’s barely any heat left in it.

It’s in that season people begin to say things that are not indicative of having entered a covenantal union. It’s then that couples often begin thinking the dying fire is a lost cause. It’s not giving off any heat or light, so they assume they should wander off elsewhere to look.

But for the Christian who understands the marriage relationship as a covenant based on the grace of God in the gospel, we recognize that we do not “fall out of love” with our spouses, because love is not based on how we feel. It’s based on the covenant itself, on the promises we made. Remember, marriage is not a contractual arrangement. True love doesn’t say, “Make me feel this way if you want me to stay.” That’s not love. Instead, true love says in commitment, “I’m giving myself to you regardless.”

Yet that fire still may look weak. Anxiety, fear, and weariness take their toll the longer a couple is together. Sometimes it has a lot to do with biology. Bodies change; metabolisms change; hormones change. Kids introduced to the home always change the dynamic. People change jobs, homes, cities. A marriage is constantly changing day by day based on the growth (or lack thereof) of the couple and on shifting circumstances around them. All of those little foxes get into the vineyard and start eating away at everything.

These stressors can dampen the fire, cut off the oxygen to it. If we’re not careful, they can dampen and cut off the heat of our love for one another.

But if we’re mindful, our fire doesn’t have to go out. It may rage or flicker, but it won’t go out, so long as we keep tending to it. You just have to keep putting logs on the fire. And maybe you’ve got to be out in the darkness, wandering around blindly in an ice storm to find them, but the work will be worth it.

As we press further into the Song of Solomon, we will learn valuable lessons about throwing logs on the fire of romance in our marriage.

Pay Attention

Picking up in Song of Solomon 7, notice something different about the king’s appraisal of his wife’s beauty:

How beautiful are your feet in sandals,

O noble daughter!

Your rounded thighs are like jewels,

the work of a master hand.

Your navel is a rounded bowl

that never lacks mixed wine.

Your belly is a heap of wheat,

encircled with lilies. (vv. 1–2)

Did you catch it?

Every other time Solomon talked about his wife’s body, he began with her eyes. But not this time. He mentioned her feet, her thighs, and then her stomach. There is a significance here we should not pass over lightly.

We should see Solomon and his wife as older now. They’ve been together for a while. Solomon was learning to see his wife in different ways that only he could see. No one knew what the queen’s thighs looked like except for Solomon. The only one who looked upon and rejoiced in her belly was the king. In the privilege of marriage, this man got to know this woman like nobody else, and vice versa.

Husbands and wives, one of the gifts that God has given to us in marriage is this treasure hunt of finding things in our spouses that nobody else can (or should). What a gift to be given by God, to spend decades with someone, Lord willing, in a safe covenant relationship, where you can know these intricate intimacies that no one else gets to see.

There are things about Lauren that only I know. I believe there are times that even Lauren doesn’t know. They are things that only I get to see, aspects of her that are amazing and beautiful that come with the honor of being one flesh with her.

And the way I get to take advantage of this gift is to bring those things to her attention. Sometimes we’ll sit down and talk about our goals, where we’re trying to go together, whether or not we’re on track, how we want to handle the kids, that kind of thing, and those are some of the times I say to her, “Hey, I’ve seen this in you. I just think it is so amazing.” And she’ll look at me, surprised and pleased at the same time. I can see it’s a blessing to her.

If you want to throw logs on the fire of romance, husbands and wives, here’s the first thing you have to do: pay attention.

You have the opportunity to see things that no one else does. So pay attention, study your spouse, learn him or her, and then you can turn around and use the things you’ve learned to demonstrate your love.

I met a guy named Dudley Collison years ago, and he told me the story of how he got engaged. It blew me away. He started by picking up his girlfriend in his car and driving out to a lake. At the lake, they got into a canoe and canoed out to a little island in the middle of the lake. There in the middle of the lake, Dudley had set up lunch. They ate a sweet, romantic meal together. After lunch, a speedboat came flying up to the island to pick them up, so they got in the speedboat and sped around the lake for a little while before going back to shore, where there was a limo waiting for them. They got in, and the driver took them out to an airfield, where they boarded a little plane and went flying over the beautiful hills of Arkansas. When they landed on a little grassy runway, they were at a nice college campus in the area. He led her out of the plane and to the campus chapel, where the whole thing was set up as if for a wedding. Candles were lit, flowers sprinkled everywhere. She saw an envelope up front with her name on it, so she went to open it, and inside was his proposal for marriage. She turned around, and Dudley was down on one knee with the ring out.

Of course she said yes. Next, he escorted her to a waiting truck—a really beat-up piece of trash that barely ran. But they got in and drove to dinner, where he explained what all the vehicles meant.

He said the car stood for normalcy, for the reality that they were going to have mostly normal days in their life together. The canoe was for the times they would have to work together to get somewhere. And the speedboat was for the fun they were going to have. The limo represented other people driving them, anticipating times when their lives would be affected by other people. The airplane was about their spiritual journey together. Finally, the old, beat-up truck was about growing old together.

And that’s how this guy proposed to his wife.

But there’s more. The two of them got married on the thirty-first day of the month. Dudley figured out that there are seven months with thirty-one days each year, and on every one of those thirty-firsts, he buys a small present for his wife and places it somewhere for her to find. It’s always something she likes, things he’s been taking notes on all the other days. So she might get into her car on the thirty-first day of a month, turn it on, and a new CD just starts playing. It’s a nice surprise.

He says that after fifteen years of marriage, on the thirty-firsts, his wife wakes up and just starts looking!

I met this guy when I was a college student, and I thought, Teach me, Jedi master.

Most of us need a little help with this stuff, right?

We can be honest and say that Dudley’s example may be a little extreme. But we can learn a lot from him about paying attention to our wives and using what we see to bless our wives’ hearts.

Most men throw all the weight of their romance into three holidays: their wife’s birthday, their anniversary, and Valentine’s Day. And that’s pretty pathetic, guys. You’re better than that.

Start paying attention to your wife, and start turning what you learn about her into intentional blessings for her. Pick a couple of dates a year to do something really creative, something really out of the ordinary. Use Google if you need help with ideas. Check out Justin Buzzard’s book Date Your Wife. There are lots of resources out there.

If you are paying attention, your wife will tell you what she likes and doesn’t like without you asking. You know those days when somehow you’ve agreed to go to the mall with her, and you’re in that Bataan Death March through the stores? Well, if you stop sulking, you’ll hear her say things like, “Oh, that’s cute,” or “I love that,” or “I hate this kind of thing.” Pay attention to that. Take notes, literally if you must. Put it in your cell phone.

Pay attention when she comments on things in magazines or books or in television commercials. Pay attention at restaurants when she comments on different food and drinks. Don’t just consider it chitchat. Consider it research.

Then you can turn your notes into presents and surprises later. Or maybe just in conversation you’ll be able to bring up her likes and dislikes. She will notice that you’ve paid attention, and that will bless her. A woman desperately wants to be known. You may have even heard your wife say from time to time, “I don’t feel like you really know me.” This is a big deal for her. Food and drinks and clothes may seem small in the grand scheme of things, but your remembering her little likes and dislikes is a way to show you are listening, paying attention, and remembering. They are ways to throw logs on the fire.

Bring home flowers for no particular reason. Send her texts and emails telling her you’re thinking about her.

But let’s not forget that men want to be desired and pursued too! Solomon’s wife tore off after him when he was gone, and that must have been a huge blessing to him. He went for a walk, and she didn’t think, Fine, then, go; I don’t care. She went after him.

I earnestly believe that, biblically speaking, husbands should be the primary pursuer in the relationship, but wives bear responsibility to tend to their husbands in some initiating ways too.

Wives, there are two big ways you can do this that will bless your husbands tremendously. The first is with words of encouragement and respect. Build him up. He deals every day with criticism—internal and external. If your husband is like most men, he is haunted by feelings of inadequacy and failure, and he will nearly always struggle with insecurity about his masculinity, his strengths, and his gifts. You are in an extraordinary position to either add to these insecurities or combat them, and your words mean the most to him. Aside from the voice of God in his Word, yours is the most powerful voice influencing your husband’s heart.

Pay attention to the things that wound or heal your husband, and intentionally speak words that do the latter. Become a student of his likes and interests. Become an expert on his strengths, not simply a noticer of his weaknesses.

The other important thing to do is flirt with your husband. Show initiation with affection and sex.

Paying attention to one another, becoming students of each other, is an important way for a married couple to weave romance into the fabric of their relationship. It’s a big log for the fire.

Get Away

Sometimes you have to take a break from the routine.

Vacations are great. If you have the means to go out of town or get away from the kids at a hotel or even just a long date, take advantage of that.

For many, however, the finances don’t allow a lot of date nights or trips away, so you will have to be more creative about carving out time in your lives to get away together. You can learn to redeem the time together, no matter how much time or money you’ve got.

Some of my favorite moments with Lauren are early in the morning before the kids get up. We sit together on the back porch, read our Bibles, drink coffee, and enjoy the quiet of the morning. We don’t always even need to talk in those moments, but we’re together, enjoying the small pleasures of life, and it’s a very sweet time. Many times it’s a great opportunity to catch up, hear each other, and share our hearts. It’s like a little getaway to start the day.

When we have a date night out, we oftentimes add things on the back end of the evening to make sure we don’t get home before the kids are in bed. We try to redeem every little bit of time we have—whether it’s over lunch breaks, date nights out, chilling out after the kids are in bed at night, or our early morning coffee.

Try to pull out of all the craziness that’s going on in your life and make sure you focus just on one another in those times. Because if you don’t, you increase the likelihood of taking the stress out on each other.

You’ve got to do what you can to make some time to be with each other, focused and relaxed and enjoying one another. That is exactly what Solomon’s wife said to her husband:

Come, my beloved,

let us go out into the fields

and lodge in the villages;

let us go out early to the vineyards

and see whether the vines have budded,

whether the grape blossoms have opened

and the pomegranates are in bloom.

There I will give you my love.

The mandrakes give forth fragrance,

and beside our doors are all choice fruits,

new as well as old,

which I have laid up for you, O my beloved. (7:11–13)

“Let’s go on vacation,” she said. “Let’s get away.”

And if you read well between the poetic lines here, she was being extremely erotic and flirty about it in 7:13, when she basically said, “I’ve got all those old fruits you enjoy so much. And I’ve got some new stuff to show you too.”

You think that, hearing that, he’s not going to move some meetings around? I’m guessing after she said that, his schedule cleared pretty quickly.

On our anniversary and a couple of other times a year, I ask some questions of Lauren, things like the following:

What am I doing well?

What do I need to get better at?

How can I help you?

If you ask your spouse these questions, you have to ask with a listening heart and a patient spirit. You can’t ask with a ready defense waiting. If you’re truly interested in increasing the fire in your marriage, you have to boldly ask for your spouse’s appraisal and carefully consider it, holding fast to what is true (see 1 Thess. 5:21).

This is one of those areas in our relationship that I’ve had to grow in because for a while I was really terrible at it. If Lauren expressed feeling a certain way or gave me even a little criticism, no matter how valid, I was quick to explain why her feelings were invalid and her appraisal was wrong. I never acknowledged that her feelings were legitimate.

So it took awhile to get Lauren to trust me enough to say, “Yeah, I think you could do this better. I think this would be more helpful in this area,” without fearing that I was going to go on the attack or get defensive or explain away her thoughts.

Responding correctly is very hard to do at six thirty at night when I’ve just walked in the front door from work and there are three screaming kids running around and dinner in the works, right? That’s not the time for this kind of conversation. But if we can get away for a bit, we can have it in a relaxed, open setting.

Do what you can to get away. It is a log on the fire.

Work Hard

That firewood didn’t appear on my porch magically. Even though it was dark and freezing cold, I knew my baby wanted a fire in that fireplace, and if I was going to provide it for her, I was going to have to do some work.

I think probably the greatest enemy of keeping the fire burning in our marriages is just plain laziness.

We must constantly guard against the tendency to downshift into tepid relational dynamics. I don’t believe that the fires of passion can always be at honeymoon level, but all of us in marriage are called by God to tend the fire. We have to watch it, keep an eye on it. When it gets low, we’re responsible to throw more wood on the fire.

If you’re in a place where that fire’s gone, where the whole room just seems dark and cold, remember that Christians are covenant people. We have committed ourselves to one another.

Remembering this, we confess, we repent, and we seek forgiveness from our spouse, and we begin to figure out how to get that flame going again. I think marriage counseling would be a huge help for many couples, but so many won’t go because they think it’s just for couples on the verge of divorce. Or they won’t go talk to their elders or pastor or a counselor at their church because it seems too embarrassing or inconvenient. Favoring the deadness of a marriage over the embarrassment or inconvenience of breathing life back into it is just plain lazy.

Some great questions you can ask your spouse are as follows:

“How can our marriage get stronger?”

“How can I love you and serve you more effectively?”

“What is it that makes you feel loved, valued, and desired?”

Then with great discipline, seek to win, woo, nurture, serve, and make much of your spouse. He or she is God’s gift to you, and you waste the gift of marriage if you don’t actively tend to it. Don’t give up on the fire.

I think the only way you have a shot at marital intimacy on a deep level is to survive years five and six. Too many marriages in our country don’t survive into their seventh year. Or even if the marriage is intact, the relationship is not. It consists of two people sharing a bed and maybe a checkbook, but little else.

Solomon and his queen worked hard at their marriage. Time passed, the years added wrinkles and pounds, but they still complimented each other, still flirted with each other, still pursued each other. They were intentional.

Romance is a discipline. You can’t be lazy and expect romance to blossom in your marriage.

Delight in Each Other

This is a hard truth to consider, but it is not optional for a husband and wife to find joy in each other. I know joy doesn’t always come naturally to us. We either like something or we don’t; either we are pleased by something or we aren’t. But part of working hard and learning our spouse is finding joy in him or her. And because our spouses are made in the image of God, because they are equipped with gifts and strengths and talents—and especially because we made a commitment to them to love in good times and bad—there are ways to delight in them. This is the way of Christ, who rejoices over us (see Zeph. 3:17).

Gary Thomas called rehearsing dissatisfaction in marriage a sin, and he wrote:

Whenever marital dissatisfaction rears its head in my marriage—as it does in virtually every marriage—I simply check my focus. The times that I am happiest and most fulfilled in my marriage are the times when I am intent on drawing meaning and fulfillment from becoming a better husband rather than from demanding a “better” wife.

If you’re a Christian, the reality is that, biblically speaking, you can’t swap your spouse for someone else. But you can change yourself. And that change can bring the fulfillment that you mistakenly believe is found only by changing partners. In one sense, it’s comical: Yes, we need a changed partner, but the partner that needs to change is not our spouse, it’s us!

I don’t know why this works. I don’t know how you can be unsatisfied maritally, and then offer yourself to God to bring about change in your life and suddenly find yourself more satisfied with the same spouse. I don’t know why this works, only that it does work. It takes time, and by time I mean maybe years. But if your heart is driven by the desire to draw near to Jesus, you find joy by becoming like Jesus. You’ll never find joy by doing something that offends Jesus—such as instigating a divorce or an affair.1

The dissatisfaction comes so easily, but then we put the work into justifying our lack of delight. According to God’s grace in the gospel, however, we ought to be fighting against our dissatisfaction, working harder at what John Piper calls “the duty of delight.” Look hard into your spouse; there is beauty there, charm and wonder. You can find delight, maybe even that original delight of the early days, if you will look hard enough through the lens of grace. Shirley Rice wrote to wives:

Are you in love with your husband? Not, Do you love him? I know you do. He has been around a long time, and you’re used to him. He is the father of your children. But are you in love with him? How long has it been since your heart really squeezed when you looked at him?… Why is it you have forgotten the things that attracted you to him at first?… By the grace of God, I want you to start changing your thought pattern. Tomorrow morning, get your eyes off the toaster or the baby bottles long enough to LOOK at him. Don’t you see the way his coat fits his shoulders? Look at his hands. Do you remember when just to look at his strong hands made your heart lift? Well, LOOK at him and remember. Then loose your tongue and tell him you love him.2

As you get older as a married couple, as things change, the things you take delight in may need to change too. Or you may need to change your approach.

In Song of Solomon 7, we see that our couple has grown older together and done much of life together. They’ve put a lot of hard work in. And they’ve reaped some tremendous romantic benefit from it. How do we know? Well, he talked about her body, how he continued to find her sexy as all get-out, and she said, “We work pretty smoothly together now, don’t we?”

What happened? The awkwardness was gone. They knew where all the buttons were, so to speak, and they knew how to press them. That’s not something you get in the first year of marriage; it takes time. It takes years. It takes a lot of hard work, a lot of study, and a lot of grace.

We have this image of young married sex as the great sex, but that’s such a false notion, really. If you keep the fires burning throughout your marriage, it only gets better. You get better at it, for one thing. But you also learn each other’s bodies; you have the fruit of all your labors.

And this is true for much more than just sex. Couples who get through those difficult seasons, weather the conflicts, work toward peace through God’s gospel, and endure to the end find that their later years are so unbelievably sweet and rich. The difficulties make them that way, like all the pressure that turns coal into a diamond.

You may envision an old couple fumbling around with each other’s buttons and think, Ew. But it is beautiful. It is the fruit of all their hard work.

Solomon and his wife tumble like a couple of randy newlyweds into chapter 8:

Oh that you were like a brother to me

who nursed at my mother’s breasts!

If I found you outside, I would kiss you,

and none would despise me.

I would lead you and bring you

into the house of my mother—

she who used to teach me.

I would give you spiced wine to drink,

the juice of my pomegranate.

His left hand is under my head,

and his right hand embraces me!

I adjure you, O daughters of Jerusalem,

that you not stir up or awaken love

until it pleases. (vv. 1–4)

At the end of it all, she looked back on their journey and said, “We did it the right way.” She had a sense of satisfaction, a depth, a gratitude that culminated in this joyous proclamation: “We didn’t arouse love until it was time, and the result has been a love incomparable, a love unquenchable.” All the hard work, the conflict, the romance, the wrinkles, and the extra weight—they were all worth it.

This is the sweetest fruit, the kind that comes from a long romance.

You can start now, today. You don’t have to give up because you’ve wasted time. Just stop wasting time. If Christ is in your marriage, the fire of marriage can be stoked again. Pay attention, carve out time for each other, work hard, and delight fully.