Ron
Every couple of months, Deborah and I would take Mama and Daddy to a nice restaurant. He would grab the first waitress he laid eyes on, whether ours or not, and in a voice much louder than necessary, say, “Honey, before you do another thing, I need a whiskey—Jim Beam and Coke, not too much Coke!”
I remember one night at a restaurant when I’d had enough of his disrespecting my mama, and I let a disgusted look creep onto my face. He looked back at me, puzzled, as though I were an alien specimen from an unknown universe.
“What have you got against drinking?” he said, sure that had to be the problem.
“Nothing, Dad. Sometimes I even have one.”
“Well then, why won’t you drink with your old daddy? You think you’re too good?”
Never did I let him see me take a drink. I even quit drinking altogether for a couple of years. That was after Carson, who was an otherwise perfect child, came home drunk in high school and wrecked his room with a boat paddle from Kanakuk Christian camp. When I was sure I never craved alcohol, I started again, allowing myself wine with a fancy dinner.
By 1975, I was working in investment banking in Fort Worth, where I first made my mark as a fine-arts dealer. I quickly got too big for my britches and, in 1986, decided we needed to move to Dallas in order to grow my business and be truly appreciated by the art-world elite.
That’s where Deborah and I started to grow apart. While I stormed the art world and collected a closetful of Armani suits and custom-made boots painstakingly handmade from the skins of various animals, Deborah plugged into God, pursuing a passionate spiritual life that included working with AIDS babies and hours spent on her knees in prayer.
Those were sometimes lonely days for Deborah. In Dallas, she had a tough time finding friends who were willing to venture deep into spiritual waters. Most people (including me) were happy to watch from the shore. Some braved the shallow end on occasion, but most were afraid of getting in over their heads.
When we first arrived in town, Deborah wanted to pray for our children, Regan and Carson, and all their classmates and the teachers in the school, so she started a weekly prayer group and invited all the mothers in Carson’s grade. I remember how puzzled Deborah was that several women in our neighborhood seemed hesitant about the invitation. Many times, nobody showed up at all.
“Why would anyone not want to pray over their kids?” she asked me one day.
Later, I heard through the grapevine that most people were a little afraid of Deborah’s intimacy with God. They were especially afraid because she invited them to do the scariest thing of all: pray with her out loud.
To tell you the truth, even I felt intimidated when praying with her. Deborah prayed with such passion—not like some nut-ball holy roller but with such knowledge of the Father as though He was her daddy and she was His favorite child. Without pausing or stumbling, she let her words flow like a psalm or a sonnet. Captured on canvas, her prayers would be considered masterpieces, like a Rubens or a Caravaggio. And yet her prayers were not artful, as though she meant to impress. Instead, she would simply remind God of His own promises in Scripture and, in an inexplicably reverent way, sort of shake Him by His lapels when she thought He really ought to get moving on a particular project.
There was a depth, an intensity, a beauty to my wife’s prayers, as if she had boldly stepped into a rare inner circle of divine light that others dared only regard from a distance. And in the beginning, that irritated me. It was as if she was so spiritual that she wasn’t being real or down-to-earth. So I understood why the ladies didn’t want to show up and secretly wished I had that option.
Before long, Deborah and I had grown so far apart that I was looking for a way out. She was sure I loved art and money but not so sure I loved her. I knew she loved God and our kids but was fairly certain she could just barely stand the sight of me. And so, in 1988, when I found myself in Beverly Hills, sharing wine with a beautiful blonde painter, I made a lot of excuses to myself on the way to a hotel room.
After a friend threatened to rat me out, I confessed. Deborah and I went to marriage counseling, and she forgave me. She also told me a truth about women’s hearts that I wish I could tattoo on the insides of every married man’s eyelids: “I know you’re an art dealer and that you love ranches and horses and longhorn steers and fancy cars. But what I don’t know about you is what’s in your heart. What you’re thinking when you look at me, when you hold me. Even if you’re thinking you don’t like me very much at that moment, I can deal with that. What I can’t deal with is not knowing your heart.”
Of course, that scared the crap out of me. Every man reading this knows his heart is a place so dangerous not even he feels safe going there. But I also knew that as much as I yearned to know my wife on an intimate physical level, she yearned for emotional and spiritual intimacy. Suddenly, I understood that just as sex—lots of it—was important to me, knowing me, experiencing my interior world, was important to her.
From then on, Deborah and I prayed together, usually lying together in bed. I would hold her in my arms, and she would know my heart according to my prayers. At first, I prayed about things I thought she’d want me to pray about: our marriage, the kids, the whole “Lord, we just want to thank You for who You are” kind of prayers that we sometimes pray because we want to sound hyperspiritual. But slowly, gradually, I began stripping off the layers of anonymity that shielded my heart from intruders, even my own wife.
Out loud, I told God I was afraid of what I felt was my wife’s superior spirituality. I told Him I resented her relationship with Him. I felt she loved Christ more than she loved me. Saying those things aloud then, and even writing them now, seems stupid. But they were real to me, and the results of my saying them were immediate. Deborah and I began connecting at a deep, spiritual level, drawing energy and life from each other like an unbroken circuit.
Deborah always treated my prayer attempts with understanding and was never condescending. I liked hearing the good things she said about me; they made me want to be even better. Meanwhile, she began adjusting her life in such a way that, without compromising her faith and integrity, she could make me feel the importance I wanted to feel in the relationship.
In the end, our prayer together was the key to the success of our marriage. That’s where we became intimate—“velcroed at the heart,” as we used to joke. Ironically, it was exactly what I wanted from the beginning. I just hadn’t known how to get there. Meanwhile, the deep joy of our physical intimacy was a direct result of the intimacy of our prayer.
During the final twelve years of our marriage, people used to ask me, “What’s your secret? What is it that you two have?”
I would reply, only half-joking, “I used to be down on my knees begging for sex. Now I’m down on my knees praying with my wife.”