"Jim (fictitious name) will no longer be the leader you report to," the voice on the other end of the phone sadly informed me. "He's been removed from his pastorate. He's been involved in multiple affairs."
Sitting in my office, I was both saddened and stunned. This individual who had been placed over me as a regional leader in one of my pastorates had been living a double life. A husband and father, community leader and pastor; he was no longer in the ministry and had been publicly humiliated through a newspaper article that outlined his failings to an entire community.
Before anyone goes clucking their tongues over this, please realize... NO man is immune to this temptation. I know a number of men who were never in the ministry who have become unfaithful as well.
What causes men to go astray? What incites them to be unfaithful to the woman they promised to love and cherish... "till death do us part?"
I do not think there are any easy answers to this question, due to the fact that all of us are such complex beings. We all have different personality traits, likes and dislikes, character traits, and so on.
However, I believe there are some shared elements that help us understand what causes men to take such risks.
One of the deepest needs all individuals share, men and women alike, is a reason to exist - a need to have purpose and value, in other words.
A man who has lacks purpose and value will be hungry for anything that can come along and fill it.
Even men who have achieved great accomplishments in their lives can feel as though they lack these two elements.
Enter someone who suddenly appreciates them where, perhaps, they haven't been all that appreciated at home. Someone who isn't tied down by duties with the children, cooking, bed making, dish washing, etc. Someone who has time to appreciate this individual who has been feeling as though their life isn't really counting for much.
A movie was released in the year 2000 that doesn't deal specifically with the subject of marital infidelity, but is a perfect example of how a man can be wooed away from a wonderful relationship with a real partner by the desire for more worth, value and accomplishment in his life. The movie... The Family Man starring Nicholas Cage and Tea Leoni.
In the movie, Cage plays a Scrooge-type character who is about to be married, but instead of heeding his fiance's intuitive concerns, leaves her to spend a year in London building their financial future. Even though he promises to return, he never does. He has placed his need for worth above the day-to-day relationship and then (in Dickens-like fashion), has a chance to see what his life would have been like if he had heeded his intended's concerns. It's simple, humdrum and day-to-day, with a less-than-exciting career as a manager of a tire store.
But, through the experience, he finds worth and value in the fray of everyday life, with all its banality, common-ness and simplicity.
One of the things a man needs to realize when he marries a woman is that his dreams may never be realized in the way he expects or desires for them to be. He needs to make a pact in his heart before God that this is the woman he intends to be faithful to through all the disappointments and anguishes of life. And to never allow anything or anyone interrupt that commitment.
This, I believe, is the fundamental commitment a man needs to make in his heart in order for a marriage to not only survive, but to thrive and to blossom throughout his life.
No comments:
Post a Comment