My Need to Control

We haven’t bought new furniture in 6 years. In fact, the very first room you enter in our house is our living room. There has been no furniture in that room for the entire year that we’ve lived here. We called it the “rug room”, because we have an area rug in the middle of it. About 7 months ago, we started saving for a new couch for our house. The plan was to move our existing couch into the rug room and buy a new couch for our family room. For the past 3 months Trisha has been watching ads and surfing the internet trying to find something that would fit our budget, our room and style.

Last week she found a couch that was on sale for $700. Boom! She drove to the store with measurements of our room, I transferred money out of savings. We bought the perfect couch with cash. It was beautiful. On Friday we brought the couch into the living room and started unpacking it. As we attached the legs to the bottom of the couch, I could tell by the look on Trisha’s face that she didn’t like it. It is a lot taller than our current couch. We put it into the only position that would fit in the room and it covered up our only window in the room. Trisha wasn’t happy and I started saying things like, “It may just take some getting used to.” That didn’t help.

After about 30 minutes, we decide to move our old couch back into the family room and put the new couch in the rug room. We slid the new couch up against the far wall of the rug room. There is a window that is right behind the couch. Trisha says, “Let me open this blind and get some light into the room.” As she pulls on the blind, the blind comes off the window, falls on to the couch and slices a gash into our 24 hour old, 7 month saved up for, too big for the room we bought it for, leather couch.

Trisha was devastated. I was in disbelief.

That was a moment we had experienced hundreds of times before in our marriage. The cause has been different, but the feelings were the same. What I typically do is try to control Trisha’s reaction in an effort to fix it or fix her. This almost always leads to an argument. For some reason this time was different. I sensed God say to me, “Don’t say a word. You can’t fix this.” So I didn’t.

I didn’t try to control her reaction.

I didn’t try to fix it.

I didn’t tell her how I think she should feel.

I just let it be.

I left to go pick up one of our kids from school, and when I got back the mood was different. It wasn’t perfect, but it was different. Trisha told me that she was so upset and so frustrated that all she felt like she could do was read Scripture. She went upstairs and spent 30 minutes alone with God. That choice didn’t heal the gash in our couch…it’s still there. It did realign her heart. It renewed her mind.

I wonder how many times I have robbed God of doing something in my wife or in my kid’s heart because I’ve tried to be god. I’ve tried to fix things; to make them go away; to heal wounds that I don’t have the capacity to heal? I wonder how many arguments we’ve had; how many hurt feelings we’ve caused because we don’t really care about the situation as much as we care about controlling the person’s reaction to it.

We think by controlling our spouse’s behavior we are changing their heart. Only God can do that.

Maybe today the best thing you can do for a relationship; your marriage; your kids is to simply allow God to be God. Giving up our need to control brings freedom to us and to the ones we are trying to manipulate.

Do you have control issues?