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"I will put you first"

How a humbling wake-up call and a timeless biblical truth reshaped my marriage and ministry for good
Gary Smalley | Outcomes, Jul/Aug 2007

In the first year of our marriage, I was a youth pastor, and I'd volunteered to be on the church basketball team. I often neglected to tell Norma when games were scheduled, so I called her from the church office one day to inform her of a game that night.

"Hey, Norm," I said. "I have a game tonight, and you know I always like you to be there to watch. Afterward, we can eat out." There was a long silence, and though we hadn't been married long, I knew already that long silences didn't bode well. "So that's a good plan, right?" I said.

"Gary, today's Valentine's Day," Norma finally answered with a quiver in her voice. "I've already begun cooking a special dinner for us. Couldn't you skip this one game so we can have our first Valentine's dinner together?"

How had I failed to see Valentine's Day coming, with all the red signs in stores and all the shelves filled with candy, cards, and balloons? As I thought about it, I vaguely remembered her mentioning this dinner about two weeks before. I had forgotten. But I had a solution: "OK, come on to the gym and we can heat up the meat after the game. How does that sound?"

Pause and more pause. She was thinking, Does he think a stupid basketball game on a team that hasn't won all year is more important than our very first special candlelight Valentine's dinner together? Finally, unable to talk because of her tears, Norma whispered, "Gary, if you want to play, you go right ahead. I'll stay home and keep cooking, and we'll eat when you get here." 

How warm do you think the dinner was when I got home? You guessed it. The food was lukewarm and my wife was Arctic cold. No snuggling that night. Her spirit was scraping bottom because she saw that my priorities were always what made me feel good—fun and games, church stuff, fishing, and then somewhere down the line, her. I was serving mainly my own needs. Her feelings and needs hardly registered. I was not a servant to my wife.

Everything came crashing down

The "ah-ha" experience for me—which started my entire ministry with marriage and family—happened five years later over a lunch break. I was pastoring my first church, and I was so committed to ministering that I even told Norma that God was first, my ministry was second, and she was third. At first she went along with that. She was young.

The only problem was that it didn't work. God was not happy with me putting my ministry over my wife, and it didn't take long for her to feel the same way. As the kids came along, she felt more and more isolated from me. I lived in two different worlds, and my actions made it clear that my real world was my ministry.