“No,” I said.
“William said he prayed for divorce. That’s not right, is it?”
“No, that’s not right,” I said. I saw William smirking. I felt this needed to end. He was dragging Jesus’s name through the mud.
I decided I needed to have a talk to end all talks. I met him alone at lunchtime, and we talked. He was the target, and my words were the darts. As soon as he put an argument up, I shot it down. I felt better. I had gotten my thoughts out.
Surprisingly, this didn’t seem to make things better. He didn’t want to talk to me at all anymore, and he was all the more determined to get his divorce over with.
I realized that we needed to be friends. He was on the internet perusing pictures of beautiful women. I asked him, “Is it possible for us to be friends?”
“No.”
“If we wanted to be friends, we could.”
“Yes, but you don’t want to be.”
“I’m angry at you all the time.”
“Why?”
I didn’t answer, because it seemed obvious. He stood against everything I ever cared about.
A couple of things did help me to be nicer to William: my Bible study friends and morning prayers. Stan, the leader of the study, told me that he felt this was a new believer and that I needed to be patient with him. The situation got me into a good habit of praying every morning. I would wake up in the morning, ready to get on William’s case, and after praying my heart would soften, and I would feel more peaceful.
I told William, “We have to be friends, and I promise I’ll try to be nice.”
“Thanks.”
Things calmed down for a while, but it felt phony sometimes, pretending that everything was fine. I asked him, “Can you be a friend of someone and be angry at him, and argue . . .”
William said, “If you love someone you won’t fight.”
I didn’t agree. His idea of love seemed to revolve around being nice and having happy feelings. He thought he had a good witness to his wife, because he was acting nice around her. It seemed artificial to me, divorcing someone with a friendly smile.
I found another “key.” It dawned on me that he did not understand Gina’s way of expressing her anger. William told me that one of his great goals was to get a townhouse. When he finally got a townhouse, he told his wife about it. She responded with “So what? I don’t care.” Certainly this was contemptible. She ought to have said something nice, but if William would have stopped for a minute, he could have gone deeper. He could have realized that there was a reason for her response. It came from angry feelings that had nothing to do with his desire for a townhouse. He didn’t think of going deeper. He simply saw the offense and reacted in anger.
I told him that when a woman is angry, she needs to get her feelings out. You need to not only allow her to say angry things but to help her get those emotions out. I told him several times, and I don’t know if he ever got it. He certainly did not see it as a “key.”
Whenever Gina said something nasty to him, he took it at face value. He didn’t know how to go deeper.
