Week #8 Beware of Pride

A Rare & Beautiful Marriage

I was focused on a project and my husband needed some help with something. I made one rude comment and he became upset. I later tried to apologize, but he refused to accept my apology and then it came out that he was still upset when we were driving away from the house with our children in the car. I almost let it ruin our outing with our children, but I decided to set it aside while spending time as a family. We had both been more concerned about ourselves than each other and it created some negativity and hurt feelings. We discussed it later and we were able to smooth things over.  

In his book Drawing Heaven Into Your Marriage,  H. Wallace Goddard stated, "God has graciously given each of us an early warning system. When we are feeling irked, annoyed, or irritated with our spouse, we have our backs toward heaven. We are guilty of pride. In a spiritual sense we are saying to our spouses, "You are not meeting my needs the way I would like them met. Don't you realize that is your job?! Your every act is to be dedicated to my happiness. Now hop to it!" (p. 69) 

I believe many times we feel that it is our right to get upset with others when they do or say things that we find annoying. I liked Goddard's point that "feeling irked, annoyed, or irritated" are signs of pride, though I had not considered that before. As President Ezra Taft Benson said, "Pride is a very misunderstood sin, and many are sinning in ignorance. In the scriptures there is no such thing as righteous pride—it is always considered a sin." But naturally irritations are going to set in—its human nature and each of us are far from perfect.  

Maybe we wish for a marriage without irritations, but that is unlikely to happen. Instead of allowing irritations to set in and over time destroy a marriage, there is another approach. Just as an oyster takes the irritating piece of sand and instead of casting out the offending object, it forms a protective sac around it, and over time it adds layer after layer of material until a beautiful and rare pearl is formed. Imagine if we took this approach with our spouse's irritations and annoyances. We can't simply cast out that Irritation, but instead we can add a protective sack (choosing to overlook the irritation or we can refuse to attack and get upset). Then, we layer our relationship with love, we choose to be humble, we forgive each other, and we perform acts of service. We prevent irritations from destroying our marriage, and instead we work adding layer upon layer until we have created a rare and beautiful marriage that will radiantly shine for all the world to marvel at!