Enduring Love, Hope, and the Limits of Patience

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student: I have been thinking about what you said last, about being a channel rather than a well. But I want to ask what happens when the other person is not a channel. When one of you is going back to the source and the other has stopped.

professor: Then you will discover what your obedience was actually resting on.

student: That sounds ominous.

professor: It is only clarifying. Most of us imagine we are being patient because we love the person. Put us beside someone who has gone dry and offers nothing back, and we find out very quickly whether the patience was for them or for God.

student: Is that not a cold thing to say? It sounds as if the person hardly matters.

professor: It sounds so only because you have the order reversed. I am not saying the person matters less. I am saying they cannot be the engine. If your kindness runs on their responsiveness, then you have made your love conditional on their performance, and you have done it without noticing, because it felt like devotion the whole time.

student: But it is unbearable to give to someone who gives nothing.

professor: It is. I will not soften that. And it is precisely the situation Paul describes when he says love bears all things and endures. He did not choose those words for the easy years. Nobody needs endurance in a good season.

student: How long is a person meant to endure?

professor: You are asking me for a number.

student: I suppose I am.

professor: I have not got one, and I would distrust anyone who offered you one. But I will tell you what I have observed. The people who ask that question are almost never asking about duration. They are asking whether they are permitted to stop hoping. And that is a different question with a different answer.

student: What is the answer?

professor: That hope is not a wager on the other person's behavior. If it were, you would be right to withdraw it once the evidence turned. Hope is a wager on God's character, which has not turned and will not.

student: So I may hope for a person who shows no sign of changing.

professor: You may, and it costs you almost nothing to be wrong. Consider what you actually risk. If you hope and are disappointed, you have suffered. If you refuse to hope and are proved right, you have suffered anyway and spent the intervening years in a smaller room. There is no arrangement in which the withholding of hope protects you. It only reduces you.

student: I want to raise something harder. You have described a bond that holds through failure. But some marriages contain more than failure. There is cruelty. There is real harm.

professor: I am glad you have said it plainly, and I will answer plainly. Nothing I have told you about walls should ever be used to hold a person in a place where they are being destroyed. A fortress that has been turned against the one inside it has stopped being a fortress, and the man who quotes Scripture to keep her there has understood nothing.

student: But you said He joined them.

professor: He did. And He is not honored by the slow destruction of someone He made. Understand what the walls were for. They were built to protect the union from the pressures outside it. They were never intended as an instrument for one person to use against the other. When they are used that way, the person doing it has already broken the thing you are being asked to preserve.

student: How do I tell the difference between a difficult marriage and one that has turned?

professor: You very likely cannot, alone. And that is not a failing of your discernment. It is what proximity does to judgment. Anyone in that position needs people outside the house who can see the house.

student: Which is another wall.

professor: Which is another wall, and you are learning to spot them. Yes. This is why the Christian arrangement never imagined a couple standing by themselves. They are meant to be inside something larger, with people who know them and may say what neither of them can see.

student: Let me turn back, because I do not want to end there. You said the two grow. That they discover they can do more together than either alone. But I have watched married people and much of what I see is smaller lives, not larger ones. Less freedom. Fewer possibilities.

professor: Describe the enlargement you had expected.

student: More of the world, I suppose. More able to do things.

professor: Then you have measured enlargement in options, which is the modern habit and a poor instrument. A man with a thousand possibilities and no commitments has not got a large life. He has got a wide shallow one. He can go anywhere precisely because he is nowhere.

student: And the married man?

professor: Has fewer directions and considerably more depth, which does not photograph well and cannot be described at a dinner party. He knows one person to a degree that a man with a thousand acquaintances will never know anyone. He has been needed, which is a thing no amount of freedom can supply. And he has been corrected by someone who could not be dismissed, which is the only education in character most of us ever get.

student: You are saying the narrowing is the enlargement.

professor: I am saying they are the same event, and you cannot have the one without accepting the other. A river narrowed is a river with force. Widen it endlessly and you get a marsh, and nothing arrives anywhere.

student: I asked you at the start why Paul added a condition to a freedom. I think I was asking the wrong question the whole time.

professor: What is the right one?

student: Not why He put walls around it. What He was protecting inside them.

professor: And what do you now think it is?

student: The two of them. Not the institution.

professor: Yes. And say the rest of it. You are nearly there.

student: That He would not have built walls around something He did not intend to keep.

professor: That is the whole matter and you have arrived at it yourself, which is the only way anyone arrives anywhere. A man does not fence an empty field. Whatever else you doubt, you may reason backward from the wall to the value of what is standing inside it. He has told you what He thinks of it by the trouble He took to protect it.

This is one piece of the archive, find the rest of the Student and Professor conversations over on TikTok.