A Prayerbook for Husbands and Wives: Partners in Prayer - Softcover

On Marriage and Prayer

Thanne and I have been married for thirty-two years. Vigorous years. Our marriage has been a story of calm days, common days, days of a sudden and blinding transcendence; we’ve sinned and confessed and forgiven; there have been trips and children, emergency rooms, schoolrooms, courtrooms, and through it all—through the daily round of human duties—faith. Our faith, yes; but more surely than that, the faithfulness of heaven.

God has been the deeper love and the ground of our marriage, always. But I myself—I did not always acknowledge that. Nor did I always take advantage of the sweet communion of prayer.

Thanne has. And it was Thanne who persuaded me to pray out loud with her.

Within days of our wedding, I began studies at Concordia Seminary in preparation for ministry, and Thanne began her profession as a teacher. Those were hard times for her. Often, in visible stress, she would say, “Wally, we should pray together.”

I didn’t disagree. But neither did I actually agree.

I’m not sure why. Perhaps because, though my father was a pastor, I never experienced spontaneous prayer before. We’d only prayed formal prayers—as Thanne and I did at mealtimes now. And I think I was embarrassed by the danger of prayer: revealing myself, inverting the truer truth of myself before Jesus and Thanne together.

But in those days I was an angry young man, angry for causes I couldn’t see—so neither could I see the anger in me. Thanne did, of course. Thanne suffered my fits of gloom. And sometimes I saw that: her suffering. And when I knew that I had hurt her, I grieved.

“Thanne,” I said. “Thanne,” I begged her in the heat of my shame, “what can I do to make it up? What can I do to prove I love you?”

One day, when I was in deepest need of her forgiveness, the opportunistic Ruthanne said, “Pray with me, Wally. Pray out loud with me.”

I was caught. I could not avoid the issue.

“Okay.”

But I was the seminary student. I knew about God. So I took us into the bedroom and said we should lie down on the bed. We did. Side by side.

But I felt breathless. Nervous. “Wait!” I cried. I jumped up and turned off the light. Somehow this praying thing seemed as awkward and exposed as the first time we made love together.

“Now, then.” I went first.

I gathered my thoughts, cleared my throat, then, in the darkness, began to fashion a formal, literate prayer. Petitions. Bible verses. I surprised myself. My voice grew strong. See, Thanne? See? I can do this after all. I succeeded very well in sounding like a preacher in the pulpit.

When I finished there was a silence. Had she fallen asleep?

No, she hadn’t.

Quietly Thanne began to pray, with no more force or formality than when she talks softly to me at night. But she was talking to Jesus. It seemed as if I weren’t even there. Jesus was close, intimate to her. Jesus was all. And I felt a little like a peeping Tom, not so much hearing her prayer as over-hearing it.

I was ashamed. My brazen prayer was only a crashing cymbal next to the common honesty of her language. And I realized that I had, in effect, prayed to her, prayed for her approval, while she was praying to Jesus, for Jesus’ blessed response.

And then, still in her tender and sacred conversation, Thanne began to tell the Lord Jesus about “Wally.” About me. As if I were so important that Jesus should take care of me. And in that moment, in the darkness, I started to cry.

Ruthanne Wangerin is a former special education teacher who is currently completing a master's degree at Valparaiso University. She grew up as one of fourteen children on a farm in central Illinois. This is her first book.

The Wangerins live in Valparaiso, Indiana and are the parents of four grown children, all of whom now live away from home.