I think highly of my husband and tend to put him on a pedestal because he is more mature than I in Christ. Just a fact.

 

But there is a problem with pedestals and I am finding it out again. I say "again" because I have in the past put people on pedestals and it has not gone well. If you are guessing that the disaster was their inevitable falling from the perch by their own foibles, you guess wrong: Their fault was simply that they were not God.

 

Interestingly, I do not treat people whom I consider my spiritual equal so shabbily. The pedestal is reserved for the unfortunate whom I most highly esteem. Unfortunate, I say, because far from exalting him, it robs him. It is a setup for failure. It is a double standard in which the unspoken deal is that he is not allowed to make mistakes while I myself have liberty to do so--since I am (as is tacitly agreed) the less mature one.

 

So I give myself permission to say things to my husband, which if he said them to me would cause offense. See Screwtape's demon primer for an example of this perverse dynamic:

 

"Your patient must demand that all his own utterances are to be taken at their face value and judged simply on the actual words, while at the same time judging all his mother's utterances with the fullest and most oversensitive interpretation of the tone and the context and the suspected intention" (The Screwtape Letters).

 

My husband David is different. He does not lay traps with words. It was not always this way. A 30-year heroin addiction made his entire life a deception, because truth is the casualty of addiction. A 2001 encounter with God in a county jail in solitary confinement showed him what he had become, and the view transformed his life. I have a five-year paper trail of daily correspondence, which I have combed and never found a single inconsistency in.