Terese DeJong has spent ten years of her life—a full decade—putting her husband through the last half of a B.A., two master’s degrees, and a doctorate. She is a crack legal secretary who can keep code numbers and deposition details in her head without missing a whereas at eighty-five words per minute. Neither she nor her husband intended to be in the pastorate; Paul had had enough of that growing up as a minister’s son. He rather wanted a Ph.D., and Terese wanted to see him get it.
Toward that end, they endured the usual stresses of seminary, he soaring into the academic stratosphere (but also working as a part-time youth pastor) while she earned most of the income—and had a baby. They passed each other in the apartment complex hallway more than once. Communication time was spasmodic. Terese remembers:
He’d come home and try some of his far-out theological ideas on me—and I had this little fundamentalist faith. I couldn’t even understand him half the time. We went to church together, of course, but I really wasn’t growing spiritually.
Paul frankly accuses seminary in those days of being a head trip that drove people apart rather than pulling them together.
It wasn’t that I didn’t respect Terese for her knowledge. But I had suddenly become the fount of all truth. It was the worst possible strain on a marriage.
I had hoped to go on to graduate study in England, but during my last year she became pregnant again, and we couldn’t afford it. That was a good thing; any more study probably would have killed us.
So for the time being, the DeJongs came to First Reformed Church of Smyrna, Delaware. Their little girl was born in May, Paul received his M.Div. in June, and they moved the first of July to a town of four thousand. The first year was difficult for the two of them, until a crisis forced Paul to stop bullying her intellectually and led Terese to find meaning in her work as a wife and mother, not just in the workplace.
Later on, they returned to the campus to finish Paul’s education, after which they returned to pastoring. The congregation they serve today in Grand Rapids, Michigan, is solid, appreciative, and in the midst of a building program. Paul is not what would be termed a workaholic pastor; he gives the church full measure but takes his fathering responsibilities seriously as well. The years of schooling are now being put to good use in preaching and teaching. “He has a great ability to take hard things and make them simple,” says his wife with admiration. “I don’t think people fully notice the benefits of all his graduate work.”
The academic sculpting of Paul DeJong, however, with its many hours of deep concentration, has created a man who does not quickly shift gears. His body can move from booklined office to family rec room faster than his mind.
Some days I come home, and I just can’t sit down; I keep walking around. I don’t want to do that, but I do. I’m not mad at anybody—I just can’t stop the energy. I don’t have a solution for that yet.
The ministry is doubly preoccupying, I think. If I were a businessman, I’d probably be the same way. But on top of that, this is eternal stuff.
Also, the more finely trained your mind is, the more you use it to try to solve everything. You don’t just let things go. You keep mulling them over.
He happens, of course, to be married to an action-oriented woman, the legal secretary who thrives on pressure and is always thinking of what comes next. She freely admits:
I hate procrastination in any form, in anybody. I like everything all sewed up. Part of the struggle Paul has with me is that I’m such a controlling person. I try to sew up his loose ends—things in his ministry where he could be more sensitive, for example—and he doesn’t respond well to my saying so.
So preoccupation is one way he keeps me at bay. I don’t have the power to bring him out of it. I’ll be talking away about something, and suddenly I’ll realize he doesn’t hear. So I’ll say, “I just love having conversations with myself out loud.”
And he’ll look up and say, “What?”
He doesn’t mean to ignore me. He cares deeply about me and loves me. He’s just got something on his mind.
The one trick Terese has discovered is to get Paul out of town. Once he physically leaves Grand Rapids, he relaxes and in some ways reverts to the funmaker he was in seminary. She relishes the time they headed north one March and got stranded by a snowstorm in a Petoskey, Michigan, motel. They talked and laughed together like old times.
But on another winter trip, things backfired. They were flying to Florida, where Paul was to speak at a conference. When the plane made a stopover at Tampa, he got out to breathe the warm gulf air. Paul is a confirmed snow hater, and the blessings of a warm climate mesmerized him there outside the terminal. No wonder people up north came here to escape.
He returned to his seat on the airplane and said to Terese, “You know, the thought hit me that I could get off here and get lost, and never be found again.” That was all.
She said nothing but sat reviewing the recent weeks for clues to explain his comment. Her guesswork soon got out of hand.
What a thing to tell me! Was he really thinking about leaving me or what?
We stayed at this beautiful condominium that week right by the ocean, and I didn’t have his attention the whole time. True, he had to speak, plus some friends were staying there with us, but still.…
A couple of weeks later, he went with a tour group to Israel. While he was gone, I woke up in the middle of one night thinking about that remark in Tampa. What if he never came back?! What would I do? I just panicked. So often these days you hear or read about someone walking out, and the partner being “so surprised.” I couldn’t think of anything wrong between us, but what if there was?
See, that’s where his preoccupation gets scary. I don’t always know what he’s thinking.
The truth is, while Terese lay terrified in Michigan, Paul was feeling downright amorous in Tel Aviv. He went for a walk one evening by himself, and the thought occurred to him that his marriage was one of God’s special acts of grace in his life. To have a wife who loved him and never stopped, no matter how he behaved, was indeed an undeserved favor from above. Here was theology in the specific. He would have to tell her this when he got home.
That led to a special conversation upon his return. A great sigh of relief swept over Terese. Her fears had been groundless.
Will there be more such unveilings in the future? Both partners would like that, if they can keep finding the key. The practicalities, though, are sometimes troublesome.
Terese: Anything that goes wrong with me, I can tell Paul. But I sense he can’t do it back. And over the years, that’s been his way of handling me—it’s a power thing. I warble about everything going through my mind, so that by now, he’s got all this “stuff” on me. But I don’t get it back.
Paul: Part of it is just my conviction not to tell you stuff that goes on here [at the church: board meetings, etc.]. You don’t need that junk in your life.
Terese: But you also leave out what’s going on inside you.
Paul: Yeah, I do. When things happen, I like to think about them a long time before I say them.
Terese: Which gives you the air of being preoccupied.
Paul: Part of that is being male. Part of it’s the ministry. And part of it’s just me.
I made a New Year’s resolution last week: two times this year we’re going off on a weekend together, and ten times this year we’re going out on a date.
During a separate interview later on, Terese expressed amazement at this vow. “That’s new for Paul,” she claimed. “If he keeps going that way, everything’s going to be cool!”
Both spouses say they are making progress in this area, gradually clearing a two-way channel of deep communication. That they are still working on it, after twenty years of marriage, is a mark of its importance. It is also a testimony to their determination not to be isolated under the same roof.
Reflections
by David SeamandsThis case illustrates another hazard of the ministry. The very characteristic that makes Paul DeJong a good minister—his ability to concentrate intensely upon a segment of something—creates problems in his marriage. It has done the same in mine.
Concentration is a great gift, especially for pastors. They can focus on what they’re doing at the time and exclude a lot of distractions.
Women are somewhat more holistic in their thinking. New neurological studies of the differences between male and female brains (most of them by feminists, interestingly) are bringing this out. When a little girl walks into a strange room, she is more frightened because she sees and senses everything at once; it all comes at her. The boy sees just one thing; he concentrates on that and fails to notice the rest.
When Paul DeJong says he comes home from the church office and can’t stop walking around, he reveals this aspect of his male brain. It makes him a good minister but a poor husband.
Terese’s insecurity in the Tampa airport incident seems unusual at first, since she is a controller, a doer, a person with no loose ends. Why should she fear? But beneath that, she is also uncertain over the years about where her husband is coming from; he’s in this ethereal world, she feels. She also feels mismatched against his great education, and she downgrades her own gifts by comparison.
She may have also been thinking, You know, he could get off here and get so fascinated with Tampa he’d forget he’s married and has a family; he could get so compartmentalized he’d just leave us hanging. If so, no wonder she was insecure.
I am fortunate to have a wife who confronts me with preoccupation. She just will not let me get by. I would really have self-destructed otherwise. She keeps pushing: “Hey, I know you’re there; talk to me. Put those papers down. You’re hearing me, but you’re thinking about your next lecture or something. Look at me when we talk. Look me in the eye.”
I know I need to do this. I even tell my classes, “You can’t do two things at once if listening’s one of them.” But I don’t always live that.
This couple has discovered that if they schedule a getaway, they can break the barrier. (The scheduling aspect is no problem to Terese; she recognizes it’s that or nothing.) Paul has even resolved to schedule more opportunities in the future. The ten dates a year are a bare minimum, in my view, almost a sop. He should schedule even more prime time.
But Terese is obviously helping him with this problem. She will always have to live with his personality type, of course. These two people perceive the world differently; that’s all there is to it. Nevertheless, this marriage has a lot of promise.
Copyright © 1985 by Christianity Today
