Wholeheartedly Doing the Will of God as a Married Couple
/MAGGIE STRICKLAND
Recently, I watched The Sound of Music for the first time in many years, and this time, I was struck by a bit of dialogue that I hadn’t paid much attention to as a younger viewer.
PHOTOGRAPHY: KATE ALLEY PHOTOGRAPHY
Early in the film, Maria is in the Reverend Mother’s office and the abbess asks her what the most important thing she had learned at the abbey. Maria replies “To find out what is the will of God, and to do it wholeheartedly.” That leads, of course, to Maria being sent to the von Trapp house, but after I finished the movie, that one line stuck with me as a succinct and beautiful description of holiness.
I returned to that line again after finishing Absent in the Spring, a novel published by Agatha Christie under her pseudonym Mary Westmacott. It is one of a few Christie novels that are not crime novels; it is instead a character study of a middle-aged married woman, Joan Scudamore, who is traveling home to England in the late 1930s after visiting her daughter in Baghdad.
Related: Three Classic Novels for Brides
The weather strands Joan as the sole traveler at a rest house on the Turkish border for a few days, and the people who work there speak very little English. Once she runs out of reading and writing material, she begins to examine her life, coming to some unexpected and unwanted realizations in the meantime. Joan, on the cusp of her twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, has not spent the last decades “finding out what is the will of God, and doing it wholeheartedly”; rather she has spent her marriage arranging things according to her own desires and depriving herself of the opportunity for deep and meaningful relationships with her children, and especially with her husband Rodney.
Early in their marriage, Rodney comes to her and tells her that he hates being a lawyer in the family firm and he really wants to take the money they’ve saved and start a farm – it won’t be as lucrative, he admits, but he will be much happier and it will be good for their children. She is horrified and tells him he would be foolish to turn down a good position that will make them financially comfortable: “She had got, she saw, to be firm about this. She must be wise for the two of them. If Rodney was blind to what was best for him, she must assume the responsibility. It was so dear and silly and ridiculous this farming idea. He was like a little boy. She felt strong and confident and maternal.”
Rodney goes into the family firm because she is so insistent, and she thinks that they are happy, but years later, he tells their older daughter that “a man who’s not doing the work he wants to do – the work he was made to do – is only half a man … And if you think that your love, or any woman’s love, can make up to him for that, then I tell you plainly that you’re a sentimental little fool.”
Even then, Joan doesn’t see that her inability to discern with Rodney and to try out his dream of farming has harmed her marriage. It isn’t until she’s alone in the desert, thinking about her life that she realizes the damage she has done to her husband. And her forcing him into a life that he hated and “taken from him his birthright – the right to choose his manner and way of life” is made all the worse because she did it thinking that she loved him. She realizes then that the only way forward is to ask for his forgiveness and she becomes even more impatient to get home to Rodney.
Related: A Note from Our Creative Director | Exercising Discernment Through Seasons of Life
Perhaps this story is even more poignant to me because I was in a similar position early in my marriage. My husband realized that he didn’t want to use his doctorate to do industrial research, but rather to teach physics, and initially I was completely against the idea because it would mean upending everything we had planned. But he was convinced that teaching was where God was calling him, and so, on the advice of a good friend, I agreed to try it, just for a year.
That was five years ago, and while our life is much different than we planned, having the courage to follow where we were being led has led to a happy life. And although difficulties have arisen, we’ve faced them together with that same courage, deepening our love for each other.
About the Author: Maggie Strickland has loved reading and writing stories since her earliest memory. An English teacher by training and an avid reader by avocation, she now spends her days homemaking, chasing her toddler son, and reading during naptime. She and her husband are originally from the Carolinas, but now make their home in Birmingham, Alabama.