COLLEEN TINKER
Today is Richard’s and my wedding anniversary. I would marry him again in a heartbeat. Ours is a second marriage for both of us, and statistics stacked the deck against us from the beginning. Certainly our Adventist community at the time of our wedding saw us as an enigma if not an embarrassment; we felt the stigma even though we stayed engaged with the “church”.
“But God,” as Paul frequently begins his explanations in his epistles, intended to glorify Himself by creating something new from the rubble of our newly-joined lives. In fact, if we could have seen His intentions in advance, we wouldn’t have believed what we saw!
God stabilized me with a strong husband with a drive for truth. Richard’s integrity and conviction led us to discover two things which changed our trajectory: the truth about Ellen White and Adventism, and the reality of the gospel of Jesus’ finished work. Because Richard was not afraid to look at the facts, I felt safe to look as well.
The Lord led us as we searched—and we emerged a few years later looking at Adventism in the rear view mirror. As born again believers in the Lord Jesus, we knew we could not remain in the organization that had shaped us from birth. We now belonged to Jesus, and He would give us our identity. Adventism could no longer define us.
At the same time, Richard’s loyalty and love gave me and his two boys a firm foundation on which we built a family. I learned that being an adoptive parent is a gift of grace that reveals God’s love for me. I learned that an adopted child is legally secure in a way that even a natural child is not; legally I can never undo my adoption of my sons. I also learned that a strong husband who loves his family is the anchor that keeps a family safe in gales and doldrums. A loyal husband is the safety of both his wife and his children.
I learned another thing as well. I learned that my husband is a visionary leader with a shepherd’s heart as he has worked shoulder-to-shoulder with Dale Ratzlaff and the board of Life Assurance Ministries since its inception in 2000. Working with people questioning and leaving Adventism is a rarefied ministry. The joy of seeing people learn the gospel and trust Jesus is always balanced with the loss of friends who don’t want to see the truth. This work is peppered with cruel attacks, sarcastic put-downs, condescending defenses, and misunderstanding even from the body of Christ.
My husband, though, has never lost his burden to make Jesus known to the people who are still caught in Adventism. His discernment is fine-tuned to spot wolves masquerading as sheep, and he lives out his devotion to protect the sheep and to expose the wolves.
Finally, being married to a husband who honors God has helped me understand Paul’s imagery of marriage being a type of Christ and His church as explained in Ephesians 5. Jesus, Paul explains, is the head of the body which is the church. This picture reveals that believers and their Lord Jesus are indivisible. The body cannot be separated from the head, and the head cannot leave the body and control from a distance. Paul wants us to know that this intimate, indivisible picture of a body attached to its Head is our reality when we believe in Jesus.
Marriage is a picture of this indivisible union. This picture illustrates what God declared in Genesis, that a husband and a wife are “one flesh”. God gave humanity the gift of marriage so that we would be better able to understand the eternal reality of the Lord Jesus being the head of His body, the church of all who have believed and have been born again. We cannot be separated from our head, either personally or corporately.
As a wife, I cannot be separated from my husband as my head, either. Even if the body of Christ is physically separated from our Head, yet spiritually the church is never apart from the Lord, and a wife is never separated from being “one flesh” with her husband.
What does marriage have to do with Covid and cancer?
On Monday this week, Richard had surgery for prostate cancer. The process of diagnosis and treatment felt too fast to internalize. He received his diagnosis early in January, just as we were entering the whirlwind of FAF Conference preparations. After consulting a second opinion, although he was told he could wait until a more convenient time, Richard opted to have the surgery as soon as possible: the day after the FAF Conference.
I dropped my husband at the front door of the hospital at 5:45 AM and watched him go through the front doors that were my barricade. Wives normally are encouraged to go with their husbands before surgery and to meet them when they wake up afterwards, but because of the pandemic, I was excluded.
I knew I had all day to wait. Richard was likely to be discharged that evening, but since home was 55 miles away, a drive expanded by Southern California rush hour traffic, I was not leaving. Besides, I didn’t want to leave the place which had ensconced my husband.
A repurposed library became a day waiting room for family members of surgical patients. I worked in a study carrel, growing increasingly anxious, until the doctor called me a little after 11:00 AM. Sounding happy, he reported that Richard had done “fantastic”, the surgery had been straightforward, and there had been no surprises. The case worker called me with instructions to pick up Richard’s prescriptions at the pharmacy—and that started my entrapment in a web of Covid protocols which I could not anticipate nor could anyone explain.
To make a long story short, my screening to enter the pharmacy building did not apply to any other place on campus. After the security officer removed my pharmacy-access armband and returned my I.D., I discovered that I was “not screened” for access to the cafeteria. Stunned, I learned I could order outdoors and my food would be brought. A couple of hours later, I ran into my next roadblock as I was informed I could not access Starbucks because I was “not screened” to be inside.
None of these enforcers was able to tell me how to be properly screened nor how to qualify to be screened. I realized my problem was becoming more acute as I found myself excluded from the places I’d originally been told I could be; all that was left was that repurposed library—and it closed at 6:00 PM. The surgeon had already told me that Richard would not be discharged until 7:00 or 8:00 PM; I began to imagine my evening spent waiting in my car in a dark, nearly empty parking lot—an image which quickly became reality.
As I sat in the car texting my groggy but increasingly antsy husband as he waited to be cleared for discharge, I realized that my situation likely had fallen through the cracks as the Covid planners had created their protocols. There probably aren’t many people who drive from out of town for a procedure that probably would be outpatient if there were no complications without making arrangements for lodging nearby. Yet from the beginning the surgeon had said Richard would likely go home the same day.
While not unique, I was undoubtedly unusual. Nevertheless, the strange world of Covid screenings and restriction had left me both uninformed and vulnerable with no safe place to be—and with absolutely no physical access to my husband.
I understand that the public health protocols for managing this pandemic require unusual measures. I would never say extreme caution was not mandatory under these circumstances.
Yet I pondered the reality of our circumstances as Richard went alone into a strange building for an invasive procedure for a terrifying diagnosis: cancer. He had no one to support him or to hold his hand as he rallied after anesthesia. He had no one to be his “ears” as the nurses gave him post-operative instructions through his still-foggy consciousness.
Patents generally do better when they are not alone, when someone they love walks with them through the unknown. Of course, the enforced separation of the Covid restrictions could not separate my bond with Richard, but limiting a patient from having one screened family member who could stay with him makes caring for the patient harder. The patient would receive more attention and help, and instead of nurses giving instructions to both patient and family at once, they must phone the family member besides telling details to the woozy patient.
From my layperson’s view, both patient and loved one would be safer and more stable if they weren’t artificially separated.
Perspective
No, I could not have imagined where God would lead Richard and me. He has knit us together and given us His work to do—work that would have terrified me had I known it was coming. Neither of us imagined we would ever leave Adventism much less commit our lives to exposing its true nature and to telling Adventists who the true Jesus is.
Our marriage is a work of God. He is making us who He wants us to be, both personally and as a couple. With Jesus, we know that we are more than the sum of our parts.
I know that not even a scary diagnosis like cancer can stop the work of God in us, and it cannot stop all the days of our lives which He ordained “when as yet there was not one of them” (Ps. 139:16). Even more, no human protocols can tear apart the oneness that is God’s creation in a marriage. I know these things are true, because our Lord Jesus is our Head, and because we are in Him, “we who are many are one body” (1 Cor. 10:17).
So on this day I celebrate my husband and thank God that He has given me a husband who loves me and makes me laugh. I celebrate his strength and integrity and his commitment to God’s truth and will. I thank God that his diagnosis was found early, and I praise the Lord Jesus for making us one in Him.
Happy Anniversary, Richard—and I pray that the Lord will glorify Himself through us. †
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