Our help comes from the Lord—the Lord who guards life. Our help comes from the Lord who protects our lives. Our protector does not sleep, so he is always alert to the times when we need help. Like the lifeguard who grabs the buoy, poised to run into the water, so the Lord stands ready to run to the rescue of his children. 

Last summer I saw a lifeguard rescue someone from the ocean. The lifeguards had posted signs, as is customary, informing swimmers of that day’s rip current risk level. On this day, the risk was moderate, so there was reason to be cautious. The lifeguards had put cones in the sand permitting people to swim only between the cones, presumably so they could keep a close watch over everyone.
I was sitting close to the lifeguard station, so I saw the scene play out. I first noticed the two lifeguards watching a middle-aged man who was on the edge of the area swimmers were supposed to stay within. He looked to be enjoying himself but was soon swimming beyond the designated area. One lifeguard blew his whistle at the man, and when they got his attention, they both gestured for him to swim back within the cone area. The man didn’t follow this direction. The lifeguards kept their eyes on him. The waves were big, and he continued to swim. He was moving farther away from shore and farther outside the posted area. The whistle sounded again. The gestures were made again. But there was no movement in the right direction. All of a sudden, the swimmer looked like he was no longer leisurely swimming; his arms started to flail. The female lifeguard grabbed her rescue buoy. They watched him struggle for a few seconds, his movements decreasing as he endured the pounding of the next wave. It became clear: he needed help. “Go!” the male lifeguard said to his coworker. She ran into the water—and brought this man safely back to shore.
Though it all ended well, it was frightening to witness. As is helpful and necessary after an unsettling event, I continued to process what I had seen in the days that followed. This young lifeguard—she couldn’t have been older than twenty—headed into danger in order to rescue someone out of it. This moved me. On that day, she courageously embodied her title: she guarded life—an actual life! I had a new appreciation for the job, and couldn’t stop thinking about the title: lifeguard. Life guard.
Though I thought a lot about lifeguards, I found myself relating to that swimmer. There had been signs on display.
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He purifies you from all unrighteousness. He invests in you—fully. There is no hint of stinginess. We make that move toward the Lord with our confession, and he takes it from there. He is committed to us for the long haul. You are forgiven by a faithful and just God. You are purified by a Father who will not waver in his dedication to making you righteous.

Over the past year, I’ve observed that my son becomes panicky after he asks for forgiveness. If you don’t immediately assure him that you forgive him, he gets upset. He quickly becomes distressed and cries out, “You don’t forgive me!”
I do find it endearing that children are much more open about their emotions compared to adults. When my son feels this hard emotion, he expresses it openly and in an impassioned way. As best as I can put words to the state of his little heart in these moments, his cry is “Are we okay? Are we okay?” When you have sinned and ask for forgiveness, the reality is you are indebted to the other person. The relationship is vulnerable at that moment because of your offense. You are at their mercy. And even at five years old, my son can sense that vulnerability, and he wants reassurance that all is okay between us.
I can certainly relate to the distress he is feeling, though as an adult it doesn’t tumble out of me in a frantic manner. It is an uncomfortable feeling to know you have done harm to a relationship. The time between your confession and the other person extending forgiveness is also quite uncomfortable. And sometimes we do have to wait. Sometimes it’s because the person is not ready to forgive; they explain that they need more time. Sometimes the person might just be so angry that even offering three words of grace, “I forgive you,” is too high of a wall to climb; it just seems impossible given how they’re feeling. Or sometimes someone may even decide to be stingy and withhold forgiveness for longer periods of time. They relish the power that it affords them to keep the other person in their debt.
None of these are advisable responses, of course, and if we were having a conversation together, I’d want to consider how to move toward a gracious response when someone is in your debt! But these reactions are common and don’t surprise us. The problem is that we can start to think that maybe God is like us.
Does God, like us, struggle to extend forgiveness when we ask him?
Does he get caught up in his anger, like we do, and withdraw from us?
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Seeing the Spirit’s work in our partner doesn’t mean we ignore real issues or problems. Husbands and wives should speak about concerns in order to hold one another accountable and to invest in the health and growth of one another. But it does mean we expect to find ways God is showing up in our spouse’s life. And that means we must speak in a way that reflects that reality.

“You always prioritize work over me.”“You never take my feelings into consideration.”“Your only concern is your own comfort.”
Here is a universal rule for marriage counselors: don’t allow couples to speak to each other in absolutes. We know that when couples use words like always, never, and only to describe each other’s behavior or to express a complaint, it will not help to resolve their conflict. These words exaggerate and overgeneralize in a way that provokes a spouse to defensiveness. Instead of considering and talking about their spouse’s concern, an accused spouse will be tempted to prove that they are not always guilty of this or that behavior.
So it’s easy to see the wisdom in steering couples away from such language. And yet it’s not easy to actually restrain our word choices, is it? When emotions run high, when we are convinced that we have just the right point to make to gain the upper hand in the argument, when we are boiling over with anger, all of us are prone to run to overgeneralizations to describe our spouse.
Given the pull toward such language, despite knowing its unhelpfulness, it’s important to think beyond just the rule of “don’t use absolutes” and press into the heart of the offense and what is at stake when we use these overstatements.
The heart of the offense is this: our usage of absolutes does not take into account that the Holy Spirit is at work in this area of our spouse’s life. Couples tend to have conflicts that repeat, so usually the concerning behavior that we are speaking about is one we’ve spoken about before. But with the addition of the absolute language, we are essentially declaring that we see no progress in this area. With the addition of the absolute language, we are essentially declaring that we have no hope for progress to occur. The impact of this? To be sure, the use of absolutes will shame your spouse. It makes a claim about who she is: “This is what you always (or never) do.” The message of this? “This (behavior) is who you are.” But imagine if your spouse really has been seeking to grow in this area. She will feel deeply discouraged. She will be vulnerable to hopelessness: What’s the point of trying to grow if my husband doesn’t see that I’m trying? Maybe she will even doubt the Spirit’s work and activity in her life.
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