{"id":275,"date":"2026-05-05T06:27:36","date_gmt":"2026-05-05T11:27:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/stumbleup.me\/?p=275"},"modified":"2026-05-05T06:27:37","modified_gmt":"2026-05-05T11:27:37","slug":"the-thing-she-called-love","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stumbleup.me\/index.php\/2026\/05\/05\/the-thing-she-called-love\/","title":{"rendered":"The Thing She Called Love"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<!-- POST TITLE: The Thing She Called Love | Week 7 | Statement 7 | Tuesday -->\n<style>\n@import url('https:\/\/fonts.googleapis.com\/css2?family=Oswald:wght@400;600;700&family=Lato:ital,wght@0,300;0,400;0,700;1,300;1,400&display=swap');\n.su-wrap{--stone:#4A4A4A;--ash:#F0EDE8;--gold:#C9933A;--shadow:#1C1C1C;font-family:'Lato',sans-serif;color:var(--stone);max-width:700px;margin:0 auto;padding:2rem 1.5rem;line-height:1.8;font-size:1rem}\n.su-tag{font-family:'Oswald',sans-serif;font-size:.65rem;letter-spacing:.25em;text-transform:uppercase;color:var(--gold);margin-bottom:.4rem}\n.su-sub{font-family:'Lato',sans-serif;font-size:.85rem;font-weight:300;color:var(--stone);margin-bottom:2rem;letter-spacing:.03em}\n.su-verse{border-left:3px solid var(--gold);background:#f2ede5;padding:1.25rem 1.5rem;margin:1.75rem 0;font-style:italic;font-size:1.1rem;color:var(--shadow);line-height:1.6}\n.su-verse cite{display:block;font-style:normal;font-family:'Oswald',sans-serif;font-size:.7rem;letter-spacing:.15em;text-transform:uppercase;color:var(--gold);margin-top:.5rem}\n.su-beat{font-family:'Oswald',sans-serif;font-size:.65rem;letter-spacing:.25em;text-transform:uppercase;color:var(--gold);margin:2rem 0 .4rem}\nhr.su-rule{border:none;border-top:1px solid #ddd;margin:1.75rem 0}\n.su-callout{background:var(--shadow);color:var(--ash);padding:1.5rem 1.75rem;margin:2rem 0}\n.su-callout .su-beat{color:var(--gold);margin-top:0}\n.su-callout p{margin:.4rem 0 0;line-height:1.65;font-size:1rem}\n.su-foot{font-size:.72rem;color:#bbb;margin-top:2rem;padding-top:1rem;border-top:1px solid #eee;font-family:'Oswald',sans-serif;letter-spacing:.12em;text-transform:uppercase}\np{margin:0 0 1.1rem}\n<\/style>\n<div class=\"su-wrap\">\n  <p class=\"su-tag\">Seven Statements from the Cross &bull; Week 7 &bull; Tuesday<\/p>\n  <p class=\"su-sub\">Statement VII &bull; Luke 23:46 &bull; Diane, 44, wife<\/p>\n\n  <div class=\"su-verse\">\n    &#8220;For am I now seeking the approval of man, or of God? Or am I trying to please man? If I were still trying to please man, I would not be a servant of Christ.&#8221;\n    <cite>&mdash; Galatians 1:10 (ESV)<\/cite>\n  <\/div>\n\n  <p class=\"su-beat\">The Setup<\/p>\n  <p>Diane is 44 and has been married for seventeen years. Her husband is a good man in nearly every measurable way. He is present, he is kind, he works hard, he loves his family. The one thing he has never fully engaged with is his faith. He comes to church on Christmas and Easter. He listens politely when faith comes up in conversation. He is not hostile to it. He is simply somewhere between uninterested and unconvinced, and that place has been the quiet ache in the center of Diane&#8217;s marriage for most of its duration.<\/p>\n\n  <p>She has not been passive about it. She has been quietly, persistently, intelligently active. Over eleven years she has rearranged Sunday mornings to remove every logistical obstacle to church attendance. She has curated their social circle with a careful eye toward couples whose faith might be contagious. She has chosen the vacation destination that happened to have the church she had already researched. She has steered conversations, recommended books, suggested podcasts, noted moments in their shared life that she hoped might open something in him. She has done all of this with genuine love and real prayer. And she is exhausted in a way that does not have a simple remedy because the exhaustion is not from the effort. It is from the results.<\/p>\n\n  <p class=\"su-beat\">The Crossroads Moment<\/p>\n  <p>Eleven years. Her husband is not meaningfully closer to faith than he was when they married. Diane cannot decide whether to redouble the effort or abandon it entirely, and neither of those options feels right, because neither of them is right. The real problem is not the strategy. The real problem is that Diane has quietly appointed herself as the person responsible for her husband&#8217;s spiritual condition, and she has been carrying that responsibility with a seriousness and a grip that would exhaust anyone. She loves him. She wants this for him more than she wants almost anything. But somewhere in the last eleven years the love became management and the management became control and the control became the invisible wall between them that her husband can feel without being able to name.<\/p>\n\n  <p class=\"su-beat\">What Jesus Did<\/p>\n  <p>Jesus placed his spirit into the Father&#8217;s hands. He did not engineer the resurrection. He surrendered the outcome to the one who was actually capable of it and trusted completely that the work would be completed. The spiritual condition of another person is not ours to manage, even when that person is the one we share a life with. God loves Diane&#8217;s husband more than Diane does, which is a sentence that takes a moment to sit with. He is more committed to the work being done in Diane&#8217;s husband than she is. He does not need her to run the process. He needs her to love her husband and trust him with the rest.<\/p>\n\n  <p class=\"su-beat\">The Choice and Outcome<\/p>\n  <p>Diane is in the car alone after dropping the kids at school when she finally says the thing out loud that she has been circling for months. She says it directly, like a confession: I have been trying to do your job. For eleven years I have been trying to be the person who closes the distance between my husband and you, and I cannot do it and I am tired and I am handing him back. I am going to love him the way he is today and trust you with who he becomes. The silence after that prayer is different from the silence before it. She drives home lighter than she has felt in years. She does not immediately know what changes. But something in how she occupies the marriage begins to shift over the following weeks. She stops arranging. She starts simply being present. Her husband notices something in her that has relaxed without understanding why. Three months later he asks her, unprompted, if he can come to church on a Sunday that is not Christmas. She does not make it a moment. She just says yes. God did not need eleven years of management. He needed one prayer of release.<\/p>\n\n  <div class=\"su-callout\">\n    <p class=\"su-beat\">The Lesson<\/p>\n    <p>Control dressed as concern is still control, and it was never ours to carry. The Spirit surrenders the spiritual outcomes of the people we love into the hands of the one who loves them more and is far more capable of reaching them. Surrender your life to God and let it go, including the people in it whose souls we have been trying to manage into the kingdom.<\/p>\n  <\/div>\n\n  <p class=\"su-foot\">stumbleup.me &bull; #StumbleUp &bull; #SevenStatements &bull; #OpenHands<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Seven Statements from the Cross &bull; Week 7 &bull; Tuesday Statement VII &bull; Luke 23:46 &bull; Diane, 44, wife &#8220;For am I now seeking the approval of man, or of God? Or am I trying to please man? If I&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":276,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-275","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-burden"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/stumbleup.me\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/SU_20260505_BLOG.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stumbleup.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stumbleup.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stumbleup.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stumbleup.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stumbleup.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=275"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/stumbleup.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":277,"href":"https:\/\/stumbleup.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275\/revisions\/277"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stumbleup.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/276"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stumbleup.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stumbleup.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stumbleup.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}