Yes, you saw the title of this post correctly. While it’s a great thing to compliment your spouse, I’m talking about something different here. In my dictionary, complement means “something that completes, makes up a whole, or brings to perfection.”
In my book, He Made Us Better: A Story of Faith, Family, Friends (and Football) I tell about how my wife Sandra and I worked together pretty well as a team to care for our special-needs son Peter over a period of 39-plus years. Despite some pretty significant differences in how we approach situations, over the years we learned that these differences weren’t so much a liability as an asset.
For example:
– I tend to be pretty rational, while she’s more emotional. Rational is good for troubleshooting ventilators, feeding pumps, and wheelchairs, but less so in other areas. By being more emotional, she would pick up on little touches that only a mother would notice or think of.
– She tends to worry quite a bit. On a scale of 1-100, things that she would see as a 90, I might see as a 10. As we would process some of these things, we would often meet somewhere in the middle, which was a better place to be. But on some occasions, she was right, it really was a 90. In others, she would realize it wasn’t even a 10.
– She’s a very light sleeper, while I could sleep through a tsunami. There’s a whole lot to be said for getting a good night’s sleep. But if Peter was having any kind of problem in his room a few feet away, she was “on it.”
– She’s pretty organized, while I use more of an “It’s-in-that-pile-somewhere,” approach. While the latter works surprisingly well for me, what I sometimes see as organizational overkill came in pretty handy when storing a huge amount of medical supplies.
– She’s very detailed, me, not so much. There were times when my “quick-and-dirty” approach was just what was called for, and simplified matters greatly. But I’d be the first to admit that it doesn’t fit all situations. On the other hand, her meticulous medical care of Peter (Sandra’s a nurse) was realistically what kept him going for many of those 39 years.
The list could go on for a long time, but you probably get the idea. Over time, I came to view the detail stuff, which I could sometimes see as needless nit-picking, was really vital to his care. And when she would feel like she was falling apart, I could bring a perspective that “It will be OK, we will get through this.”
At some point, it hit me—these differences aren’t a problem, they’re a gift. As in the definition, they “completed us, made us more whole, and brought us a whole lot closer (not that we ever came that close) to perfection” than we ever would have on our own.
It also hit me that “I think that’s the way God intended it to be.” In the Bible, it tells how God created man and woman for each other, to essentially “complete, make more whole, and bring closer to perfection.” As I was to learn, that’s a very good thing, in ways I could never have imagined.
