A couple sat across from me not long ago, both of them visibly exhausted, and the wife said the thing so many people think but rarely say out loud: “We pray together. We’re both genuinely walking with God. So why does this still feel this hard?” There was shame underneath the question — like struggling was proof they were doing something wrong, or believing something wrong, or maybe not believing hard enough. I want to say clearly, as someone who has been married twenty-one years and counselling couples for fifteen: struggle is not evidence of spiritual failure. Sometimes it’s just evidence that you’re married to another human being.
The quiet myth we never quite say out loud
Nobody stands up in church and says “if your marriage is godly, it will be easy.” But plenty of us absorbed that message anyway, sideways, through the culture around us — the couples who only post the anniversary photo, never the year they nearly didn’t make it to the anniversary. When a “Christian marriage” hits real conflict, real distance, real seasons of not liking each other very much, the unspoken assumption kicks in: something must be spiritually wrong here. That assumption isn’t in your Bible. It’s in your church culture, and those are not the same source.
Romans 8:28 says, “And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.” Read that verse honestly and it doesn’t say all things are good. It says God works all things — including the hard, unchosen, unglamorous seasons — toward good, for people who love him. The verse assumes difficult things will happen. It doesn’t promise you’ll be exempt from them because you prayed the right prayers.
What trials are actually described as doing
James 1:2-4 goes even further: “My brethren, count it all joy when ye fall into divers temptations; knowing this, that the trying of your faith worketh patience. But let patience have her perfect work, that ye may be perfect and entire, wanting nothing.” James isn’t telling you to enjoy suffering for its own sake. He’s telling you what trials are for — they produce endurance, and endurance, allowed to finish its work, produces a maturity that ease never could have produced on its own.
I’ve watched this play out in real marriages. A couple I worked with lost a pregnancy in their third year of marriage, and the grief exposed every unresolved thing between them — how differently they processed pain, how poorly they’d learned to sit with each other in it rather than fix it. That season nearly ended them. It also, eventually, built something in their marriage that the easy years before it hadn’t built: a working knowledge of how to grieve together instead of alone. That’s not a tidy silver lining I’m handing you. It cost them real pain to get there. But it matches exactly what James describes — trial producing endurance, endurance finishing its work.
Why “Christian” was never meant to mean “conflict-free”
Faith in your marriage was never the guarantee that hard things wouldn’t happen to you. It’s the resource for what you do with the hard things once they arrive — where you take your exhaustion, whose character you’re trusting when your own patience runs out, what you let the difficulty produce in you rather than just endure. A marriage between two believers can still include seasons of real distance, real anger, real doubt about whether you married the right person. None of that disqualifies you from the word “Christian” attached to your marriage. It just means you’re living inside a story where sanctification, not comfort, is the actual goal.
What this means for you, this week
If your marriage is struggling right now, resist the reflex to treat the struggle itself as the verdict on your faith or your spouse’s. Ask instead what this particular season might be forming in you that ease never would have. And if you’re carrying shame about not having an effortless “Christian marriage,” lay that shame down specifically — it was never biblical in the first place.
The line I want you to keep
A hard season in your marriage is not proof your faith failed. It might be the exact place your faith is finally being asked to do something real.
I go deeper into this theology of struggle — and what it looked like in my own marriage in specific seasons — in the book.
Sacred, but Fully Known launches October 3rd. Subscribe below for more of this, every week.
— Funke
Sacred, but Fully Known: A Faith-Rooted Guide to Intimacy in Marriage launches October 3rd, 2026. Subscribe above to follow the story, and to be first in line on launch day.
