Your Faithfulness Affects Us All: A Plea to Empty Nesters to Continue to Pursue Their Marriages

Note from Tim: This article originally appeared in the May 2023 edition of Lifeway’s “Mature Living” Magazine.

“Do you have a few minutes to talk during my break?” the twenty-something barista asked me as I took my cup of coffee from him in one hand, balancing commentaries and my laptop in the other hand. I could see strain on his face. I had first met him just a few months earlier. We worshiped at different churches in different communities, but he knew I was a pastor and I could see he needed to talk.

Thirty minutes later, he sat across from me in the coffee shop and poured out his broken heart to me: his dad had just announced his unfaithfulness and that he was pursuing a divorce. This hit my new friend hard. He had only been married a couple of years, and he had always looked up to his dad; his parents had led him to the Lord.

A couple of days later, I sat in a church member’s home during our small group. When it came time to share prayer requests, he asked for prayer for his parents. His mom had just announced she had a boyfriend and was pursuing a divorce. This set of parents was in their early sixties. He was shocked and saddened.

What this pair of circumstances days apart showed me yet again is that unfaithfulness—or faithfulness—in marriage affects those around us in profound ways. My friends, both married men who had been out of the home for years, were nonetheless deeply affected by their parents’ marital drift. The majority of my marriage counseling is with empty nester and retired couples, a common trend. The problems that are often swept under the rug while the kids are at home have a nasty way of coming back with a vengeance after the kids have left the home. The call to pursue your husband or wife is just as crucial three or five decades into marriage as it is in the first couple of decades of your covenant. Here are three ways to pursue faithfulness in marriage during your empty nest years.

Remember you are leaving a legacy. Your marriage is not just for you. Your choices in your marriage today affect your grown children, your grandchildren, and generations you will never meet. Investing in your marriage today could give hope to the future marriage of your grandchildren who are now in elementary school. My grandparent’s 64 years of marriage still encourages me today.

Remember that your faithfulness honors Jesus. Unfaithfulness in your marriage may affect us all, but so does faithfulness. Your faithfulness in the later decades of marriage remind us that Jesus still redeems, and that Jesus still empowers. Pursuing your spouse in your several-decades-old marriage reminds us that Jesus has an enduring love also, because the covenant of marriage was designed by God to point to the New Covenant love of Christ (Ephesians 5:22-33). 

Remember God’s promises of hope and joy. During Isaiah’s time, Israel struggled to believe that God would be with them to the end. Could the same God who had saved in the past break through the circumstances of today? This consolation from the living God still rings true: “Listen to me . . . all the remnant of the house of Israel, who have been sustained from the womb . . . I will be the same until your old age, and I will bear you up when you turn gray. I have made you, and I will carry you; I will bear and rescue you.” (Isaiah 46:3-4) 

God created your marriage covenant all of those decades ago. He was with you when you said, “I do,” and he promises to carry you until death do you part. But he doesn’t just promise to help his people grin and bear it; he is also the God who can bring hope and joy. He loves to bring renewal. He resurrects marriages just as he resurrected Lazarus.

It could be that the golden years of your retirement are the golden years of your marriage. With Jesus, all things are possible. Brothers and sisters, your unfaithfulness affects us all. But your faithfulness also affects us for good, more than you will ever know.