Lessons From a Cage Fight in a Minivan

In my book Rocking Ordinary I share about an epic battle my husband and I had in a parking lot. Really big fight. And that story is one of the most-talked-about parts of the book. Maybe because we’ve all been there, too?

So when my friend Tricia Goyer asked me to share how God challenged me to step out of my comfort zone and do something radical for Him . . . yeah, this memory sprang to mind. Because there’s nothing like a marital spat to turn things around, right?

J.C. Penny’s isn’t a great place to start a fight with your husband, come to find out. When we realized our increasingly tense voices were garnering the side eye from more than one customer, we high-tailed it out of there. There was only one place to go: the minivan.

It was a cage fight in the minivan. Don’t tell me you’ve never had one.

Enclosed in the seemingly soundproof vehicle (in order to have a minivan cage fight, you must first pretend your minivan is soundproof), we allowed our voices to raise. There may have been some slaps on the dashboard and stomps on the floormats, too.

Yep, it got ugly real quick.

What started the brawl? Just your run-of-the-mill “you aren’t paying attention to me” “well, you’re too busy for me” “because you’re engrossed in work” “like you look up from your schedule” “I’m doing the best I can to hold everything together” “are you saying I’m not running myself ragged” kind of fight.

You’ve had that fight, too.

Because we all do. We run, run, run the race of family life and work and soccer games and homeschooling and ministry and volunteering until all of the sudden WHAM! We hit the brick wall. And our spouse is usually standing in front of that brick wall, getting squashed by our frustrated fatigue.

And it’s there, bouncing off the wall bruised and broken, that we start to look around and wonder, “What in the world am I doing here, and what’s it all for?”

After a good 30 minutes of yelling, we finally got to that question. Midway through our lives, we looked at each other thru tears and gasped, “What are we doing? Where are we headed?” And we didn’t like the answer.

Wanna hear the rest of the story? Jump over here.