Becoming Each Other’s Sculptor

Becoming Each Other’s Sculptor

This means that anyone who belongs to Christ has become a new person. The old life is gone; a new life has begun!

2 Corinthians 5:17

At a renowned museum in Florence, Italy, you will find four partially finished sculptures. Michelangelo originally intended each of them to be used on the tomb of Pope Julius, but midway through the project he decided not to use them and ceased his work. There is a hand protruding here, a torso of a man there, a leg, part of a head. None is finished.

Stand in this great hall, looking at these fragmentary figures, and you will sense the turmoil, the struggle embodied in these stones. It’s as though the figures are crying to break free from the prison of the marble to become what they were intended to be.

Michelangelo called them The Captives. Study them for a time, and they are certain to stir up within you a deep longing to be completed, yourself. They are bound to bring more consciously into your awareness the ache in your soul to be free from that which imprisons or inhibits your wholeness.

This is a universal longing we humans share—to grow, to mature, to become complete, and to fulfill our destinies. But sometimes, like Michelangelo’s captive statues, we are frozen in our efforts to realize who we were really meant to be.

But here’s the good news. In a loving relationship in which two people are doing their best to serve God, we become, to some degree, each other’s sculptors. It is God who does the work, but he allows us to hold the tools: not chisels, but words and actions. And as we prayerfully consider what God is helping our spouses to become, we can help them to break free of the captivity of their old selves to become new creations. As Michelangelo said of one of his efforts: “I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.”

How can you support your spouse on a journey toward becoming free to be his or her best self?

The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short; but in setting our aim too low, and achieving our mark. . . . Lord, grant that I may always desire more than I can accomplish.

—Michelangelo