Marti and I were engaged in a somewhat heated exchange the other day when she asked me why I was being so defensive.

“Because you accused me,” I said.

“I didn’t accuse you,” she replied, “I was intuitively assuming.”

Ah yes: the prerogative of wives—to intuitively assume. In other words, she knows me so well that she thinks she knows what I’m up to even before I’m up to it. And the problem is, she’s usually right, which makes it very difficult for me to argue with her. She has me arguing with myself most of the time—tying me up in knots with my own words.

But I asked for this by being defensive in the first place. I’m so good at this. I suffer from chronic caught-in-the-principal’s-office syndrome. Half the time, I’m acting like I just got caught, and the rest of the time I’m wondering if I will be.

How much of your negative patterns have you ever examined? This is part of the value of friends and spouses: They are like mirrors—they show us what we can’t see about ourselves. My fear of getting caught is so ingrained, I never thought about it until Marti questioned me on being defensive. By golly she’s right.

As much as I know and believe about the grace of God, my forgiveness, and the absence of condemnation when one is in Christ Jesus, I still find out that there are areas where what I know doesn’t touch where I live or even who I am. Just because you know a scripture or biblical principle doesn’t mean it’s a part of you. But it might take an intuitive assumption to find that out.