The man who wrote the Declaration of Independence didn’t want to write it.

His mother had recently died. His wife was sick back home in Virginia. And he was stuck hundreds of miles away in Philadelphia, wishing he could leave. I learned this a couple of days after the Fourth of July, listening to a well-known broadcaster walk through the history, and I haven’t stopped thinking about it since. I spend a lot of my downtime listening to things like that, teachings on faith and relationships, history, sometimes just stuff about cars. This one stuck with me.

Thomas Jefferson was part of a five-man committee, and he assumed he was just drafting something for the group. He didn’t know he was writing one of the most famous documents in human history. In fact, he thought John Adams should write it, and he told Adams so. But Adams turned it down and gave Jefferson a few reasons why he should be the one. One was that Adams knew people found him difficult. He was blunt and hot-tempered, and he was honest enough with himself to admit it. Another was simple: Jefferson was the better writer. Adams also told him a Virginian ought to be at the front of this thing. So Jefferson, grieving and far from his sick wife, sat down and wrote.

Then came the hard part. He carried his draft into a closed-up room in Philadelphia in the heat of early July, where the delegates debated it in secret, because every man in that room knew the King would call them traitors. Picture it. Wigs, coats, no air conditioning, no deodorant, windows shut so no one outside could hear. Honestly, I don’t think most of us could stand ten minutes in there. And in the middle of all that heat and sweat, men from every colony went through Jefferson’s work line by line and picked it apart while he sat there and stayed quiet.

The compromise that held them together.

One of the hardest cuts was about slavery. Jefferson had written a passage condemning it, and the southern delegations, mainly Georgia and South Carolina, wouldn’t accept it. The rest of them could have dug in and insisted it stay. Instead, to keep the colonies together, they let it go. It was the wrong compromise, and everyone eventually paid for it. Less than a century later, the nation nearly tore itself apart in a war over the very thing they set aside that summer.

I’m not telling you that to defend what they did. I’m telling you because those men understood something that’s easy to forget. Unity was the priority. It mattered more to them than any one man getting his way, even when getting his way felt right. They gave a little and took a little, and what came out of that hot room was thirteen colonies that held together long enough to become something.

As I sat with all of this, I kept thinking about unity, and where else it shows up. The Bible talks about it constantly. In John 17, Jesus, on the night before he died, prayed that his followers would be one. Think about how many denominations we have now, how many things believers argue over. Doctrine, gifts, styles, who’s right about what. And yet the true church is still unified on the one thing that actually holds it together, that Christ is King and Savior. Everything else we fight about matters a lot less than we act as if it does. When the disciples kept their eyes on that one cause, they held. When we lose sight of it, we fracture.

And then I thought about marriage, because that’s where I spend most of my days.

“When you feel more like roommates than partners.”

A marriage is a union. Two people become one (Genesis 2). But anybody who’s been married more than a week knows how many differences live inside that “one.”

I can’t tell you how many couples have sat in my office and said almost the same thing. We’re so different. We don’t have anything in common anymore. We fight about money and sex and how to raise the kids. We don’t like the same foods. He likes the outdoors, and I don’t. We can never find anything that we both like to do. The differences feel like they’re pulling them apart, and unity is about the last thing on their minds.

I worked with one couple a while back who came in frustrated and disconnected. They’d drifted apart slowly, the way it usually happens, and by the time they got to me they said they felt more like roommates than a married couple. So we talked about their differences. And what I told them is what I’ll tell you: those differences are normal. They’re natural, and they’re actually good. God gave the two of you different strengths and tastes and a different way of seeing the world. It would be a boring marriage and life if he hadn’t.

The trouble isn’t the differences. The trouble starts when we stop finding ways to enjoy each other across them. And here’s what I’ve noticed. A lot of the time, the reason we can’t enjoy our time together isn’t the activity. It’s that we walk in focusing on ourselves, or with an attitude, or with a mindset that shuts the whole thing down before it starts. We cut ourselves off from even trying.

That couple eventually saw it. The point of spending time together was never really about the thing they were doing. It was about enjoying each other. When they started focusing on the things they enjoyed about each other, they started enjoying time together. They saw their spouse’s smile again and paid attention to the laugh that they originally fell in love with. I know that’s true in my own marriage. The best part of being with my wife isn’t whatever we’re doing. It’s watching her enjoy herself, the way she lights up and smiles and sometimes surprises me, even when it’s something I wouldn’t have picked to do.