Nothing Beats Marriage

I was walking home one evening recently and as I was walking home I knew I needed to go get some little groceries to tide us over as a family for a little while longer.  As I made me way to the place it occurred to me that nothing beats marriage.  Now this is not an ode to my wife.  Or at least it’s not just an ode to my wife.  It’s a tribute and round of applause to the Creator for coming up with this marvellous concept.  It’s not to be seen as a dig to single people or an advert that suggests that all single people should become married and feel bad if they don’t.  It is just taking some time to acknowledge the brilliance of the Creator in coming up with something like marriage.

From the start I recognise that even being the loner I am, I was created as a social and relational creature.  Indeed no man is an island and even being on my own is spent occupied with thinking and activities that assume companionship or others in some capacity.  I am created with an in-built need for others in close quarters.  Yet it’s one thing to acknowledge that, and another thing to buy into this marriage business, but it’s crucial to start from that relational element.

Then from there I come across this thinking about the nature of marriage where a woman dedicates her life to becoming one with the man who dedicates his life to becoming one with her.  This oneness involves sex – let’s not beat around the bush around that.  Here is a tremendous gift from God and we get to enjoy without inhibition in the desire to enjoy the oneness with each other.  But it’s a lot more than the sex and indeed if the other stuff isn’t looked after the sex means little or nothing.  Truly with great power comes great responsibility and those goodies that come with marriage only come through when that great responsibility is accepted and lived out.  That great responsibility of caring, learning, loving and constructively challenging the loved one to be all that they were created to be, whilst at the same time being cared for, learnt about, loved and constructively challenged to be all that you were created to be.  The level of rapport and banter, intimacy and good friendship involved is like nothing else.  Literally.

At its best marriage is the fullest expression of the heights of love between two human beings and nothing beats it.  I love my children and they bring joy to my heart and merriment to my soul.  They don’t beat marriage.  I love my football, the banter, the chat, the ins, the outs, the highs and lows, love it.  but what’s football?  It is only a game.  It doesn’t help me with my bills, it offers no substantial solace when things are down.  I don’t get the thrills from football as I do from marriage.  (Thank God, I hear me wife say.)  I love writing and reading and find little better to do with my time than being engrossed in a good book or plotting another blog entry or writing a note of a thought I just made.  I absolutely love it, it’s like a child of mine that I produce that came from my heart and brain and was a result of my creativity.  It’s arguably the best thing I do.  Yet even this cannot compare to marriage.

Marriage – that sacred institution that acts as a symbol of that glorious divine plan that God has all along and unfolds with Christ and His Church, we get to act it out as microcosm in this life.  We get to do the mutual service thing where the needs of our partner is put first.  We get to experience a oneness of heart and mind that no other relationship can emulate.  And as we do so with eyes focussed on God something truly amazing happens – the joy, peace, sense of oneness, perfection of love, heightened sense of being and indomitable feeling of strength in solidarity and unity propels existence to something that cannot be measured or given a price.  This is just a foretaste of the spiritual union that awaits those who walk by faith and not by sight and married couples can get a glimpse of it, ever so briefly.  We can glimpse it and applaud God for the genius of marriage.  We can live out all those godly characteristics of love, mercy, goodness, generosity, gentleness, kindness, patience/longsuffering and faithfulness among the many others with the one nearest and dearest to us.  And through the hardships and challenges of married life our own character is stretched as we realise capacities that we weren’t even aware of both the depths of our own depravity and the heights of the holiness that can effuse us in the mundane things of life.

No other relationship offers it.  No other aspect of life comes close to that … other than the relationship with God Himself which of course is the bedrock and springboard to experience all that.  Those platitudes that I’ve spoken of can be just as equally found in that loving relationship with God, it’s just that it’s His good pleasure to allow some of us to replicate that in the beautiful institution of marriage.

That’s why nothing – but nothing – not brother, sister, mother, father, work, money, power, NOTHING BEATS MARRIAGE.  Thank God for marriage.

Just saying.

For His Name’s Sake

Shalom

dmcd