No marriage is perfect. This does not stop people getting married. There is an idea of marriage worth pursuing that can keep it thriving.
Not that I had this at the forefront of my thinking in the early years of marriage.
Previously on this series of detaching and attaching, I remarked on the amazing attachment I saw between my parents. There was then the beginning of what it would take for my focus to move away from what I had seen in my parents to considering an attachment of my own. The last dispatch highlighted serious challenges I faced in truly understanding and paying the price of attachment.
Attachment is costly business. I just didn’t know if I had thought it through properly and if I wanted to pay that price.
Over a decade later, here I sit writing about what were genuine struggles that threatened my commitment to marriage. I write about it, not as though I got the answers and had a great marriage for the subsequent ten years and more. That would be a grossly inaccurate portrayal of those years.
It’s worth reflecting, however and sharing as to what happened in that crisis time in the marriage to help me get my head and heart in line.
Pivotal to everything was a renewal of the purpose of marriage. That renewal was sourced on looking at a biblical approach to marriage. The Father and Israel. The Son and His Bride. The commitment to loving, serving and supporting the bride. The devotion to that bride in all circumstances. Never straying from what was right and never moving from that covenant.
That love of God – amazing in scope and focus. Breathtaking in patience and mercy. When God was asking me to pay the price of attachment in marriage, He was not asking me to do it from my own resources. When God was displaying what marriage was about, He was not looking at it through a sentimental lens full of the wonders of romance. When God presented the beauty of marriage, it was about seeing His love, recognising myself as a recipient of that love, then appreciating that I am a recipient to be a partaker in it. I partake in that love in as much as I share it. And the first and most important place I express that love is with the one He has blessed me with.
The success of the marriage is only in as much as I remember the source of the love that helps me to love my wife. When I rely on that source and appreciate the images of a loving marriage He shows in His word and in life, then it spurs me on to get in line and in agreement with why this marriage is such an amazing gift.
It is not enough to recognise that I cannot pay the price of attachment and give up. It is to see that I cannot pay the price to be attached but know that the one who had the idea also has the resource to enable to commit. Fully commit. Fully commit to fully serve. Fully commit to fully serve in the great variety of circumstances.
Then there is not just the cost of attachment, there is a realisation of the overwhelming benefits of the attachment. Faithfulness, commitment and devotion may not be on the top people’s desired qualities in a person, but seeing that’s how God is to me and then seeing how God has developed that in my wife to me helps me appreciate the tremendous benefit of truly attaching. The strength of knowing someone who knows me and we are made one by the love of God is a truly incredibly enriching reality to enjoy.
It will be for my daughters themselves to relay what they observed in the marriage of their parents. Personally, I don’t think they’ll necessarily have the same story as I have of my parents. What I do hope they will acknowledge and appreciate is that if the marriage has thrived it is because we both had a strong belief in what God joins together. We believe in it, we agree with it and so we do what is necessary to navigate the choppy waters of life to endure and enjoy this gift God has given us.
God joined us together – and God joins us together. We cooperate as we get on with the cleaving to each other. There are times where it truly is glorious and the taste of what God has in mind for marriage makes it something worth pursuing and sticking with.
No marriage is perfect. This does not stop people getting married. God is an idea of marriage worth pursuing that can keep it thriving.
That’s just the joy and delight that comes when thinking about bit about us as a couple – can you even consider what He has in store when He considers the family formation? Well it’s funny you should mention that …
(Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash)
For His Name’s Sake
Shalom
C. L. J. Dryden
Life With CD 