Devotion - Thursday, January 24

Today would have been my parents 70th wedding anniversary.  They were married in 1943, on January 24.

They married young; Daddy was 19, Mama 18.  They also got married secretly.  They didn't tell their parents for a while; each continuing to live with their own parents rather than being together. But they were united, and none of the trials which came their way over the next 65 years separated them.

I hear that some of you (mostly the female students) recommend you speak to someone other than me about matters of the heart. "He isn't much of a romantic." they report.  And they may be right; I am more pragmatic.  Though I felt the pain of two conversations yesterday, within minutes of each other, of unwanted break-ups.

Then I opened my bible to this morning's reading from Ephesians 5.  In this passage, Paul says we are to be subject to one another.  Wives subject to husbands is only one line out of a full section which speaks of how our human relationships are to mirror our relationship with God. 

Emotion may move us into relationship, but it can seldom be maintained at a level sufficient for 65 years of marriage.  To achieve that, you need commitment.  You need the kind of love which God has for us; a love that does not wax or wane but remains and never ends.

In Mere Christianity, CS Lewis writes of this: 
"Love in this second sense - love as distinct from being 'in love' - is not merely a feeling. It is a deep unity, maintained by the will and deliberately strengthened by habit reinforced by (in Christian marriages) the grace which both partners ask, and receive, from God. They can have this love for each other even at those moments when they do not like each other, as you love yourself even when you do not like yourself. They can retain this love even when each would easily, if they allowed themselves, be 'in love' with someone else. 'Being in love' first moved them to promise fidelity; this quieter love enables them to keep this promise. It is on this love that the engine of marriage is run: being in love was the explosion that started it."

The imperfect, at time obnoxious person that I am - who could remain by my side for the past 29 years?  Only someone drawn to me by being "in love," but soon thereafter welded to me by virtue of "the love" which comes from God.