Our current concept of marriage is a relatively recent phenomenon. It’s driven by romantic feeling, that wonderful experience of being in love. If you somehow lose it, basically if you’re not Romeo and Juliet 24×7 for the rest of your life, well you have a right — nay, an obligation — to move on. It didn’t work out, he or she was not the right one, I will now go find my true soul mate. Because I deserve that kind of love. Repeat until spouse number eight.
Another choice is just to pretend that all is well in Verona, try to fool yourself and others that there’s not a deep, life-sucking disappointment at the center of your life, settle, give up your dreams, rationalize. (I’m not even going to address here those who have allowed “marriage” to devolve into a mere consumer transaction).
Look, since we’re all big boys and girls, I’m going to let you in on a fact of life: No matter how hard you try, no matter how much one is determined to be Romeo to her Juliet, or Juliet to his Romeo, the feeling of being in love will fade. It may be six months, it may be three years. But it will go. There’s no getting around it.
There is another way.
True Christian marriage starts with the understanding that we are each deeply broken individuals in need of salvation. And while it’s true that marriage is in great part about raising the next generation, it has a more fundamental purpose: sanctification, of being made day on day more like Christ. We now find ourselves far, far from the land of daisies and chardonnay. In God’s plan, your spouse is your spiritual partner, picked by Him just for you expressly for this process of making the other holy. It’s a great returning. Needless to say, the business at hand is vitally, desperately important.
Sanctification means pain and conflict, of eventually turning over to God all in you that needs to be burned away — and there’s a lot there that needs to change — of responding with love and resolve to the challenges to your very being forced upon you by your spouse’s God-given differences. It can only happen if both partners are committed to following God’s will and to sticking it out in sickness and in health, in times of plenty and times of want. In other words, of sticking by the promises you made on your wedding day.
All of this makes what Navy Seals do look like a day at the waterpark. But what results is two beautiful human beings – “little Christs” who serve the Father – who in the process find (to their great amazement) that they love each other more deeply, and in a real, completely naked, and deeply joyous way than either could ever have thought possible.
Take that, Romeo and Juliet.
Photo credit: Ben Swayze, Zion National Park