In some part of my soul, it hurts me when I hear people talk about trying harder, determined to do the hard things, about digging in with their toes and hanging on with their teeth, whether its about my Jesus or about marriage. They preach or write or talk in my living room about working hard at our faith, making it number one, the centre, and showing up every time the church doors are open, about discipline and submission and authority and hell, structures and guards, commitments.
But I do remember when my spiritual life was all about trying harder. When it was all about being "radical" and setting up boundaries in my life so that people would know, oh, yes, here is a girl who loves Jesus, they know her by her works, her quality decisions. It wasn't until God captured my heart, until I understood in some small way what it means to live loved that, oh, everything that was ill-fitting and heavy fell away, so this is what it means to be compelled by love, this is love-as-freedom. I understood, slowly at first and then faster and faster, that
God loves, his very nature is love, that he is very, very fond of me and then the exhale.
And here's the funny thing about this, the thing sweet: when I embraced Him, cracked open my rib cage to living loved, to my Beloved, all of those old things? the things that before were filed under Discipline and Accountability and Doing Hard Things For God suddenly became easy responses. There is no routine to prayer when you are talking to your beloved, when it's your place of retreat and quiet, is there? There is no obligation to the doing of
things but instead these things help and shape, they put sails up on my little ship, sometimes, sure, but the Holy Spirit is my only wind.
Who could move the ship of a life with tiny oars anyway?
And now I notice and witness people around us using the same language of obligation to talk about marriage.
Yes, you can do that, I guess. Yes, many of us can stay married for a good long time, simply by trying harder. Yes, we can holler at others to grow up, to stop being selfish, we can use the language of discipline, submission and authority. We take turns holding on tight, white-knuckling through the years. We can grit our teeth and hang on with our toes, we can make choices all day long and when it's hard, we can mutter under our breath that marriage isn't supposed to make us happy, it's supposed to make us holy and sure, it might help us stay. There is likely value in that and even happy days.
My darling, you taught me that there are choices, yes. But the choice is easy when you are living loved in full mutuality, when both husband and wife love wild. When we etched "
I am my beloved's" on the thin white gold of my wedding band and yours answered back, "
and she is mine," the stage was set for how we were going to do this thing, conversation, oneness, a slow dance, it began.
It's funny how there is a natural overflow of living loved. When we understand that we are loved by God, when we are secure in that, no conditions, the fists unclench and now here we are, able to love in all areas with that kind of abandon. No worth to earn here. Promises are kept but not because we tried harder, maybe it's because we surrendered to each other, to this.
I usually feel more kinship with poetry and literature than I do with marriage manuals, I see us there, the language of longing and fulfillment, of how I carry your heart, and it's the thing of the thing.
We do this one thing well because the loving came first and through it all;
you first, no, you first, here, let me serve you, let me love you, let me give everything to you because I trust you to give it back even better, let me hold your face every morning and smile at the very sight of you without your teeth brushed.
You have never once told me that marriage is hard. You have never once gritted your teeth and acted like it was taking all of your effort to love me. Instead, this is our safe place. This is where the real life happens. We do hard things, oh, yes, but they are halved for the sharing and then they are our stories, our connections, our
do-you-remembers. We give birth and we mourn and we rejoice and we make love and we laugh, we fail. There is an ease to this that only grows with the passing of the years, a comfort.
Those things that could possibly hurt what we have?
We give each other the gift of patience, years still coming up ahead to work through and change, we're walking alongside. My darling, here, let me put my cold feet against your warm legs, I need to be warmed up and its kind of fun still to make you jump.
When you knew that you loved me, there was never another question in your mind, you gorgeous man. Because you lived loved, lived secure and confident in that man that God had created you to be, you were moved to love me well, to forgive, to lay yourself down, no insecurity in how you love. Never once, darling, have you exposed me to ridicule or made me feel like a burden to you. Our secrets are ours alone, not everything for public consumption. You see how easy it is to love you?
There is an ease, a slow-dance rhythm, to us. Maybe it's not a grand-ballroom performance with ringside seats for those taking notes but instead it's free, a moonlit shuffle more about listening to the other's breath and heartbeat. It's not always easy; life is real and it happens here, we make mistakes, we have hurt each other, circumstances can always surround like a creature but here we are, standing together, always standing together, one. You kiss the curve between my eyes and our littlest girl has your mouth
and there hasn't ever been a hard choice to make, who wouldn't choose this?
Maybe this then is, indeed, the great mystery, that
our marriages sometimes are the greatest mirror of how we see life in Christ.
I write now and then about what love looks like for us.
EDITED TO ADD: I have written an apology for this post. You can read it
here - I hope you do.