Tonight I am restless and thought I would write a bit on a theme. Tonight’s theme is marriage. I think it is important to note that marriage is not easy. This is an understatement – marriage is pretty darn hard at times. Some people are pretty good at hiding the hard things in their life. You know what I mean. We all hide things of one sort or another for one reason or another. We’ve all got secrets.

It’s usually pretty tough to spot the strong marriage from the struggling ones in a crowd because the folks who are struggling pretty much feel like they are the only ones in this situation and so they do their best to hide the pain in public.

Like I said before, marriage is hard. Marriage is an act of becoming. You are two becoming one. You are something old becoming something new. There is great pain in the process of two becoming one. Often there is also a great deal of doubt as well. Sometimes we even forget why we ever got married in the first place and that’s a dangerous place to be.

Jesus talks about marriage in the Bible but only as a result of being questioned about divorce. He was being tested by a teacher of the law. The basic question was “is divorce allowable?” Of course Jesus knew his scripture and told the teacher that divorce was allowable but it was not desirable. It was allowable only because people are stubborn and refuse to look at the alternative. It is not desirable because it is the painful rending of the one new creation that God  has been weaving together through marriage. It is the destruction of community.

There are times in a marriage when one might contemplate divorce. One should consider that the alternative might be worse than what one is in the midst of right now. Of course there are always times when divorce may be the only option – when one’s well-being is being threatened by the other, when a spouse has chosen to unite with another and disrupt/corrupt the sacred bond that already existed between them and their partner.

I know this is a bit of a ramble but there’s been a lot of broken marriages lately and I think I want to encourage people to hold on for dear life if they can. There are always going to be times when you want to throw in the towel. Times when you think the alternative might be better. The reality is that marriage asks us to discard our expectations and mutually sacrifice for the other. It is a very selfless act. More often than not the primary reason that a person has for separation is they have unmet expectations. I hate to say it but at the core what we’re talking about it selfishness.

Marriage requires the sacrifice of the individual’s dreams in exchange for something greater – the new dreams of a new creation. The dreams of the two who have become one. If any one person’s dreams begin to take precedence over the others than bitterness is not far behind. Bitterness can lead to hatred and as has been said before hatred always leads to death. Always. There’s just no avoiding it.

You know what the most ridiculous reason people often have for divorce is? A loss of love. People fall out of love. I say this is ridiculous because God calls us to love everyone…even our enemies. How in the world are we to love our enemies if we lose love for the one we have been most intimate with? Love is always possible. It can be rekindled. Rediscovered. It must be otherwise our Lord is a liar. The interesting thing about love is that it is often found when we serve, sacrifice and pray for the other. It is often lost when we become self-focused. This is why it is said that to love God is to die to oneself. To love we must put the other before ourselves. We must put their needs ahead of our own.

Now having said all that I don’t want you to get the impression that I live in the perfect relationship. None of us does. As long as we are imperfect people living in an imperfect world we will have imperfect relationships. Bear this in mind the next time you feel like it should end because it fails to meet a fairytale expectation.

That’s it for now. I am no expert. These are just some random thoughts written by a guy trying to avoid sleep.