Our world today is flooded with so many options in so many areas of life, from relationships to work to how to spend weekends. In a climate like this, long-term commitments can feel like little more than limitations on our freedom to choose. Then again, what good are a thousand options if we never choose one? That’s what this poem is about:
Continue reading Commitment Is A BallTag: marriage
A Happy Beginning
“And they lived happily ever after” may be a cliché, but it’s still satisfying. After all the troubles and difficulties of a good story, we love to see the happy couple roll away in their carriage as the credits start rolling. Of course, we also know in the back of our minds that any “ever after” on earth will include more troubles and difficulties in the days and years ahead. But after all they have been through, we wouldn’t want to mention that. It’s the end of the story, leave them alone. But in real life, a wedding is not the end of the story. It’s the beginning of a new chapter, one that could easily be longer and more complex than anything that came before it.
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The Middle Years
My wife and I got married 15 years ago this week. Shortly after, I wrote a short poem for my new bride:
Are there seasons to love, new months and years bring?
If seasons there are, our love is the Spring
A sapling still budding, fresh fruit on the vine
With roots planted deep in the well of Divine
Must needs there be Winter? I haven’t a clue
My prayer is to always be growing the New
But seasons can come, and seasons can go
Our love will remain, it will always be so
Though slowly, yet surely, this oak of the Lord
Will grow up precisely as it has been told
Till stands in God’s garden a tree strong and true
That brings Him a smile as He’s passing through
I suppose it’s natural when you begin something to think of the ending. But there’s something else I didn’t think of so much back then, something we’re living a lot of right now. It’s something you might call “the middle”, or in the words of the poem, that “slowly, yet surely” bit. Saplings may be full of exciting potential, and mature oaks of awe-inspiring strength, but it’s the transformation from one to the other that accounts for the majority of the life of the tree. And our marriage.
Don’t Assume You Don’t Assume
When groups of people live together on the same piece of earth, we have to learn how to get along. Granted, we’re often not very good at it, but even if we spend a lot of time arguing, we still need each other and depend on each other quite a bit more than we’d usually like to admit. And that’s not all: we also influence each other quite a bit more than we’d usually like to admit. Oddly enough, you can even see this in what we choose to argue about and the arguments that we use.
I Lost My Independence. And I’m Happy About It.
I lost my freedom and independence on the 9th of May, 2004. It was a sunny day in Virginia, and we were celebrating: Jessica wore a beautiful white dress and we hired tuxedos, a horse drawn carriage, and a chocolate fountain for the occasion. The pastor who gave the message told us that in one sense, the day marked a death. Not a physical death, but a death of our two independent lives which were now being joined together to create something new. He was right. In the fourteen years since that day, neither of us have had the freedom and independence we enjoyed before. In fact, over the years we’ve found three highly effective ways to limit our independence even further: their names are Daniel, David and Rebekah.
Continue reading I Lost My Independence. And I’m Happy About It.
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