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My parents marked their 48th wedding anniversary recently, but this very well might be their last. My dad was diagnosed with bone cancer several years ago, and while officially he’s in remission from cancer, he’s had several medical events over the years that has ended him back in the hospital, often every few months or so. And recently he was also diagnosed with Alzheimer’s dementia.
And this, now looking back, might explain many of the relational struggles and scars we’ve endured as a family over this past few years. After the latest medical event that ended him hospital, he started to experience a failure to thrive. And so the decision was made to call hospice.
Through it all, I’ve watched my mom continue to love him well. This is not sentimental, Hollywood, or Hallmark type of love, but it is love all the same – providing what is needed, not just for for my dad’s sake but more for for God’s sake.
And it’s got me thinking and reflecting on the shadow side of our marriage vows.
Wedding Day Bliss
Often when we get married we think of all the the positive joyous aspects of our of our future together. And this is as it should be. Our wedding day is a joyous occasion.
But what often gets overlooked in all our celebrations is a sober reality that our vows also communicate. That our vow is not entered into just for the expectation of a happily ever after. Always blue skies and never rain. The vow is entered because of the expectation that things will get hard as well. And so our vows include the language for better for worse for richer for poor in sickness and in health. And so we enter that vow because we don’t know what’s coming.
And so we make this holy pledge to keep saying “I do” despite what comes our way on this journey ahead.
Certainly it’s tempting for many to the check out when marriage gets hard, when their spouse is no longer living up to their expectations, or their love for each other grows cold. And while the reality of sin and the hardness of hearts are things we still have to contend with, the marriage vow reminds us that marriage is not something to take so lightly or casually.
Mike Mason (The Mystery of Marriage)
I like the way that Mike Mason in The Mystery of Marriage puts it. He says,
“…God is not interested, ultimately, in natural attraction. He wants us to come to know the supernatural attraction of His Own sort of love. So later in life, we may be called upon to repeat in marriage our original acts of love and abandonment, but this time without much help from the emotions, and without any help at all from romantic love.”
In other words, we can no longer rely on those warm and fuzzy feelings at first motivated us to walk down the aisle and say I do that we have to discover a deeper love, a deeper faith.
He goes on and says,
“We may be called upon to act all alone, out of pure faith and trust, perhaps without even the perceived help of our partner.” (p. 118)
He continues later to say,
“The vow [doesn’t] hold any guarantee that a couple shall always be ‘in love,’ but that through God’s grace and strength they may continue in faith ‘to love.’” (p. 121)
And it’s this “faith to” love that I now see demonstrated by my mom during my dad’s final days, despite the many scars that the marriage has brought her over the years. It’s an act of faith to surrender to the marriage, and to the one that God has given her to love in particular, and ultimately an act of faith to surrender to God Himself.
I believe it’s this type of mature and sacrificial love that God is trying to grow in each of us. And often, these overlooked and shadow sides of the marriage vows is his way to do just this.
