a drop of water

Jenn was sharing some deep thoughts with me yesterday as we were driving to small group.  The reading for small group had mentioned how the Israelites would annually renew their covenant with God every year.  In the past, we’ve sometimes foudn it difficult to identify with why people renew covenants so systematically.  It feels ritualized, and almost not really needed if the first covenant act was truly “real.”  But the exciting articulation and understanding discovered by Jenn was that covenants with God are living covenants.  Everyday we have the choice to renew our covenant, our relationship, our love, our commitment, our promises, and our joy of knowing, depending and looking to God.  It’s the same thing with marriage too.  Like, we could just say our vows with all the heart felt emotion possible at the altar and leave it at that, but everyday, in every interaction with each other, we are given the opportunity to renew those vows, that covenant to each other.  There is so much new life born out of the renewing of covenants and promises.  The covenants and promises can grow in breadth and depth as we grow too!  Its like in my commitment to my friends, my commitment to them will manifest itself differently as we live through different seasons of our lives.  There will be times when I am needed by friends for this and other times where I will be needed by friends for that.  Sometimes we will fail each other, but that just leaves room for the commitment to strengthen.  This view of covenants as being living, able to grow, morph, and adapt is exciting to me.

So a new category begins today, admittedly a few months after the date.  This category will be “Married Life.”  As I peruse marriage books and live life together with Jenn, I’d like to share a few glimpses into our discoveries, obstacles and victories in hope that just maybe you can relate or be encouraged.

A question that often gets defaulted our way is, “so…how is married life?”  Only being married for a few months leaves our mind pretty blank as to any one sentence answers.  Our usual response is, oh its not really that much different.  I happily relate how its really nice to not have to drive “home” any more at night to go to bed, only to wake up six hours later and drive back to Jenn’s to eat breakfast with her before work; about how now I can just climb into bed ;)  Jenn and I always joke together about what people are asking or what they really want to hear?  Do they want to hear about our sex life? haha.

But I was thinking about how to articulate the difference or the growth.  I believe that married life provides more opportunities to choose to love Jenn!  Its not that Jenn is some horrible person that I need to consciously force myself to love; instead its that living together provides opportunities for me to consciously make my love for her tangible instead of a fleeting feeling that is just assumed to be there.  It’s like realizing a holistic view of love, the feeling that manifests itself into something concrete.

Jenn and I were talking about the idea that love is not really unconditional, nor does it ask for nothing in return…

I want to challenge the time-honored saying that true love is unconditional. Can love be unconditional? If love was unconditional, does it mean that it does not ask anything in return? What I am trying to say is that true love cries out for a response; it does ask for something in return. That’s why it is easier to love people who love you, and harder to love people who do not love you. You can love someone who loves you because their love for you is hinting respectfully that you return the love; their love experienced by you catalyzes your love for them. When someone does not love you, loving them is not a natural response.

So, I concede that true love is unconditional; there are no prerequisites to love: if what love asks for in return is not met, love continues on in perseverance. But that does not mean that love asks for nothing in return. I believe that it asks for love in return. For example, when Jesus died on the Cross for our sins, he did it because God so loved the world. Would it be okay to say that God’s act of love asks for a love response? When we love people through God’s power, would it be ok to say that we are in a sense also asking for a love response towards God (instead of ourselves)?

So I was sitting in the NCR library this afternoon during my brief break from work and I was thinking about why one always hears that you need to be right with God before you enter a relationship in Christian circles. I understand the traditional meaning of this guideline, that one should be secure, confident, trust in, believe in, and dependent on God before a relationship will be soil for marriage to bare fruit, but I think that sometimes this guideline gets a twisted by American self-sufficiency.

The idea of being ‘right’ with God gives people a sense that of a plateau that they must climb towards, and upon reaching it, they can walk smoothly together, with God looking down from heaven. Because it is advised that we need to develop our own relationships with God before relationships with a significant other, we make an unneeded extrapolation that one’s faith is solely a personal thing. I used to live this way, when Jenn was discouraged, I would encourage her to seek God, essentially leaving her alone to seek God on her own. But marriage and relationships and friendships are not about that. Yes our decision of faith is an individual one, but it is an individual decision to enter a community decision (does that make sense?).

In marriage, we are not going to just be walking on this plateaued relationship with God, but we will be climbing together with our spouses. Like rock climbing, having two people there, allows you to climb a lot crazier mountains, instead of just hiking uphill like we might have done alone. Of course God willing, there are those who will climb alone, but perhaps I’m taking the analogy a little too far. What I wanted to say is just that in our friendships, in are relationships, in marriage, in our relationships with God, it is not about letting each other fight through it alone, but it is about coming alongside each other and filling the gap when needed.