Well, it's a little after 11:00pm on February 14th and another Valentine's day will soon be past. So of course the thought occurs to me that, what would Valentine's Day be without a blog post on it.
But seriously though . . . tis the season when our thoughts turn to romance and once again I am reminded of the truth that our love lives give us our greatest joys and greatest agonies. I can honestly say that my wife is my greatest earthly blessing, with the kids running a very close second, yet I also know that everyday isn't filled with wedded bliss. Many of our days we are blissfully in love, and many other days we are so harried and rushed that the best we do is a kiss and an "I love you" good night. And we also joke about the fact that some days are just "commitment days." Those are the days that we just have to remind ourselves that we took a vow. And then of course, there are days when we laugh an understanding laugh at the wit and wisdom of Ruth Bell Graham who once commented that she had never once considered divorce, but she had considered murder on several occasions.
Lynette and I sometimes feel that we have a charmed relationship because, commitment days and days with murderous intent aside, we really have a good marriage. We love each other and we like each other. We have sometimes talked about old boyfriends and girlfriends (in case your wondering, we talk about her old boyfriends and my old girlfriends, not the other way around) and shudder to think what would have happened had we gotten married to any of them. And we just can't imagine that there could be anyone else out there that we could stand to be married to.
We think we are a great catch for each other, but we realize that we wouldn't be great catches for other people. We have sometimes found ourselves in situations where a husband is complaining about his wife, or a wife her husband and we both exhibit the traits being complained about, only we're probably worse. There have been times when I have wanted to tell a disgruntled woman "you think your husband is bad, it could be worse, you could be married to me."
We also have blown just about every piece of marital advice that you've ever heard in a marriage seminar or read about in a book. We often communicate poorly, we rarely go out on dates (although we've been doing good the past few months), and for the first few years of our marriage I spent way too much time in school and work to be considered an exemplary husband. That's why I feel like apologizing for this post in one sense. The way I am writing this it makes it sound like we are the perfect married couple, but we aren't. James Dobson and Gary Smalley really wouldn't want to use as an example in their books because if you can think of a principle of marriage that they have written about, I can probably think of a way we've broken it. I'm really only writing this as a way of saying thanks to God and to Lynette for the way he has blessed me with her.
But there are two doctrines that God taught us somewhere along the line that have kept us happily and healthily married - the doctrines of total depravity and grace. Somewhere along the line we both got in touch with our inner sinner and realized that we really were as bad as we had feared, probably worse. This helped level the playing field - from that time neither one of us has ever felt morally superior to the other. Of course we stll get mad at each other from time to time, and wonder what planet the other came from, but we also understand who we are, sinners saved by grace. Therefore, we don't get too shocked when the other sins. We don't have extreme expectations of each other that set us up for disappointment. Just a few weeks ago I confessed an embarassing sin problem to my wife and she didn't reject me, she just kept on loving me.
And, because we know we are such totally depraved sinners we know how much we need grace, we know how much grace we have received and we have grace to spare toward each other.
As I write all this I write it knowing that, if you were to walk into our house on any given day, things may not look like the peaches and cream that I am making it out to be. On any given day you may catch one of us ignoring the other or saying something ugly to the other.
But I like to think of the grace of the gospel as a teflon coating for marriage. What I mean is that we still have the same fights, arguments and problems as everyone says, we still have the same messes and spills as everyone. We have both heard tales on several occassions from couples who were splitting up. When we heard the reasons they were breaking up we've sometimes thought to ourselves "man, we've fought and argued over the same things and even worse things than that. But the gospel forms a teflon coating that keeps those things from sticking.
So, in my sermon yesterday, I spoke on the Grace-filled love life and shared that what we need in our marriages (and all relationships for that matter) is not better communication techniques or other things. What our marriages need is not more passion and romance, although those things don't hurt. What our marriages need is more gospel, we need more grace.
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