I don’t preach about marriage very often. Marriage is one of those sermon topics that can leave a good number of hearers feeling left out. Some are too young. Others would like to be married but aren’t. Some are married, but wish they weren’t. Many in our congregation have been parted from their spouses by death. I’ve walked with many of you through that tough transition. But this is the day for me to talk about marriage.
Forty years ago
today I married Linda Marie Clary. On
July 10, 1982, we stood together at the front of the sanctuary of Gaffney First
Baptist Church and made promises we had barely begun to understand. Though none of our relatives spoke up to
object to the marriage, they had more than a few concerns. Linda had just graduated from Furman and I
wasn’t quite finished with seminary. We
were heading out on life’s journey together with no jobs, no permanent place to
live, and practically no money. Linda
did have a promise from her dad that if she wanted to leave me and return home
for a little while, she could do so, but only once. If life were a game of Monopoly, that was her
“Get Out of Jail Free” card. I’m delighted to report that she hasn’t played
that card yet.
Some of you know what it’s like to go on vacation, but be miserable while preparing for it and impatient while traveling to it. The key to a great vacation is to enjoy the journey and not just the destination. Some couples fall into the trap of believing that today must be endured because tomorrow will be wonderful. Life will be great when ….
…we get a place of our own.
…when the children get out of diapers or in school or learn to drive themselves or get out of college.
…when I can cut back on my workload and enjoy more recreation.
Marriage is a Covenant, Not Just a Commitment
Pastors are famous for splitting hairs over words and their meaning, but this distinction is crucial to making a marriage Christian. People make commitments to each other every day. We strive to honor those commitments the best we can. But most commitments are sustained by some kind of balance of giving and receiving.
v You give hours of each day to your job and,
in return, you are paid for your work.
But if that balance of giving and receiving ends, many commitments end as well. You quit your job. You cancel your subscription. You find another restaurant. You retire from coaching.
Some people think of marriage as a commitment, and, in many ways, it is. A couple marries believing they can give and receive some of life’s most precious gifts with each other. But Christian marriage goes beyond a commitment. A Christian marriage is a covenant. What’s the difference? If your marriage is a commitment, then you’re in it because of what you receive from your spouse. You give your best to them because they, in turn, give their best to you. But if your marriage is a covenant, you give your best, not because of what you receive in return, but because of who you are and what you believe. Your love is unconditional. This is the only way a person can love in sickness and in health, in wealth or poverty, in times of closeness and times of distance.
I’m not saying that one spouse can make a marriage work if the other spouse is unwilling. But I am saying that one spouse can sustain a marriage through times when the other spouse has nothing to give. Marriage is our best opportunity to love another person the way Christ loves us.
Make Your Marriage the Center of Your Family
In most wedding
pictures, no matter who is included, the couple is in the center. That’s good photography, but it’s also a good
rule to live by. There are two forces
that tug at a marriage and can move it out of the center of the family’s
life.
One is your Family of Origin, the people who raised you. Parents and grandparents release newlyweds to live their own lives, follow their own dreams, that is until the holidays. Then, the habits and traditions of the past show up like a ghost haunting Ebenezer Scrooge. “But you’ve always been with us on Christmas Eve.” “I’ve seen you on every one of your birthdays until now.” “I know it’s a long drive, but can’t you eat with us at Thanksgiving?” “When are you going to see, you know, her parents?”
I tell couples preparing for marriage that they have to decide who their family is going to be. You never stop loving or, to some degree, accommodating the family who raised you, but you can’t let them and their expectations drive the bus of your marriage or your family. I tell couples, “From the day you marry, you two are, in the deepest sense, your family. Everyone else will have to accept that and hopefully understand.”
The other force that pushes your marriage out of the center of your family life is Children.
Not long ago, we gathered here to thank God for the life of Janice Brewton. As we prepared for that service, Jimmy shared a sweet memory he has of his parents. The children of his family were welcomed, sometimes required, to sit with their parents during the worship service, but they were never allowed to sit between them. I think that picture illustrates a truth about marriage.
Even when children join your family, especially when children join your family, you must work to keep your marriage the center of the family. If you build your life around the children and neglect your relationship, the children will become anxious. They know if mom and dad’s happiness depends upon their performance. And, sooner or later, children move away. Some of them come back, but they usually move away again. All parents strive to work themselves out of a job, but they don’t want to work themselves out of a marriage because they have no real relationship with each other apart from the children. Never let your courtship end. Dress up and go out occasionally. Let your children see and learn that a marriage is worth the time and attention needed to keep it strong.
Confess Your Mistakes and Offer Genuine Forgiveness
As you travel this summer, you’ll probably notice that the further you travel, the more your car will fill up with trash: empty water bottles, food wrappers, drive-through receipts, packaging from that item you just couldn’t resist at the Cracker Barrel. That trash becomes intrusive and annoying. Don’t you feel better when you take some time to go through the car, gather up all that trashy clutter, and throw it away? The same is true for relationships. As we travel through life together, we pick up some junk: thoughtless words, jokes that bring more pain than laughter, emotions from another source unfairly vented or weaponized. The trash can build up until it intrudes upon the joy of our journey. We need to know how to gather it up and throw it away.
My growing up family blessed my life in many ways, but they didn’t teach me a great deal about working through problems by confessing your mistakes and forgiving a person for hurting you. Looking back as an adult, I can see that our pattern was more like, “Keep your distance for a while, then go on with your life and pretend that bad thing never happened.” I brought that pattern into my own marriage and my own family. I didn’t see how much was at stake in confessing and forgiving until we welcomed children into our family. Then, I saw how a child will innocently assume that any problem or conflict in the family is their fault, unless you tell them and teach them differently. They motivated me to learn how to say, “Dad snapped at you at the table tonight, not because you were being so bad, but because I had a hard day at work and came home frustrated. I was wrong to take that out on you. You didn’t deserve that. I hope you’ll forgive me.”
Learning the sacred art of confessing and forgiving demands an entire message of its own, but know that it’s essential to a good marriage and a happy life. I love catchy sayings and think this one says a mouthful about the character of people who handle their mistakes and the mistakes of others well.
The first to apologize is the bravest.
The first to
forgive is the strongest.
The first to
forget is the happiest.
Don’t Take the Life You Share for Granted
In my closet there is a mirror that hangs on the wall. On the frame of that mirror is a stick-on name tag that reads “Visitor.” The only other words on that tag are “Encompass Health Care.” That tag has been attached to that mirror for a little more than a year-and-a-half. I received it the day we brought Linda home from the hospital after her fall and brain bleed. I keep it stuck to the frame of my mirror so I don’t forget what I felt that day. That Friday, I realized how close we had come to losing the life we’ve shared. I felt a profound sense of gratitude that she was improving daily and was now at home. But, as I peeled that sticker off of my shirt to get ready for bed, I remembered how easily we forget. We forget that every day we share is a gift. We forget that life is fragile and fleeting. I keep that sticker on my mirror to remind me not to take the life we share for granted. I hope you’ll find your own reminder and not lose sight of the priceless gift of sharing life with someone you love.
Don’t Let the Fear of Bad Times Steal the Joy of Your Good Times
Other than me, Linda doesn’t have many chronic ailments. But she does have a chronic digestive illness, Crohn’s Disease. She was diagnosed a few years into our marriage, not long after our first child, Elizabeth, was born. Crohn’s, in its more extreme forms, can severely compromise a person’s health and impose major limitations on the patient’s lifestyle. In the early days of Linda’s illness, she suffered practically every day. Later, as medicines were found that managed her symptoms more effectively, Linda began to enjoy more healthy days. But rather than meeting these good days with joy and gratitude, I stayed “on guard,” watching for and worrying over any sign or symptom that Linda was relapsing into a Crohn’s attack. While she appreciated my interest and support, she realized that my attitude was keeping us from enjoying many of the good days her seasons of remission offered. She challenged me to reframe my understanding of the ups and downs of her health in a way that would allow us to embrace and enjoy the good days as they came. She said, “Dee, let me be a well person who sometimes gets sick, not a sick person who sometimes is well.” I saw the deep truth and wisdom in her challenge and made it the standard by which I sought to meet each day. Choosing this attitude has added a great deal of positivity and hopefulness to our marriage and all aspects of my life. Seasons of sickness and struggle will come, but we don’t have to allow them to steal away the joy of healthy happy times by dreading the prospect of their arrival. As Leo Buscaglia wrote, “Worry never robs tomorrow of its sorrow, it only saps today of its joy.”
Your life, like mine, will include some wonderful days of joy and blessing and other days of pain and struggle. But you have a choice to make about how you will understand and experience those ebbs and flows of life. You can suffer through what you’ve decided is a bad life, with a few good days sprinkled in, or you can share a good life that sometimes includes life’s inevitable storms. The choice you make will decide whether you have a joyful marriage and a happy life.
Know How to Face the Seasons
We’re blessed to live in a place where we experience all four seasons, although in Columbia summer lasts six months and winter six days. Imagine that you’d grown up in the Amazon rain forest where the climate never changes. Then, you’re moved to Columbia, SC. Right now, you could hardly tell the difference, but when fall comes, you’d see things you’d never seen before. The days shorten. The temperature drops. The leaves on the trees change color and drift to the ground. The garden stops growing. If you didn’t know better, you might think the world was ending. But because you know about the seasons, you realize that after the time of cold and relative darkness, spring will come and new life will appear.
Every marriage I know anything about goes through seasons. If you don’t understand that you might think that the first time your feelings falter or you second-guess your commitment, your world is coming to an end. It’s not. In some ways that are predictable and others that are mysterious, marriages pass through seasons, including winter. But when it comes, don’t freak out or bail out because spring can follow winter for those who hang on and bring a new beginning and new life, more beautiful than anything you’ve known before.