Cherishing the miracle of marriage

During my wedding reception, a small boy approached me just as I was about to cut the cake. All evening he had been ogling the cake topper, a tiny Lego man and wife I had purchased at the mall two days before. “Are you going to play with those Legos,” he asked, “or just cherish them?”

Realizing he was asking for a donation to his collection, I told him I was going to cherish them and that, no, I wouldn’t share. I wonder what the boy would think if he knew that the Lego people, along with the luscious chocolate-coconut cake top, have been sitting in my mother’s freezer for almost a full year. Not played with. Just cherished.

According to custom, we will soon ceremoniously withdraw the frozen cake. As I think forward to this occasion and look back on my first year as a bride, a Chinese proverb comes to mind:

“Experience is a comb which nature gives to men when they are bald.”

In the realm of marriage, nothing makes up for a wise word from an experienced veteran. Nothing cheers the heart like a word of good news dispatched from a distant land toward which you travel. Nothing discourages like the words “marriage is very, very hard. If you knew what you were in for, you wouldn’t get married.”

For people standing on the edge of marriage, or longing for it, I bring good news in three items.

First, you cannot earn love, no matter how much you want to. We seem to work from the default assumption: “You will love me if I do X, Y, and Z.” We worry that if we show our true foibles we will ruin our chances at love, when precisely the opposite is true. True lovers love foibles. They love you with your foot in your mouth and they love you when you have not yet perfected your character. Real love wants to see the whole person. And finding the person who will want to see all of you is always a miracle. Every time.

Second, the generosity of love does not stop you from growing. This mirrors the Apostle Paul’s adamant question: “Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? By no means!” Nothing motivates me like love motivates me. In marriage, I actually feel as though I share my husband Jonathan’s feelings because he is part of me. I feel keenly that I can make his life miserable or wonderful—depending on whether I choose to be whiny or grateful, competitive or helpful, passive aggressive or direct.

Third, a nagging wife may live inside every woman, but the woman who has God’s Spirit doesn’t have to listen to her. Nagging is just a symptom of not trusting God, and not believing that God will use your husband to lead you in the right direction.

If I had had these three combs of experience when I got married last May, I might have had better hair for the months that followed. But you cannot learn everything before you start. You can only be hopeful, and when the miracle comes, cherish it.