"For Better or For Worse"

We look so happy, don’t we?! Do you want to know the secret to staying married through seven moves, five years of grad school, four kids, post-partum depression, and three career changes? Sheer, jaw-clenching commitment! It was funny when Bill and I were looking through pictures the other night. For one thing, I marveled at how difficult it was to find pictures of the two of us together without kids. You get to that point, where you are just taking pictures of kids and one or the other of you always has the camera….and then there were those years that we didn’t have a camera, and those years that didn’t seem like you wanted to remember much. Bill would remark. “You look tired in that picture.” Huh! You think?! Or “Your smile is pasted on in that picture.” Yeah, probably!

Truthfully, though, when I recount the events of the last twelve years, I wouldn’t recommend that many try to follow in our footsteps. Of course the one thing I believe was always woven through was our desire to be in the center of God’s will. How many times I’ve pleaded with the Lord as we’ve had a revelation of a past mistake, “O God, don’t you know our hearts were right?” …and I know He does.

When you stand at the altar, gaze sappily into each others’ starry eyes, and say the words, “For better or for worse“, you have NO idea what that will entail. We couldn’t possibly know. - and if we did, we’d probably never say them.

Being committed to our marriage is a choice to love each other unconditionally the way Christ loves and pursues us. It’s a choice to remain faithful the way Christ is always faithful. It is a realization that if one of us chose to leave, we couldn’t be right with God. It means staying committed to each other through weight gain, depression, childhood scars, emotional handicaps, job loss, uncertainty, poverty, bed rest, loneliness, fatigue, stress, long work hours, overdue papers, piled up laundry, failures, hurting each other, cultural differences, growing spiritually at different rates, disrespect, apathy, sharing one car, and endless diapers. Our marriage has been through all of those and more, sometimes to our shame - and sometimes just because it was life - our journey in process.

During one of our hardest years, I cried to a friend, “I want to stick through this because I don’t want to miss how beautiful it could be in ten years if we let God work.”…and work He has. To His glory, we genuinely are happily, gleefully in love even after all of the above. But now when we think of the words, “For better or for worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health,” we have a real understanding of what that means. Today, I would honestly say all those words again.

I heard a new statistic on the radio the other day. They interviewed those that had been at a crisis point in their marriage and chosen to work things out. They also interviewed those that had chosen to divorce. Five years later, those that had worked things out said they were happier than ever, while those who had chosen divorce reported that they were just as miserable as when they were married.

Sheer and utter commitment to God and each other. That is our secret, folks! We’ve had good times. We’ve done a lot of things right. But without choosing to remain committed no matter what, we couldn’t have recovered from our mistakes. We wouldn’t have let God heal and restore. We wouldn’t be looking to the future with hope.

But we are!