Thought of the Day 06.29.10

Marriage is a creature.

What I mean is that, when you get married, you actually create a brand new lifeform that didn’t exist before. There is you, there is your spouse, and there is also your marriage: a living breathing thing that can thrive or suffer based on your nurture or neglect of it.

This “creatureliness” of marriage means that marriage is sacred not in a way similar to life, but in precisely the same way as life. It means that you learn to guard your marriage’s safety and health the same way you might that of your child or a friend. And when a marriage ends, there really is a something that has been tragically killed. Some marriages die from neglect, and some from direct violence. But every divorce is really a marricide, whatever the culpability, and should be mourned as a death in the family.

Happily, the reverse is also true. If you are raising and nurturing your marriage well, it can be a thing of enormous beauty and satisfaction, sustaining both of you and glorifying the God who enabled you to create it.

This way of thinking, by the way, explains why we celebrate anniversaries basically as if they were birthdays. They really are. It's also why I look forward to a day when divorce is as uncommon as child mortality, the sort of ugly thing that happened to people who simply didn’t yet know how to prevent it.