Devotion and Service

I've been wanting to write a post about marriage since my husband and I celebrated our one-year anniversary a month ago, but it's hard to open up about something so personal. I've been going nuts thinking about angles to write from and specific moments to address, but nothing seemed to be right. Sometimes, these things hit you when you least expect them.

My husband and I just got done celebrating a fabulous Memorial Day weekend with family and friends. Like many Americans, we spent a lot of time in the past handful of days contemplating the service and devotion of the men and women who have defended our great nation. In a world that seems to value the self over others, I think those two traits - devotion and service - are the ultimate act of love. I am so thankful that our country is made of amazing men and women who have given up years of living a life of ease to defend this great country, and who risked it all in so doing. I am so grateful for those who have lost loved ones who did make that ultimate sacrifice, and the men and women who bear the permanent scars of their love for America.

For some people, it might seem that making a link between the war fighter and the husband or wife is disrespectful. If you're one of those, I apologize. Most husbands and wives are not putting their lives on the line every day in their marriages. They serve one another rather than an entire nation. However, I do think that devotion and service are absolutely key components to making any marriage work.

Coming out of the trust-busting, impermanence of dating and into the world of marriage is a huge step. In our pre-marital counseling book, each chapter seemed designed to prove to my fiance and me that our relationship was not ready for that next step. The book questioned our most basic values and put us through countless wringers. What about financial decisions, it asked. What about children, and your core values? Are you sure God has pointed you towards the person you are meant to be with?

While we were going through our counseling book, my fiance and I were living several states apart. We filled out our answers to all the questions separately, and discussed them together over the phone. Most of the time, we could have filled in our partner's answers on top of our own. In the time we'd been dating and, yes, living together, we'd already done most of the questioning. The book didn't confronted us with much that we hadn't discussed before. But the severity of those answers was definitely an eye-opener. Before, if we had a massive disagreement over funds or interior decorating, either of us could have walked away from the relationship unscathed. Once we were married, walking away wouldn't be so simple. And in the course of a lifetime of marriage, we would have to communicate our way through more than the petty disagreements that plagued our lives as daters.

Every so often, we met up with our pastor to discuss our progress in the book, and to talk about our expectations for married life. He and his wife opened their home to us, Skype-chatted with us, and devoted their time to ensuring we were ready for what we were about to set out on. Our pastor had never performed a marriage before. His track record was clean, he explained, and he wasn't going to marry two people who would end up divorcing. Divorces were a negative stain on that track record, and he wanted to stay in the positive. We nodded and smiled, promised that he had nothing to worry about.

Whenever we met up with our pastor, he loved to discuss what the bible had to say about the sacred rite of marriage. I always looked forward to these parts of our sessions.  The one verse that sprang up over and over again was Mark 10:6-9: "But at the beginning of creation,  God made them male and female. 'For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.' So they are no longer two, but one flesh.' Therefore, what God has put together, let no man separate."

At first, I appreciated this verse at the surface level. Over time, I felt the power of this verse resonating more deeply. Now that I have my first year of marriage under my belt, I agree with our pastor. This passage is a particularly great example of God's will that marriage be based on devotion to one's partner over one's self.

In our first thirteen months of marriage, we have had some amazing joys and beautiful experiences. Of course, it wasn't all sunshine and rainbows; a few issues did raise their ugly heads. Most of the time, we dealt with those issues well. We talked through our feelings on the subjects at hand until we were both satisfied that our opinions were on the table. Then, we came to mutually-agreeable resolutions. Then there were other times when we didn't do so well.  I can count those times on the fingers on one hand, which is positive, I suppose. 

One thing I have noticed from the problems we have run into is that they occur when one of us fails to treat the other as an extension of our own self.  That's when devotion and service are necessary. In a marriage, your partner is more than just the person whose bed your share and whom you keep company with. Your partner is part of your self. They know you more intimately than anyone, God aside. When you mistreat your partner, you are depriving yourself of the partner God means for you to have by diminishing what ought to be a most spectacular and awesome relationship.

I am lucky to have gone through that wringer of pre-marital counseling with our pastor and my husband. It gave me the foundation for the marriage I have always wanted,