Dear Daughters,
I had never noticed that the Bible begins with a marriage and ends with a marriage. In their book Love and War, John and Stasi Eldredge point out that the epic story of human history, spanning thousands of years, begins in Genesis with a garden and a couple. As God unfolds the beautiful, frightening, mysterious story of His love, there is not some lone hero standing against the world, but a man and a woman – a marriage.
In the book of Revelation, the end of the world as we know it – after a very long battle – there is finally a feast, a wedding feast. The wedding here is between Jesus Christ and his bride, the church.
In a sense, marriage is the Kingdom of God. It is meant to bring glory to God because God is love and where there is love, there is God. (Mother Teresa) When we love each other in our marriages, forgive when there are offenses (and there will be offenses every day), sacrifice for one another, never give up hope, always persevere in the difficult times of life, we are modeling what the love of God is all about.
The bottom line story of the Bible is Love. God loves us and He wants us to love one another. Sounds simple, but as we both know, it’s not. Why? Because this beautiful love story is placed in the middle of a dreadful war.
Think of all the fairy tales you love. One of my favorites is The Little Mermaid by Hans Christian Anderson, later made into a Disney movie. If you remember, that love story is placed in the midst of a war as well. Ursula, the sea witch, was doing everything she could to keep Ariel and the Prince from marrying, making a mockery of love. In the end, the Prince and Ariel did marry but not without a battle of heroic proportions.
Think of the famous girls and boys in other adventure stories you have read: Shasta and Aravis in The Horse and His Boy, being driven together by Aslan the Lion. Hansel and Gretel holding hands together for safety in the dark woods, Beauty and the Beast learning to love so they can both be free. People all over the world love those stories. Why? Because we want to live stories like that as well.
The honeymoon of Adam and Eve barely started when the serpent successfully snaked in with a plan to break everyone’s heart. His deceptive lie hissed, You can live without God and because that lie was embraced, there was broken fellowship between the humans and God. It was the beginning of distrust, blaming, shaming, and betrayal. Satan’s plan has not changed one iota since; he comes only to kill, steal and divide.
But in this, the world’s darkest moment, love shone through. In spite of chronic unbelief on our part, God pledged to love and pursue us. He did this through the great Prince, Son of the King, Jesus Christ. Christianity is truly the most preeminent love story the world has ever known.
This story is not over, it is still unfolding right now, even as you are reading. The terrible clash between the Kingdom of God and the kingdom of darkness continues. At the core of this age-old struggle, there is one overarching question that is being raised: Can a kingdom of love prevail? God vows that Love never fails, (1 Corinthians 13:8) but the world laughs and the devil laughs. Sometimes we laugh too. It sounds so naïve. Love seems so weak when compared to all the evil around us.
Your marriage is set in the midst of this story, the age-old beautiful story of God pursuing His people; it is a story of redemption, a story of love. But that story is opposed, because we have an enemy who desires to see our marriages and families divided. His goal is to bring bitterness and strife.
It seems that if we as married couples can’t find a great battle to fight together we’ll start one with each other. For years I saw Dad as the enemy of our marriage. He wouldn’t agree with me on how to raise you girls, on which movies to watch, how to discipline, decisions on spending money….and on and on. So I fought with him, fighting for my opinion to win, my view to be the right view. Not surprisingly, this did not improve our marriage.
Then God finally opened my eyes to see the spiritual battle that was going on, a battle that could only be fought effectively with prayer and love. You know the verse, Love your enemies, pray for those who hurt you…? Well, when I finally started doing what this verse says, a ray of hope sprang up in my heart. I started trusting God to do His work, instead of me trying to change things. And that is precisely when things started to change.
Oh, how I lament the years that I tried to do things in my own power, but God is so gracious. He patiently waits for each of us to come to the point of giving up on ourselves and giving in to Him. He never coerces, never pressures, but simply pursues and encourages us through his Spirit.
We are prone to wander, forget, and go back to old patterns, but for that too God is patient, forgiving and filled with grace, always urging us to get up and try again.
God loves you as you are, not as you should be. (Brennan Manning)
Love, Mom
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