If our relationship was based on "romantic love," on the diluted version of love our culture sells, a love without substance, free of commitment and void of sacrifice, we would have broken up in month two when the first intense conflicts started emerging lol. We’ve pondered this many times, the love we’ve been given and has fostered contains romance but is not romantic in nature, but sacrificial, and a love that we as Christians are called to but that is countercultural to everything within us and everything our culture sells us on what love is.
Ben and I are two intense people. We love with all we’ve got and we fight with all we’ve got lol. But through it all and through conflict, trials and challenges, we come out in the end realizing there is a Love and a love that sustains us. A love based and rooted in the Love of that Christ that has so deeply transformed and affected our lives and a love not based on nor void of emotion but not built on it, yet a love characterized by the strength of will and commitment, and a never-ending surrender to treat one another and cherish one another as we ought. A love that stretches and endures, deepens over time, that is ultimately not about us, but about something so much greater... A love is transcendent and reminds us of how He first loved us...
"ROMANTIC LOVE HAS NO ELASTICITY TO IT. It can never be stretched, it simply shatters. Mature love, the kind demanded of a good marriage, must stretch, as the sinful human condition is such that all of us have conflicting emotions. “Her hatred is real as her love is real,” Porter explains of the young wide. This is the reality of the human heart, the inevitability of two sinful people pledging to live together, with all their faults, for the rest of their lives.
A wedding calls us to our highest and best—in fact, to almost impossible—ideals. It’s the way we want to live.”
- Sacred Marriage, Gary Thomas
No comments:
Post a Comment