To Tie the Knot

Well, I'm doing a wedding later today. That's an interesting expression come to think of it; "doing" a wedding. I wonder if we "do" marriage. After all marriage takes some doing.

I heard a couple at a marriage enrichment event say, "The reason we are still married after all these years is that we did not fall out of love with each other at the same time." Scott Peck wrote that weddings happen when two people "fall in love," but then asked, "If you fall, what happens when you get up?" I call that marriage...and it takes some "doing" to stay married.

The blurry eyed couple who will stand before me later today do not really know this. They never do. O, they think they know it but as my marriage counseling professor said the first day of class, "Let's get something straight, no one knows what they are doing when they get married."

We have to figure it out though don't we? What happens after you "get up?" Peck also said that real love takes two things: work and courage...Work is the overcoming of the selfish desire to get lazy in relationship building....and courage is the overcoming of the fear that I need to learn who I am as well as who the "other" I am married to really is.

One old saying is that when two people get married the "two become one." The trouble starts when they try to figure out "which one." Marriage takes a lot of figuring out. Statistics reveal that as a culture we often do not figure it out.

Everybody is hard to live with so why are we surprised? In the "old wisdom" of the Bible it clearly states that the only real hope of staying married in a healthy way is to discover something called "agape." The word is translated "love" but it means "dis-interested love." In other words you love the other person not for what they can do for you or for what they need to be for you...You love them for what they need and who they are.

God does not "love" us...God "agape-s" us. To say that "love" is from God is a bit too casual because we "love" cars, potato chips, and sitting on the beach. Loving another person is different and therein is the problem. We've confused love. I tell people most of what we do should be spelled "Luv." We "luv" all kinds of things. Luv is closer to lust and possession and contains a lot of co-dependence.

So today I'll "do" a wedding for two people who are definitely in "luv." I hope they will discover "agape" somewhere along the road. They will need you. If you are reading this and you are married you know what I mean.
(I'll be at a continuing education event next week so I may not be blogging..if not I'll return the next week...until then may you find some "luv" and even more "agape.")
Bless you,
jody jseymour@davidsonumc.org