By Mark A. Taylor
We began editing this issue the week I was celebrating my 36th wedding anniversary. And I couldn”t help thinking how the advice of Randy Gariss and Paul Williams apply to my marriage as well as my ministry.
Stick with a ministry for the long haul? Difficult. Stick with a marriage for a lifetime? Some would say impossible.
Indeed, this summer”s tabloids have been filled with news of failed marriages, with conservative politicians as well as reality show stars confessing affairs and vowing to move on to the next chapters in their lives.
Time magazine took note of this in its July 13 cover story, “Unfaithfully Yours,” jumping off from the celebrity split-ups to decry the general state of matrimony in America. “There is no other single force causing as much measurable hardship and human misery in this country as the collapse of marriage,” it said.
Marriage today is “an extremely fragile construct,” the article asserts, “depending less and less on notions of sacrifice and obligation than on the ephemera of romance and happiness as defined by and for its adult principals.” And the number of those choosing a different path than lifetime marriage continues to rise. May figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention underscore the trend: births to unmarried women have now reached 39.7 percent.
If the purpose of marriage is my own happiness or self-fulfillment, the report concludes, “we might as well hold the wake now.”
There probably aren”t many people whose idea of 24-hour-a-day good times consists of being yoked to the same romantic partner, through bouts of stomach flu and depression, financial setbacks and emotional upsets, until after many a long decade, one or the other eventually dies.
The report”s conclusion, based on quotes from researchers””none of them speaking as Christians””is this: Children need their mothers and their fathers to develop as healthy adults. And if children don”t learn commitment and sacrifice by seeing it demonstrated over decades by their parents, the result could be devastating: what commitment and sacrifice will those children as adults demonstrate toward their aging, ailing parents?
“We do not want to pay the price of thoughtful confrontation,” Paul Williams writes this week, describing a minister”s relationships. But it”s also true of couples whose marriages don”t succeed.
“It is through long-term relationships and difficult servanthood that we change,” Randy Gariss adds, thinking of his ministry; but his truth applies to marriages too. “In staying, there is transformation: hard, tearful at times, exasperating, but ultimately beneficial.”
And fulfilling. Readers whose marriages have survived decades know how their commitment has helped them grow. This change is a fruit of lifetime marriage the Time report didn”t mention, understood only by those who have paid the price to taste it.
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