Searching For the Sound of Silence

Love. Death. Forever.

The velocity of life is apparent when we’re stilled by either cold tragedy or immense beauty. Our sojourning through this world is laden with mile markers where we look back and reflect upon the twisting road that has carried us to where we are.

This past Thursday I led a blue-eyed beauty down a quiet path to a familiar place: our weeping willow tree.

I shook before Jessica as I lowered my frame down to the dirt, lifted my eyes to meet her’s, and held a modest symbol of love between us.

“I want to love you the rest of my life, Jessie. Will you be my bride?”

Thankfully, without hesitation, she responded, “Of course!”

As I ponder our future together–this airy ambiguity called “marriage”–I find myself spinning questions in my mind:

“Do I have what it takes to love this beautiful woman well…forever?”

“What does love even mean?”

“What’s different about Jessica and I that provides hope amid the cultural regularity of marital failure: something like 55%?”

I look back at my past amid this beautiful moment in time and wonder whether the scars and sins I’ve inflicted on others can truly be overwhelmed and ultimately dissolved by grace.

Honestly, I don’t have a high enough view of myself to simply shrug these questions off and carelessly skip down the aisle. I’ve seen cold marriages , infidelity, and the pain of friends who after offering vows to women in white, have been forced to relent, retreat and start all over again.

The concept of marriage (probably for a whole host of reasons) injects my heart with a heavy dose of fear and trepidation. And ironically, I’m learning (slowly) that the very thing I’ve feared most about love is what fills my heart with hope when I look deeply into Jessica’s eyes: Love aims to kill me.

For the first time in my life, I’m looking forward to burying my beating heart beneath the dust, handing the reigns over to a girl and a God. And I believe that God is teaching me a new way to be human, drawing me into a metaphor (marriage) that will both wreck me and restore me–for the sake of not only Jessica and I, but His Kingdom.

Author Mike Mason says it this way,

marriage inevitably is a trap, a very cunning trap in which two people are caught in the absolute necessity of loving one another. In the taking of vows, it is as if they have agreed to an actual ultimatum: love or else. This a curious and frustrating and often excruciatingly painful trap to be in, but the plain fact is that if a couple do not love one another first, as they do themselves, then they cannot really love themselves or anyone else. But when they do love, that love becomes a fire that has the power to enkindle all around them.

So I’m learning to love. Truly love, for the first time. I’m scared that I don’t have what it takes, which is certainly the case. And yet, the existence of grace–the unmerited force of love reverberating off the cross, through the heart of the resurrected Jesus, Father and Spirit–is my hope. Sweet grace, come.

I’m trusting that where I (and we) fall short in this beautiful adventure called marriage, this death row march toward sanctification, God will establish his cross, and empower us to, again and again, do the impossible. Love.

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