This post is inspired by two people Thandi who celebrated her 8th wedding anniversary over
at http://www.thandislocsnlife.blogspot.com/ and Darius who posted a comment this week on fb asking:Is it better to love the one
you marry than to seek to marry the one you love? I hope this answers the question.
Set me as a seal upon thine heart, as a seal upon thine arm: for love is strong as death;
jealousy is cruel as the grave: the coals thereof are coals of fire, which hath a most vehement flame.
Songs of Song 8:6
Flames of Love- 8/5/2011- photo taken by hubby of a fire opposite our house last week
I awake from my slumber as the first rays from the morning sun peirces through our bedroom window.
I hear the familiar yet comforting soft breathing of my husband who is also rousing from the latter stages of sleep.
I snuggle up close and inhale all that is him,the stale aftershave
and the faint perspiration mixed with fabric softner on his clothes. Then it suddenly dawns on me.
It’s as though I’m peeking through the window and I’m on the outside looking in. It feels strange .
Questions race through my mind: Who is this man in my bed? Why did he choose me as his wife?
Why did I choose him to be the father of my children?
Before I got my drivers licence he had to take me to and from work 2-3 evenings a week.
He would drop me off at the staff entrance at the back of the store. We kiss as we part, and I blow kisses at the kids in their car seats
Then suddenly I’m at my desk I look up and I’ll see him from across a crowded room with the kids in tow.
For a moment he is a stranger, just another customer then I see his face
and then my brain scans its memory bank and then it finds the correct folder. Then its suddenly aflood with information.
I have to take a step back and take a deep breath. It is just so mind boggling . How is it that two strangers met?
I was born in the Caribbean never a thought to leaving my island much less comming to Britain.
I lived in East Ham ,East London for two years and he in Manor Park all his life.So many times we could have taken the same bus.
Or stood in line at Sainsbury’s supermarket, or at the cinema waiting to buy tickets.
Comming face to face but never really seeing each other ,because the time had not yet come.
What or why were we put in each others path and thereby igniting a course that changed our lives?
What steered us to make vows to stick together through life’s ups and downs until the end? Till death.
Then poof ! In a haze of smoke it’s gone. It becomes reality, tangible yet ordinary once again and I lose that window of amusing objectivity.
I return to my every day experience of married life with my husband. The usual greeting:”Good morning sweetheart, Did you sleep well?
“ Don’t forget to pick up the ink for the printer.”
Did you put the trash out last night ?”
.
We begin our day.Homeschooling the children,working, doing the dishes, changing poopy diapers,
wiping snotty noses ,laughing and praying together.
These moments metamorph into days, months ,years. The times he has held my hair back while I puked in the toilet.
Or the nights we’ve held an all-night vigil at a sick
child’s bed . Or yesterday when I fainted in the kitchen due to pregnancy anaemia and he had to scrape me off the floor.(baby is fine)
Every mistake ,joy, every miscarriage,job-loss, every hardship, every celebration – together.
You know what ,I can’t imagine it any other way.
It amounts to eleven years together. I choose to love the man I am married to. We live in a society that
says if it aint working throw it away.My bible tells me different . I left
the following response on his fb post
Romantic love is a fairly new concept 200 years maybe ,looking at the biblical model,
Samson loved Delilah and his first wife, jacob
loved rachel look where that got them.
I suspect Solomon loved all 700 of his wives too. Most biblical and oriental marriages were arranged.
In the uk statistics, arranged marriages are less likely to divorce than so called LOVE marriages.
Adam grew to love his wife so did Isaac and they
were great marriages.
In conclusion love the one you marry .
Provided it is ordained by God himself not mere phyisical, lustful fleshly desires”
I believe real love occurs after the music fades,the roses wither and hair starts balding and graying and things begin to sag.
I believe as each one seeks to imitate the love they have with Our Creator it can’t help but overflow into the marriage.
The Love portrayed in blockbusters like Titanic are not REAL nor are they like the
countless mindless trash turned out in the PUBLISHING FACTORIES like mills & boon.They make us build up unrealistic
expectations that are bound to fail. It says you can be fulfilled in every way by another human being.
Only God can fill that need ,He created us ,It is He that put that deep yearning there.
Love can mistakenly be confused with sex . Hugh Hefner and others have built a multi billion dollar industry on “free love” Love is not free it costs something.All these various cogs in this machinery used by secular humanist/ SATAN,inevitably lead to death of the family and eventually society. They are designed to leave us wanting more than the ordinary.
It takes our eyes off Jesus,our role in this great controversy and places Self on a pedestal. Indulging in perversity,lust and fleshly desires.
What happens when one finds the grass is not so green on the other side? Let’s tott up the casualities instead. Yes a generation of Madam Bovary types have been manifested in our culture today. Yet they never are fully satisfied. That is part of the reason why in christiandom divorce rates are rocketing.
I invite you all to dust off your bibles and turn to the love chapter in 1 corinthians 13 of the qualities of God’s love. If you find that the flames of love have dwindled then pray and ask God for empowerment to rekindle it.
I don’t like “christian rap” I think it an oxymoron but the opening lines of this song encapsulates what I have been trying to express in this post.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DvoIF_4N8zY&feature=related
Humbly yours
MizAJ4Christ