Marriage is Daily

I wrote the following in July of 2006 for the newsletter of Santa Margarita Community Church. As I read it over this afternoon (in between getting cold packs, chicken broth, water, and apple juice for my wife who had two wisdom teeth extracted), I thought I'd post it on my blog. This article looked forward to a major event in the life of one of my daughters. Since then her brother has also learned the significance of what I wrote. I thought it bears repeating both for those who are married and for those who will one day be married.

"Over the years I’ve mused about many things in this column. The purpose of the church. The importance of rest. The power of the resurrection. The struggle for holiness. The heart-breaking reality of sin. The profound relief of forgiveness in Christ.

I’ve also chronicled the more pedestrian seasons in my own life, both implicitly and explicitly. I have, at some level, let you into the mundane, menial aspects of life as a pastor, a father, a husband, a friend. I’ve shared with you the joy of children who follow Jesus. I’ve written about the humbling I’ve received at the hands of my children or wife. I’ve opened myself to you regarding the bittersweet season of having them graduate high school and launch (and then re-launch) into adult life.

Over the past few years, Kelli has done a marvelous job planning weddings for some of her friends. Recently Kelli was looking at a church building with a view to its suitability for an upcoming wedding. In the back corner of the sanctuary, I noticed a room with a large window that allows you to see and hear the wedding without those in the wedding hearing you. I told Kelli that during the wedding she’s planning, that’s where I will be. You see, it’s the crying room, and the wedding she is planning is her own.

I am still amazed by the father of the bride at a wedding over which I officiated. In the middle of the wedding, he sang “Sunrise, Sunset” without wavering once. (The rest of us were undone.) I distinctly remember the umpteenth viewing of the aforementioned “Fiddler on the Roof” when I switched my allegiance from Teyve’s children to Teyve. How could the girls grow up and marry those boys?

Yet I find myself in Teyve’s situation. A young man has captured the heart of my daughter. He is a man of integrity. He is a man of faith. He is a man who is willing to work hard. He is a man who is willing to commit himself to the daily-ness of life with one woman and one woman only…for the rest of his life. That woman is my daughter.

Pray for David Mireles and Kelli Schliep as they make public and permanent the most profound promise anyone can make to another person. As Kathleen Norris writes in her book The Quotidian Mysteries: Laundry, Liturgy and “Women’s Work” (quotidian is a word meaning “occurring every day; commonplace, ordinary”), “In seeking any covenantal relationship we must be willing to say ‘yes’ long before we have a clear idea of what such intimacy will cost us. Marriage is eternal, but it’s also daily, as daily and unromantic as housekeeping…Paradoxically, human love is sanctified not in the height of attraction and enthusiasm but in the everyday struggles of living with another person. It is not in romance but in routine that the possibilities for transformation are made manifest. And that requires commitment.”

You will never find that written in a Hallmark© card. But those who have been married for more than six weeks know the reality of it. It is quotidian, dying to ourselves in order to live the life that God desires for us to live. Pray that Dave and Kelli’s married life will overflow with a deep and abiding commitment that expresses itself in daily acts of service for each other."