On Marriage Part I

My wonderful and beautiful daughter related a story several years ago when she was in med school in San Diego, California. She, and several of her girlfriends, who were in UCSD’s Medical School with her, were at a gathering, involved with wine no doubt, and discussing what was their success based on; in other words these fourteen or fifteen young women were trying to figure out how come, or what was the basic reason for their success in school, particularly getting into med school, their obvious success in undergraduate school, and why their dreams and aspirations were set towards a relatively high bar. It was interesting to hear her response based on that conversation. The common denominator that they all came up with was that their parents had stayed together. She, my daughter, also followed up with an even more base line—that because we had all stayed together, they, including my daughter (although there were some teenage years that I wanted to….er, never mind) felt safe, secure and at the core, loved.

That got me to thinking. Before we can know God and Christ the face of God which is love, we need to know that we are secure and loved by those who we can experience in a material way. Does that mean that any who do not have the blessings of these women not succeed? Absolutely not. But the pathway seems to be more “secure”, or maybe more readily available according to them.

And then I started pondering my own life. Marilyn and I have been married for almost thirty-three years. Not that I’m any great success, or that we are any great success, but what success I do claim does also come from parents who stayed together—through thick and thin—and this year they are celebrating in August their sixtieth wedding anniversary. My in-laws are well over fifty years, and after counting on my fingers and toes how old Marilyn is, well over fifty-six years of marriage. And my grandparents on both my father’s and mother’s side had both well over fifty years of marriage; and the same with Marilyn’s grandparents. Is there something to that? And is it, a good and holy marriage, worth it? I believe an emphatic ‘yes’ for a number of reasons.