08/12/2017
Two individuals enter into a wedding ceremony, but one flesh emerges from a life together. This is a beautiful mystery, and it is fraught with hardship and challenge. Are we ready for the flame that purifies a marriage? Are we prepared to endure the fire and become one ash in the palm of God?
“Therefore let us be grateful for receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, and thus let us offer to God acceptable worship, with reverence and awe, for our God is a consuming fire.”
Hebrews 12:28-29 ESV
Ruby and Bill Hughes attend my church and just celebrated their 68th wedding anniversary. I saw them sitting side by side on the pew last Sunday, and as I remarked about their lives together, Ruby said that Bill had taught her how to love and live with someone... to which Bill responded "She is my gift!"
I thought about them the next morning as I drove into work and the song "You've Lost That Loving Feeling" came on the radio. The song is based on a man's belief that his relationship is failing because his girlfriend is beginning to criticize the little things he does. How incredibly wrong that assumption is! Ruby and Bill testified to that.
Love is not just the intense emotion that many people think it is. Just because it might start that way doesn't mean that is all there is to it. Ruby didn't say that Bill had only taught her how to love someone... that ability was largely given to her by God. Bill didn't say that Ruby was a wonderful and perfect wife... He said she was His gift, and that came from God as well.
Loving someone, or loving God, requires perseverance. It takes more than just falling in love... it involves learning how to live with one another... how two individuals can become one. I had never really paid attention to the wording of the scripture that we often use in understanding marriage until recently. In most translations it speaks about becoming one flesh, but not about instantly being made one flesh... it is the beginning.
“'Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.' So they are no longer two but one flesh.”
Mark 10:7-8 ESV
Ruby talked of learning to live with Bill when I spoke to her; this is an interesting observation because it takes what started as infatuation and flaming desire, and brings it to the place where the fire has engulfed the wood and left the ashes. Love isn't about the wood... it is about the ashes. It is about what is left when everything that is particular to us, and separates us, has been consumed, and the ash is what remains.
I was a boy scout in my younger years and loved to build a fire in my campsite. We would cook our meals over it, keep warm by it, see each other in the dark by its light, and find our way back to camp by its glow and smoke. I would lay wood upon it all evening, and stoke it to keep it going, but finally I would grow tired and sleep. Over the course of the night, all of the wood burned down and by morning there was a white pile of ash where the individual sticks of wood had been the night before. Many sticks, much effort, and now... one pile of ash.
Ash, it is the one body, it is what we have when people have completed the process of becoming one. It is the 68th wedding anniversary that remains when the wood of living a life together has taken the two, and made them indistinguishable, and inseparably one by the flame of God.
God is the fire in our lives, He converts us from two individual sticks into one ash. He makes all that a fire does possible as we live together, and in the end he sees us as one... no longer wood, but pure and white in His hand... a gift.
There is something else interesting about a campfire... if rain extinguishes it you are left with a little ash and the remains of unburnt logs, or if a piece of wood rolls out of the fire it will smolder for a while and then go out. It will not turn to ash, the wood remains; marked by the fire, leaving some ash behind, but is still distinguishable as wood. The premature death of a spouse is a fire quenched by rain, and divorce becomes two logs that have rolled from the flame before they were fully consumed. Neither reached the place where the two fully became one.
Whether by rain or by rolling away, each piece of wood that has been in a fire is marked by it, but if you gather two partially burnt logs a flame can be rekindled and the process of becoming ash can begin once more. In the end, these two can now become one, and as Ruby puts it... they can learn to live with one another. The gift is not lost to them.
Fire when it is hot enough will feed itself like a forest fire, but that is something different. The love of two people is more like the campfire, it requires work to keep the flame burning, but if tended properly then families grow and are fed, the warmth of the coals comfort all, it illuminates everyone around it, and brings home those who stray. However, in the end we have ash; we are left with the two having become one. This is what we place on our foreheads or cover ourselves with when parents or loved ones die... it is not the memory of the two, but of the one.
“So we have come to know and to believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him. By this is love perfected with us, so that we may have confidence for the day of judgment, because as he is so also are we in this world.”
1 John 4:16-17 ESV
Prayer:
Father, I thank you for our becoming one flesh. I thank you for your fire which burns away our differences and leaves us as one. Living our lives as husband and wife is a process, a miracle, Lord, and we look to you as our guide; as the one who brings us to the place where we are indistinguishable from one another... one body... one flesh... your gift to us. Holy Father we often twist in the flame that consumes the individual as it leaves us as one, but even as it burns we find your peace and a joy in one another, blessings that only you can provide. We learn to live together and we become a gift to one another. It takes some of us many years to come to this realization, and there are those who miss it altogether, but thank you for those of us who allow you to tend their marriages, lives, and fires. Make us pure Father; let us be the white ash you hold in your palm when our days are done... two souls... one flesh... one love.
Rich Forbes