08/12/2025
Two individuals enter a wedding ceremony, but upon the marriage’s consummation only one flesh emerges to form a life together. This is a beautiful mystery, and over the years it is fraught with hardships and challenges. 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? Are we determined to live out the years together?
“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 were well up in their years and attended my church the year they celebrated their 68th wedding anniversary. I saw them that Sunday sitting side by side on the church pew, and as I remarked about their married life 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" played 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 such assumptions are! Ruby and Bill’s love was testament 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... as a matter of fact that ability was largely given to her by God. No, she said he taught her how to live with someone. And Bill didn't say that Ruby was a wonderful and perfect wife... No, he said she was His gift, and the gift he was referring to came from God as well.
Loving someone, or loving God, requires perseverance, determination, and self-sacrifice. 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 I had been married for some time. In most translations it speaks about becoming one flesh, but not about instantly being made one flesh... it is the beginning… it is becoming.
“'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
So, 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 a flaming desire and brings it to a place where the fire has engulfed the wood and left the ashes. But love isn't about the wood... it is about the ashes. It is about what is left when everything that is particular to us as individuals is separated from us, has been consumed by love, and has been reduced at last to a single pile of ash.
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 at night and smoke by day. I would lay wood upon it all evening, and stoke it to keep it from dying out, but finally I would grow tired, and sleep would come over me. Over the course of the night, all the wood would burn down and by morning there was only a white pile of ash where the individual sticks of wood had been the night before. Many sticks, much effort, and now... one single 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 our lives together has taken the two, and made them indistinguishable, and inseparably one in 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 learn to live together, and in the end, he sees us as one... no longer wood, but pure white ash 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 will remain; marked by the fire, while leaving some ash behind, but it is still distinguishable as wood. The premature death of a spouse is a fire quenched by rain, and a divorce leaves behind two logs that have rolled from the flame before they were fully consumed. Neither has reached the place where the two fully became one.
Thus, 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 those two partially burnt logs and bring them together again a flame can be rekindled and the process of becoming ash can begin again. In the end, these two can now become one, and as Ruby put it... they can learn to love and live with one another. The gift will not be lost to them.
Fire can become hot enough that it will feed itself like a forest fire, but that is something quite different. The love of two people is much more akin to 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 comforts them, it illuminates everyone around it, and it brings home those who stray. Thus, in the end, there is ash, and 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. The two become many but are still one… one family.
“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 bringing us together as one flesh. Thank you for your fire which burns away our differences and leaves us as one. Father, thank you for showing us that living our lives as husband and wife is a process, a miracle, and that we should 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 the two is in their having become one. Holy Father we often twist in the flame that consumes our individuality and eventually leaves us as one, but even as it burns us, we find your peace and joy in one another, we experience blessings that only you can provide. We learn to live together, and we become a gift to you and 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 who allow you to tend to their marriages, lives, and spiritual fires. Make us pure Father; let us become the white ash you hold in your palm when our days are done... two souls... now one flesh and one love… just as we are when we become the church and are pronounced one with Jesus… the bride of Christ.
Amen, Amen, Amen!
“Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish.”
Ephesians 5:25-27 ESV
Rich Forbes