Christianity Archives - Page 18 of 41

I Don’t Want an Equal Marriage

This week, my Facebook stream was commandeered by an army of red equal signs.

At first, I didn’t know what that meant because I’ve always been a little socially awkward, even social media awkward, and I was oblivious. Was the entire nation suddenly becoming more interested in math?

Thankfully, before I had the chance to make a fool of myself, some other clueless person asked and the secret came tumbling out. That equal sign stood for marriage equality.

I had no intention of stepping in to the marriage equality debate on Facebook or anywhere else where meanings can be misconstrued and misapplied, where allegiances divide friendships and shut down communication before it even starts.

But I stopped when I saw the words marriage equality coupled with that great big equal sign because I realized something that might make the culture cringe, and it really has very little to do with the current debate and much more to do with my own heart and my own home.

I realized I don’t want an equal marriage.

Before my husband was my husband, back when we were just two kids talking marriage on a park bench in the forest of Chicago, we asked ourselves this question: Can we be better together than apart? Because we were both self-centered enough to know that equal wasn’t worth it. We wanted to know that together, we’d be more than the sum of our parts.

We wanted a marriage that was exponential, not equal.

Of course, we could have just taken our two equal selves and done some simple addition. After all, 1+1=2, and two is already better than one, right?

An equal marriage might work that way. But I didn’t want an equal marriage.

I wanted a marriage in which 1+1=1, and then somehow equals 3 or 4, or in our case, 7. That kind of math meant sacrifice, a dying to self, a setting aside of rights. It meant elevating the needs of the other above my own. That kind of math requires submission—mine and his.

If I had stuck to simple addition, I would not be the mother of five children. If I had stuck to simple addition, I would not have dropped out of school to help my husband finish two graduate degrees. He would not have taken the kids on vacation without me because I needed a break from everyone more than I needed a break with everyone. He would not have put a PhD program on the way back burner because he knew I couldn’t do it again, not yet.

We have both subtracted a lot out of lives and God has multiplied the remnants into something more than I could have imagined. But it wouldn’t have happened if we were both more interested in being equal than submissive.

Submission isn’t a popular word these days because being submissive means you have to consider someone else as better than yourself. You have to put someone else’s needs above your own and some days, that goes against every fiber of our being because deep down inside, we’re much less concerned about sacrifice than we are about rights. Our rights. Marriage rights.

That term—marriage rights—makes my heart a little sick every time I hear it, and it has nothing to do with homosexuality or Christianity or being gay or being straight or being something in between. It has to do with what I believe marriage is, not who it is for.

The term “marriage rights” cuts at my heart because I believe that when we reduce marriage to nothing more than a battle of rights, we’ve already lost. The beauty and reality of marriage is that it is a place to die, not a place to elevate rights. It is a place to subtract self and will and equality and all that other stuff that is in our nature but is not in our God and love someone more than ourselves.

That is sacrifice. Submission. Tough stuff.

It is tough because self is the hardest thing to die and the hardest thing to make submit, especially if there’s another self in the room. Self will proclaim, “He’s no better than me!” and “I have the right to be happy!” and while that kind of talk is normal and perhaps even logical, it is not biblical, and it does nothing to make a marriage that multiplies because self-talk constantly reduces the multipliers to 1.

Any number times one always equals itself, nothing more.

I do not want to struggle through marriage for nothing more than what I went in with. I do not want an equal marriage. I want an exponential marriage.

So while the debate over marriage rights rages on, I am battling to keep marriage equality out of my own home. It is hard because I am selfish. But I am choosing to keep my focus on the math that matters, the subtraction and division that will build up my husband, my children, and myself into more than just the sum of our parts.

I am choosing to have a marriage that multiplies.

Palm Sunday and Swords

The palm branches were late that morning. My friend, a tall brunette who drives a delivery car to church and pours her creativity into the flowers at her shop, rushed into church just as the announcements were ending.

I thought about the palm branches the night before. We even talked about it, as a family, but then Sunday had come and in the rush of looking holy enough for church, I had forgotten all about them.

I had forgotten we were waiting for something.

But the children hadn’t forgotten. They rushed upstairs after Sunday school anxious to grab a palm branch. That was their favorite part about Palm Sunday, and expectations ran high. But the palms weren’t there.

They looked up at me with disappointment in their eyes. “I don’t know,” I said, answering the question they didn’t ask. “Maybe we were wrong about the palms.”

Maybe we were wrong. Maybe we had been expecting something that was never going to come.

Then the door at the back of the church opened, and Oriana came in, a few bouncing chestnut curls framing her smiling face, and the children gasped.

The thing they had waited for, the thing they had hoped for, had arrived.

And it was all Hosanna! and waving hands and laughter. Hosanna! Hosanna!

But it didn’t take long for the praises to fade. Wiggling children turned palm branches into spears and swords and it was all poking eyes and whacking heads and more than one attempt by a particular redhead to impale an unsuspecting elder with a palm frond.

I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.

Is this what I was waiting for? More chaos?

I saw a crowd of Jewish mothers, skirts full of children, pregnant with expectation. The very thing they had waited for had arrived! Hosanna! Hosanna!

But the children were poking the donkey and whipping their sisters and all those Jewish mothers shot withering glances at their husbands because those boys certainly didn’t learn that kind of behavior from them.

It didn’t take very long for that long-awaited gift to lose its newness. It didn’t take very long for that good thing to turn sour. All the expectation in the world couldn’t keep the hosannas coming.

At the end of the day, there was nothing but the same dusty road, littered with broken branches because all those Jewish mothers had had enough of palm swords and had said things like, “If you don’t put that thing down right now…”

It didn’t take very long for the long-awaited Messiah to fall short. Because the Messiah they wanted couldn’t work out the worst in them. The Messiah they wanted couldn’t change a lick of their life.

Only a Savior could do that. But a savior was not what they were waiting for and certainly not what they expected.

So they missed it.

And they had to wait for their eyes to be opened and their hearts to be softened to this Messiah, the one who came late to the party with nothing they thought they needed, the Messiah who couldn’t hold their attention long enough to be late for dinner.

This Messiah–the Messiah–was more than just the main event at a ramshackle parade. He was more than an excuse to wave branches and cause a little trouble, more than just the fulfillment of a dream, more than just a novelty, more than just a one-time Hosanna.

He is everything worth waiting for.

Let it Be

It was a little too dangerous to be out on the roads that had just claimed the life of a young father. Great, treacherous flakes floated down from the clouds that hid the heavens. But that didn’t stop them from coming.

Beautiful saints, every one, they came to give a soft place for the tears to fall, to embrace the broken, and to mourn with those who mourned the most.

Bonnie, who had been widowed younger than my mother—was my mother a widow?—was one of the first to come. She came in, soggy from the snow, and grabbed my mother’s hands without stopping to take off her coat. Her tear-stained eyes searched my mother’s face for the pain she knew was there and the pain she knew was coming.

They sat together in the steel light of the feather-frosted window, and Bonnie sobbed. She sobbed for her dead young husband and she sobbed for my tall, handsome father, and she sobbed for my mother because Bonnie knew.

She sobbed because there was nothing else she could do.

There was nothing else anyone could do, and so, like Bonnie, they came in, silent as snow. Dear friends from church, relatives, even neighbors–everyone came. Some came for a minute, heaving a potted plant into my arms or pressing a fold of money into my hand for my mother before they flurried away so as not to be a bother.

Others stayed until the shadows grew and melted into the freshly-fallen snow. They did not know how to leave a woman who had just been left all alone in the world with three young children and a house that needed fixing. So they lingered.

They lingered until the little green house in the middle of the forest was filled up with the scent of the saints. Even with the drafty windows and a wood stove that wasn’t quite up to the task, there was a warmth in that place unlike anything I had known before. It was warm enough to calm the shivers that convulsed through my body, warm enough to stop my teeth from chattering, warm enough to help me believe that somehow, it would be okay.

I watched from the corner of the couch, from my little refuge behind the tall-backed adults and the nodding heads and the sad voices, and I saw Him. Jesus. Jesus in real hands and real feet and real tears crying over our Lazarus- grave when it was too late and there was nothing else that could be done.

How beautiful He is.

I rested my head on a couch cushion. It smelled like my Sunday school teacher, who didn’t have any children but who loved children more than most women who did. She had been there with me, and her fragrance lingered and filled up my space like a slow, parting embrace.

The entire house smelled like Jesus, in the remarkable way that Jesus smells like Dial soap and Old Spice and a kitchen full of casseroles.

Had He been there that day?

In my mind, I went over all the faces. Some old, some young, some full of their own agonies and some who were just learning how hope could be shattered. Each with a story, but each willing to step in to the day when my story fell apart. Just like Jesus.

It left me breathless.

Somehow, Jesus had come to my living room garden, and He had whispered to me, “Child, child. Why do you weep?”

He said it in words that came through other lips, chosen messengers, but it was there all the same. I clung to them as the bitter sleep drifted in and I thought to myself, if this is what it takes to see Jesus, then let it be.

I think of it, all these years later because we are in a hard bit of the road, right here. I have told you about it, dear saints, and you have come in with arms that ache to hold me up and tell me it will be okay. Some of you have cried with me because you know. You have called and you have written and you have prayed for me even when you do not know me, not really.

You have been Jesus to me.

And I weep because it is so beautiful, I do not know that I could ever trade these moments even for all the answers I ever wanted that did not come. I am surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, and it is you, dear friends, who cheer me on. It is you, dear ones, who minister Christ to me in real hands and real feet and real tears that cry over my Lazarus-grave.

You have shown me Jesus. I cannot wish for any other.

I am left with nothing more to say in my prayers but this: If this is what it takes to see Jesus, then let it be.

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