April 15, 2009
Family Trees
I’m the type of person who likes stability in my life so I have a difficult time understanding the mind set of people who have multiple marriages and divorces. Bill and I hadn’t been married long when I lamented to his Great Uncle about all the broken branches on the family tree. I thought the uncle had been married to the same woman for many years. Come to find out he had divorced the first wife, had a couple of marriages and divorces in between and then remarried the first wife again. My brother-in-law is another example. As he prepared to marry yet again I told my kids half-jokingly, “You don’t have to call her Aunt, because we don’t know how long she’ll be around!” When I go over our family genealogy the stories of the woman at the well (John 4) and the woman married and widowed by seven brothers (Luke 20) don’t seem quite so bizarre after all.
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Gail;
-----Commitment. Many think it should be the word of the day. It shouldn’t be. It should be the word of the lifetime. But it falls short of that bar especially. And not because people do not want to be committed. Their exchange of wedding vows and rings evidence their desires to commit. But the real lifelong word is actually change.
-----We are born into this life with a blank paper for a mind. From then to fore the paper is written and drawn upon by others and ourselves. The markings are not in ink, but in pencil. Everyone is also born with an eraser, albeit an inefficient eraser that reasonably fades the past markings enough to allow marking over those areas only somewhat legibly. And thank God for erasers, because many markings on our papers need removal. Yet erasers become abused by careless desires and ambitions so that, for good or for worse, the theme paper that is our lives continually changes through the course of time. Therefore, when two pages are brought together, each bearing a picture of the other, change presents challenge. And many can not handle challenge.
-----So, the careful choice of that other drawn there is just as important as is commitment to the picture and the denial of its wholesale erasure. That new drawing must be a realistic fit with most of what is already drawn upon the paper. If it isn’t, then extensive erasure of the other markings must happen, else the picture of the spouse must be altered. Either way causes so many other commitments to be broken that solutions to careless choices are difficult and life altering enough to make people simply erase the spouse’s picture off the page.
-----This is what Jesus meant when he said Moses gave the right of divorce because of the weakness of man. The law Moses gave didn’t make divorce godly, and of course man never has been godly. The two are just an easy fit. A person wielding the pencil and eraser with reverent respect for the picture of the other should be the reality. And if the choice of that picture was not wise at the first, the choice of how the rest of the page’s markings should be altered should be wisely done from commitment. But we do not want to think of these things, because they represent death to some of what we consider important parts of our lives. Yet, life through death is what Jesus Christ brought us, dying daily is what the Spirit through Paul taught us, and that marrying another after divorce is adultery emboldens God’s expectation of commitment to our marriage vow. This solution through “death“ underscores the fact that God expects the picture of the spouse to be the next most important picture on the paper to the one of God.
-----Unfortunately, that expectation doesn’t change the fact we are man. Therefore our reality is not going to be real, our pictures are not always going to be drawn next to God, and divorce and remarriage are going to continue. The cleaning of our ways to perfection is not dependent upon our impeccable performance of God’s reality. It is by God’s mercy alone that we are righteous; it is indeed a reckoned righteousness, not an achieved one. We must put our arms around those divorced and remarried and divorced and remarried and divorced and remarried people and love them with the respect and love God has for them, respecting and loving their marriages, too, for by God‘s mercy they do. So Christ said if we expect to be forgiven we must forgive. We must operate with the mercy He applies. Then we can live in the reality He has carved from mercy for our broken natures and view one another’s marriages not according to the incomplete erasures, but rather to the drawings currently upon the page. And praise God with all our hearts, on that glorious Day His erasure will bring our pages to pure white again. All the past will become meaningless. Yet, for today, since change is not always good, mercy is the lifelong commitment that helps the family trees grow up through the pruned off underbrush.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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