Lately I've been reading almost exclusively a mix of books on marriage. It has been a great blessing to mine these books for gold and to think through the joys and the hardships of marriage. This morning I read the chapter on Submission in Mike Mason's The Mystery of Marriage and was blessed by this profound thought on love and marriage:
"To love is not just to view someone as the most wonderful person in the world or as some kind of saint. It is also to see all the weakness, the falseness and shoddiness, all the very worst in the loved one exposed--and then to be enabled, by the pure grace of God, not only to accept this person, but to accept in a deeper, more perfect way than was possible before. Love works for two people, in other words, the way faith works for one. For faith always begins with a frank recognition of one's own sinfulness (called repentance), which paradoxically opens up the way for greater self-acceptance through forgiveness. Similarly, before love can really begin to be love, it must face and forgive the very worst in the person loved.
In marriage, a wife's imperfections are not something a husband can afford to hold against her, but neither can he afford simply to overlook them. Rather he must bear them with her as part of his cross, just as she bears with him. To live with her in love is to experience at close quarters the way she herself struggles with her own humanness. Is such intimate and costly knowledge to be repaid with criticism? No, it can be answered only with tenderness and compassion and borne with a profound sadness that in turn makes room for more and more love. In this way, love not only falls from heaven but rises from the earth. Lo love is to be caught in the vortex of another's humanity, to spiral down and down into the murky, tragic tangles of the sinful flesh, where only pure love can go without being defiled. If hatred often consists in being repelled by mere impressions, by surface characteristics in other people who happen to rub us the wrong way, then love consists in seeing into the very center of the twistedness and sin and self-love that are in the heart of another person and yet not being repelled: holding on to the grace by which we ourselves are loved and finding in it the strength to descend with another into their darkest place. If we love other people for their saintliness, then we do not love at all. Love is wasted on saints. It is meant for the sinner."
"To love is not just to view someone as the most wonderful person in the world or as some kind of saint. It is also to see all the weakness, the falseness and shoddiness, all the very worst in the loved one exposed--and then to be enabled, by the pure grace of God, not only to accept this person, but to accept in a deeper, more perfect way than was possible before. Love works for two people, in other words, the way faith works for one. For faith always begins with a frank recognition of one's own sinfulness (called repentance), which paradoxically opens up the way for greater self-acceptance through forgiveness. Similarly, before love can really begin to be love, it must face and forgive the very worst in the person loved.
In marriage, a wife's imperfections are not something a husband can afford to hold against her, but neither can he afford simply to overlook them. Rather he must bear them with her as part of his cross, just as she bears with him. To live with her in love is to experience at close quarters the way she herself struggles with her own humanness. Is such intimate and costly knowledge to be repaid with criticism? No, it can be answered only with tenderness and compassion and borne with a profound sadness that in turn makes room for more and more love. In this way, love not only falls from heaven but rises from the earth. Lo love is to be caught in the vortex of another's humanity, to spiral down and down into the murky, tragic tangles of the sinful flesh, where only pure love can go without being defiled. If hatred often consists in being repelled by mere impressions, by surface characteristics in other people who happen to rub us the wrong way, then love consists in seeing into the very center of the twistedness and sin and self-love that are in the heart of another person and yet not being repelled: holding on to the grace by which we ourselves are loved and finding in it the strength to descend with another into their darkest place. If we love other people for their saintliness, then we do not love at all. Love is wasted on saints. It is meant for the sinner."
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