"Friend, lover, husband. In your
life together he will be many things to you. Confidant, companion, provider,
strength, playmate, listener, teacher, pupil, leader, comforter, and, as Sarah
saw Abraham, "lord." Each role has its glories and its limitations, each
requires a different kind of response from you and this takes resilience,
adaptability, maturity. Life is made exciting and interest is sustained by these
dynamics so long as all are undergirded by love.
Your provider may someday lose his
job. Your strength may show unexpected weakness. Your knight in armor may
experience a public defeat. Your teacher may make a serious mistake that you
tried to warn him about. Your lover may become a helpless patient, sick, sore,
and sad, needing your presence and care every minute of the day and night. "This
isn't the man I married," you will say, and it will be true. But you married him
for better or for worse, in sickness and in health, and those tremendous
promises took into account the possibility of radical change. That was why
promises were necessary.
There are things in life which can
make what seems to be a mockery out of the solemn promises. "To love, honor, and
obey" your husband can seem the last ironies in the face of the unspeakable
humiliations and indignities of illness. Love, honor and obey this beaten,
anguished, angry man who will not take his pill? The vows are serious.
Staggeringly serious. But you did not take them trusting in your own strength to
perform. The grace that enabled you to take those vows will be there to draw on
when the performance of them seems impossible." ~ Elisabeth Elliot, Let Me Be A
Woman
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