Love and Marriage Goes Together Like A Horse and Carriage

First I want to start out by saying this is not to offend anyone, or point any fingers.  My blog is all about sharing my thoughts, and it's open for anyone to read because I feel like my life should be an open book.  I have nothing to hide, especially for what I am most passionate about.  (If we aren't willing to be open about what we are most passionate about, are we really passionate about it?)

Yesterday I was introduced to a quote from LA Ink.  A man on the show said, "Marriage is just a word.  It's the commitment that counts."  Right off the bat my first instinct was that this was a very inspirational quote, almost proverb-like, but something inside of me kept saying something wasn't right.  After about two seconds, I realised my discomfort was that this quote reminded me of how much the world has watered down marriage and love into pleasures we can change at any given time.  At the same time, marriage and love takes the abuse and wonders why no one realizes how much we can actually depend on them to remain consistent. 

Marriage and Love were created by God.  They are constants.  When we are looking for what variables to change these remain untouched, but they are always the first ones we blame when we face changes or difficulties in our relationships;  "We don't feel the same way about each other anymore, so our marriage has changed", or "I have to make myself look prettier and have sex so that we'll love each other more."  We've even gone as far as to loosely call it "making love".  The questions I have are these: Was it the marriage that changed?  Do we have the ability to "make" love?  How does God define these two?

MARRIAGE
Designed for companionship and intimacy
"Then the Lord God made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man. The man said, 'This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called 'woman,' for she was taken out of man.' For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh." Genesis 2:21-24

Commitment to Love, sacrifice, and submission
"And you husbands must love your wives with the same love Christ showed the church. He gave up his life for her to make her holy and clean, washed by baptism and God's word. He did this to present her to himself as a glorious church without a spot or wrinkle or any other blemish. Instead, she will be holy and without fault. In the same way, husbands ought to love their wives as they love their own bodies. For a man is actually loving himself when he loves his wife. No one hates his own body but lovingly cares for it, just as Christ cares for his body, which is the church. And we are his body." Ephesians 5:23-30

Marriage is the fuzing together of more than one entity, a bond unlike what either entity was before; one's valley of faults are filled with the other's mountain of greatness, forming a beautiful blend of balance.  When Hershey's Chocolate Syrup and Prairie Farms' 2% milk are married together they make the most delicious glass of chocolate milk, and I can't help but get blessed when musical notes marry together to form harmony.  Just like running is an action, so is marriage; the speed and what you put into those actions may vary, but the fact that you are running, or in this case, married, never changes.  We can choose to stop the action, but just because we stopped does not automatically mean it no longer exists.  In fact, if marriage were to cease to exist in all of creation, everything would fall apart.  Even the members of our bodies are formed by being married together; veins, heart, lungs, kidneys, brain, spinal cord, nerves, etc. 

It is important to point out how many times the word Love is mentioned in the passage from Ephesians before moving on to what Love is; not the specific number of times it is mentioned, just that it practically floods the entire message given here.  Love is the intregal ingredient to the bond of a relationship, and we can see God's view of Love in His sacrifice for The Church; followers of God.

LOVE
Selfless
"If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.  If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing. 
Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud.  It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth.  It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

 Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears. When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me. For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.

 And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love."

There have been many times that I have led myself and others through this passage and said, "Now replace the word Love with your name, and see how much of this you can trully say you live up to."  This definitely shows us how much we may need to work on in our personal lives, but what doesn't ever change is the fact that Love ALWAYS continues to hold true to every bit of it.

See, the main point is that when it comes to where we don't quite measure up, we very easily look for ways to justify it by putting the blame on anything else but ourselves.  "Marriage caused it", "Love changed".  I can even say this about myself.  When I am not careful, I find myself saying love is different for each person, and because of the relationships I have been in it seems easiest to believe love has its own time card, punching in and out whenever it so chooses.  I don't want to believe that someone I care so much about may choose to dismiss love, or even myself for that matter.  To say that I have chosen lust or pleasures and pushed Love or Marriage to the side, causes me to recognize my faults, and that's never fun. 

But, what is the least fun to me, and causes me the most gut-wrenching pain, is knowing that I am part of a system that looks marriage and love straight in the eyes and says to them, "You don't matter, you're just a word." 

Thankfully, God desires to show us the real reason why these were created by Him and holds out His hands to forgive us from not wanting to see it.  How much of God's creation do I look at and say, "You don't matter, you're just a word"?