Got in My Car and Ain’t it Crazy?

But I realized that someone else had dialed in the radio.  It was on a country station.  “Aw, what the heck.  I’ll leave it on and try and imagine a sunny day haulin’ hay and listenin’ to Willie.”

First song up and now my brain is on fire with thoughts.

They called them crazy when they started out
Said seventeen’s too young to know what loves about
They’ve been together fifty-eight years now
That’s crazy.            Lee Brice – Love Like Crazy

Who doesn’t have a grandma or great grandma, grandpa, in their lives who indeed is celebrating or celebrated that many or more years of marriage and was wed at seventeen or sixteen even?  

Now-a-days you hear lots of talk about; “I was just too young,” “You know, they were way too young,”  as if the youngness was the problem, the reason the marriage didn’t stick.  Didn’t last past the waves of problems.  That in order to deal with life’s problems, disappointments, heartaches, tragedies, you need to be, what, thirty?  Or maybe just at least twenty-five?

Really?  That was the reason? 

Against Modern Day Thinking

Back in the day when marriages actually lasted and a fifty-year anniversary just meant that you managed to live that long, life was harder, much harder and folks married younger. Not all folks, some were in their early and mid twenties and some were even at the other end of twenties and into their thirties, but there were young couples and they stayed together as well as any other age group. 

These young married couples often saw the death of children while the couple was still in their twenties, their youth. No union jobs and no pension plans, no unemployment insurance, no life, home or car insurance (make that buggy insurance) for the common man.  No vaccines, no health plans, no hospitals in most towns. No fertility clinics.  No indoor plumbing, no internet, no entertainment, save for what you made yourself.

If a house or barn burned down or blew away with a tornado, the couple just had to start all over again and rebuild with their bare hands.  If twenty-one-year-old Harold mistakenly built the house on the flood plane because pregnant-seventeen-year-old Eugenia liked the view, and they lost it all in the spring flood, they learned their lesson, rebuilt in another spot and continued on with their lives.  Hard lives.  Hard but good, because most of them stayed together. 

We are about ready to lose to attrition, the generation that can personally remember a day when most marriages stayed together, figured it out, got over themselves and learned to give to the other.  At the turn of the last century, if you knew a thousand couples you might know one couple that was divorced.  Back when things were hard, when many folks married young, when married’s lived near or with parents and relatives, when a man might do the same thing all his life but not necessarily at the same place of business, when education was not easily obtained and many went uneducated, when babies came or didn’t come whether or not the parents desired it,  back there where married people lived with all the reasons people now cite as things that make marriages hard, marriages stayed together. 

Doesn’t Get Any Better Unless We Change Our Hearts

According to Enrichment Journal on the divorce rate in America:
The divorce rate in America for first marriage is 41%
The divorce rate in America for second marriage is 60%
The divorce rate in America for third marriage is 73%

Those statistics among so many others that tell a slice of the story (admittedly statistics are not a full picture of what occurs but they are a tool in looking at our lives).  It shows that we aren’t any better at getting it right the second or third time around, when a person is supposedly older and wiser.

At the beginning of this era of acceptance of divorce, we were told that we needed to embrace divorce because it was necessary.  We were told there were folks, mostly women, trapped in abusive un-loving relationships.   Which I have no doubt that there were. But we were fed a rosy picture that women would be so much better off, children would be so much better off, if divorce was not so frowned on.   Now we know different, that in most cases nothing is really improved.  In this world of easy divorce and correlating loose morals of living together and sleeping around, women are no better off and children are still caught in the middle of a whirl wind.

There was a day when I supported the idea of divorce.  There was the day when in high school I strongly suggested to my mom that she should just get a divorce, that no one should be expected to live with the humiliation of infidelity, that clearly mom and dad were incompatible and should just split.  Thank God she didn’t listen to her daughters.   Thank God she listened instead to her religious training.

And since then, over the years, through other people’s amazing lives, stories of healing and reconciliation, my own undeserved receipt of grace, mercy and forgiveness, and the written word of God, the Holy Spirit has taught me much.  The Holy Spirit has taught me that no one and no sin is beyond God.  There is no sin or evil that is bigger than God, bigger than His forgiveness, bigger than His reconciliation, bigger that His rebuilding. 

There is no person beyond His reach, no person beyond our reach, when we look to God for the strength and ability to do the hard thing, the things that go against self, self-preservation, self-care, the self-things that make us say, “God wants me to be happy”.  There is even a story out there about a father who put down his life, his life as a prominent elder in a church, to follow a rebellious daughter to the city of her choosing, just so he could minister to her.  These are all stories and lessons and words that have changed my mind.  Changed me from seeing marriages and people as semi-disposable to irrevocable, and the responsibility of all of us.

The Response-ability in Responsibility

It is not just for the married person, the responsibility for marriage belongs to all of us, young, old, married, single, widowed, clergy and non-clerical.  We are told in Hebrews thirteen, that marriage should be honored by all.  It belongs to all of us.  Our marriage and our neighbors’ marriage and marriage in general.  Its not that everyone should enter into a marriage, just that everyone is responsible to the honor of marriage. 

Because?  God says He hates divorce.   We are clearly told in Malachi that He does, for it covers one’s garments with violence.   We are all responsible because we ought not stand by or encourage what covers one’s garments in violence.  For in the gospels we read that sin comes into the world but we ought not to be those who let it come in through us or slip by us.   Because yes, we are responsible for ourselves, but we are responsible for one another as well.   And we are responsible for keeping those we know, those we have influence over, from wandering into the clutches of what God hates.  Because God says marriage should be honored by all.  Not just those who are married.

Instead of embracing divorce as a solution to the problems, granted some of them very evil themselves, we had chosen a different route, a harder route, a time eating, energy devouring route, would we of the church, those who live in the Body, have seen a different outcome than what we have now?  And does outcome really matter when you are at the point of choosing between what God would desire, what we are encouraged to live and be in the word of God, and how the World would have us act and react?  Do you only have to pick God’s ways when the outcome is certain?

If, instead of marveling at the marriage that lasts fifty-years and calling it crazy, we had indeed expected it, relied on it, helped to insure it, no matter what we thought of either party, what would we have?  What would we have in the church to present to God in regards to marriage and our honoring marriage, if we chose to not repay evil with more evil, but to love our neighbor as our self, that neighbor that is our spouse, that neighbor that is the brother-in-law, sister-in-law, son-in-law, spouse of our good friend? 

What If?  Ain’t it Crazy?

If we offered ourselves as a living sacrifice to Him instead of chasing the stuff that would make us feel better, more justified, more in control, the stuff that would allow us to have the life we deserve, what would happen to the bleed out in the church?  What if we, through the help of those who could perhaps see situations clearer, those who aren’t directly involved and insulted or offended by another’s actions or another’s mere existence, what if we allowed those people who could see both sides, but mostly God’s side, to help us and we then chose God’s way, a way of love, mercy, forgiveness, unending, never failing love, that is patient?  What if we picked up God’s grace and handed it to others in our lives, those who don’t deserve it? What if we chose the type of love that the World calls crazy,  that sacrificial love.  Ain’t it a crazy thought?