love is a battlefield.

 As our sixth wedding anniversary approaches (and as I've had an increasing number of counseling clients dealing with marital issues lately), I've been thinking a lot about marriage and family. 

As the professor of my marital & pre-marital counseling class in grad school said: "Marriage isn't rocket science, but it is really hard."

And it's true: While not incredibly complicated, loving one other person for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, in good moods and bad moods, through celebration seasons and suffering seasons, in failures and victories (and also loving the miniature versions of the two of you your love has made) 'til death do you part is one of the weightiest and most demanding things you could ever commit to doing.

Marriage and family life takes hard work, endurance, and sacrifice. It requires risk and great courage. 

As Russell Moore says in his book, The Storm-Tossed Family, "Family is hard because family is unpredictable. You cannot plan out your life. You cannot choose your parents, or your genes, or your upbringing the way you choose your career path. You cannot know everything about your future spouse, or fit you children into some preexisting life plan. Family means vulnerability. You can be hurt. You will be hurt, and you will hurt others. You will learn to love others so much that you wish you could protect them from what's our there...And family also exposes who we really are, stripping us of our pretensions and our masks. Family will, sooner or later, reveal that we are not the person our families need us to be. We are naked before our illusions, and those closest to us eventually learn that we do not have it all together."

C.S. Lewis said something similar about the hazards of love in The Four Loves:

"To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable."

The fact that marriage and family is a dangerous undertaking is evidenced by the number of counseling cases that have to do with past or present familial relationships. As a counselor, I can attest to this. Two of the clients I saw today are reading through The Emotionally Destructive Marriage by Leslie Vernick, if that tells you anything. Also, there tends to be an uptick in people seeking marriage and family counseling after the holidays...isn't that interesting? (As a plug for counseling or even just intentional Christian community/discipleship...you don't have to walk the road your walking alone and there is help and support to be found!)

Didn't Westley say it best in The Princess Bride: "Love is pain, Highness. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something."

So why do it? Is it really worth the risk? The effort? Do I really want to fight this fight if "Love is a Battlefield," as Pat Benatar sings (I am a true millennial for only seeing Jennifer Garner dancing in her pajamas in 13 Going on 30 when I think about that song)?

My husband and I have been through a lot in the past six short years...more things than six years should probably logically contain: "Common" things like communication challenges, differences in personality and/or preference, boundary issues, and the world-rocking transition into parenthood as well as bigger things like international moves, spiritual abuse, the death of a dream, feelings of failure, pregnancy and childbirth in a foreign country, a medically complicated pregnancy, and existential questions of identity and calling and how a good, sovereign God could allow or even ordain injustice and pain and suffering to go seemingly unchecked.

As a friend of my husband's said the other day, "Honestly, it's a miracle you guys are still married!"

It's a grace-filled, Holy Spirit-empowered miracle that any of us survive this marathon of marriage! Just to see if the whole "half of marriages end in divorce" thing is still true with fewer and fewer people getting married later and later...it is: It's around 40% in the U.S. for first marriages, higher for subsequent ones, with some countries having a divorce rate of as high as 70% (!).

That's both staggering and sobering.

But what an opportunity if we can, by, again, some miracle, love the person in front of us despite all that is broken in them and in us and in the world?

This is the bad news that precedes the good news of the gospel: That when sin entered the world through the choice to distrust and break trust with God, everything broke...our relationships with God and with other people, even our relationship to the created world around us. God could have let that be that...leaving us to the mess we'd made of things. But he didn't. And he doesn't. 

Instead, he brings beauty from the ashes of our incinerated desires and expectations and fears and strivings. He empowers us in the hardest and most important work we will ever do...to love another person...to push back the creeping darkness and degeneration and decay in the world by pressing into relationships--with God and others...joining God in his redemptive work of restoration and reconciliation by pursuing the healing and mending of broken relationships with God, other people, and creation. And in his goodness he gives us so much joy in loving and being loved! 

Because he went first...loving and committing to and pursuing and ultimately dying for the often-unfaithful people he chose. Our only hope of any shred of capability of loving another person is because he first loved us (1 John 4:19), even if you don't believe he exists.

For those of you who don't know our story, we got married during COVID, so yeah...our 300-person guest list dwindled down to the 10 people legally allowed to gather in the state of Virginia in May 2020. But one of the beautiful things about that was a wedding gift that I doubt would exist otherwise: My maid of honor (my sister in law) contacted everyone on our guest list to compile this priceless little leather-bound notebook of marriage advice and encouragement (written by the same people who would watch our live-streamed wedding and support us from afar). Some recurring themes were to show grace, to laugh often, not to speak negatively of your spouse to others, to make time for each other, and perhaps the most creative being how one friend wove some sage wisdom into his mom's homemade scone recipe :)

Though I hadn't looked at it in years, I saw it on the shelf the other day and it is even more of an encouragement to me now...now that we've weathered a few storms...now that I have more experiential knowledge of the truth of their wise words. What a profound blessing to know we are not alone in any of our struggles...to have this tangible reminder that others are running this race with us and cheering us on along the way. 

It takes work to love another person with both grace and truth...to "love your [nearest] neighbor as you love yourself" (even if it's the assumed part that we are also to love ourselves that we might need to work on)...to be steady even past the exciting infatuation stage...to communicate and resolve conflict well...to do what is in the other's best interest...to admit wrong and endeavor to do better...to lovingly call out sinful behavior...and yes, it can even be the most loving choice to get out of the way of natural consequences and walk away when there is harm done and refusal to change (The counselor in me cannot close without the caveat that abusive behavior should not be tolerated just because "God hates divorce." God cares about you--and your spouse for that matter--and each of your hearts and eternal souls more than he cares about the institution of marriage.)

I'll close with an excerpt from "A Liturgy Begging the Grace to Love One Man or Woman Well" from Volume III of Every Moment Holy (if you don't know about these collections of liturgies, they're so beautiful!):

"Grant that I might humbly learn, 

in childlike imitation of my Lord

The lifelong vocation 

of spending my self

in daily service to my beloved.

Remind me that in some ways,

I will always be lonely,

even in marriage. 

for until all things are fulfilled in this world, 

the undercurrent of my existence 

will be a longing and a loneliness 

for you, for an unveiled communion

with my Creator.

So in this shared and sacramental life

let me never burden my spouse 

with the expectation that they

must somehow fulfill those deepest

God-shaped longings of my soul

which are met only in you, O God.

Indeed, Lord, let my beloved and I always lean

in to this hard task of learning to love 

one another in all seasons,

convinced that to love one other person well is at 

the very heart of the high and holy calling 

to love Christ and his people and his creation."

So yes, marriage is hard. But it can also be such a wonderful, life-enriching gift. Love is a battlefield. But it's worth fighting for.