God gets in the way all the time at our house.
Bill and I are back to where we started, the two of us playing house in a home where all the other bedrooms are guest rooms. We are free to eat cereal for dinner or go to a late movie on a whim. We can work away at our laptops until eleven if we want to, basketball on mute and the coffee pot primed for the wee hours of the next morning. We can work in our pajamas if we don’t have to go anywhere, or at least wear our slippers all the live long day. We are free agents on planet earth. Two halves of a grand liberty we’ve earned after so many years of sleep schedules and budgets and diets and entertainment choices dictated by our children.
But someone else lingers here, and there is frequent evidence of this fact. These otherwise unaccountable seismic shifts take place in the ideas, the affections, the purposes of our household. Our sleep is mysteriously interrupted with unbidden concerns that turn into reasons to pray. The banal regularly turns into romance. Stymied plans open up into a wide way forward. The differences between us melt like magic.
It must be God. We’ve figured this out by the process of elimination. It isn’t Bill and it isn’t me, so who else can it be?
In early marriage, during our first stint at freedom so many years ago, we learned that autonomy would strangle us if we did not determine to have a tertiary marriage as opposed to a binary one.
So we invited in a third party, the only one we could trust. God just seemed like the logical choice. Day in and day out, he has been a welcome interference ever since.
We welcomed God into our home before we had a home, before we said our vows, and we continue to do it thirty five years later, now that those vows, mere words that cost us little back then, have accrued gold bar by gold bar into veritable Fort Knox. I know better than to think we are impervious to the evils that can attack any marriage, but some days I swear it feels like we live under a gold dome not unlike the one atop Georgia’s capital building. We didn’t put it there.
The way I see it, our marriage is proof of God. It isn’t a perfect marriage. It doesn’t have a back-from-the-brink-of-divorce story in any of its decades. But it is a fluid one, or to put it in the language of machinery it is well oiled. It gets creaky and stuck and rusty, but then it gets attention, not from us, but from him, the arbiter of our souls. He steps in and does what only he can do. He does it in us as individuals and as a unit. Usually in that order.
The best picture of this in the Bible is in Ecclesiastes, that existential book that does not once try to make real life any less troublesome or trivial than it can seem at times. About the partnership between two people, whether marriage or friendship, Solomon said:
“Two are better than one, because they have a good return for their work: If one falls down, his friend can help him up. But pity the man who falls and has no one to help him up! Also, if two lie down together, they will keep warm. But how can one keep warm alone? Though one may be overpowered, two can defend themselves.” (Ecclesiastes 4:9-12)
And then, at the end of this discourse on two, he added:
“A cord of three strands is not easily broken.” (Verse 12)
This tells me a two needs a third to stay unassailably, unbreakably joined together.
The other day I tried to imagine who else could be the third cord in our marriage, if not God. Who else could challenge each of us, separately, to lay down our swords and shake hands when each of us is determined to win a battle? Who else could show us where the real battle is, after all? Who else could literally turn impatience into longsuffering or irritability into affection? Who could provide the soothing effect of a truthful word at precisely the right time?
There is no one I know who could do that for us, no one I would want to be so intimately entwined in our lives. Not one person. I actually tried to picture a human being in this role, someone who would live in our house 24/7, with access to our kitchen, our living room, our bedroom, closets, bathrooms, our very minds and hearts—a counselor, a friend, a family member—and I had to stop because the idea got creepy once I put a face on it.
But this is the only way two people can be sewn together as we have been. Two opinions, two predilections, two personalities, two paces, and two sets of giftings and longings and offerings, somehow maintaining their individual beauty, all while creating a collective one, too.
Only God could do that. And, thus, thanks to one marriage, mine to Bill, I believe more firmly in his actual existence.
