He Won't Dance with Me

I've tried everything: simple requests, bargaining, debating, reasoning, begging. Nothing will move my husband to dance with me at an event like a wedding. We have been to several in our nearly five years of marriage, so there have been many opportunities to try new strategies. Maybe this time, I'll think. Maybe this time he'll realize how much it would mean to me and he'll give in. Usually this crazy thought is followed by some daydreaming about how fun it will be to get out there on the floor, all dressed up, and enjoy a slow dance or two with my love. Every time I bring it up, however, my hopes are silenced, like pretty music suddenly drowned out by the sound of a loud truck's roaring engine. He absolutely refuses. He just will not do it. Why, I cannot fully comprehend. But there it is. He is the man I married.

Lest it sound as though my husband is never amenable to my requests, I should explain that most often he is perfectly happy to go along with doing things I enjoy, and to let me even take the lead in planning anniversary trips and such. Most of the time, he is not so immovable as on the dancing question. Dancing is one of two things I can think of on which he will not budge; the other is going to one of those "bring your own snacks and paint along with the instructor" classes.

Dealing with our completely opposite interests in the dancing matter is one thing, and I'm sure many lessons about disappointment, understanding, patience, and the like can be learned from it. But the more interesting point in all of this is the irony found in the fact that I, like many girls, I'm sure, always looked forward during my single days to the days when I would finally have a spouse to take with me to these dancing functions. It was always awkward without a dance partner who wasn't A) a crush (embarrassing), B) a reluctant date (pathetic), or C) a family member (not quite the same thing). I remember consciously thinking about how nice it would be to have a built-in dance partner who was at once my romantic interest and my best friend.

As it turns out, all of my best chances for dancing and enjoying it, notwithstanding awkwardness, happened when I was single. I danced more then than I have since and than I maybe ever will again. I had the opportunities to attend and participate in English country dances (yes, as in Jane Austen); swing dancing classes, events, and performances; high school banquets and fundraisers; and weddings. Little did I know that in my pining for future married dancing bliss I had fallen prey to a mindset that was false - and the dancing dreams were just one specific instance of that mindset.

The mindset was this: an assumption that married life would be a certain way, and specifically a better way than I perceived my single state to be. What a mistake! Of course, marriage books warn you not to assume marriage will fix all your problems, because you and your spouse will be just as messed up together as you are individually. I knew this truth, but somehow I failed to apply it in all my thinking. I sometimes let myself feel sorry for my single self instead of enjoying and making the most of the time that I had with good friends and fun experiences. Hence my dancing dreams, which frankly were a form of idolatry and jealousy (idolizing marriage and envying those who had what I thought I wanted).

In reality, my spouse is both much less and much more than I assumed he would be when I imagined what dancing with him would be like. True, he won't dance with me, but he will brush my hair, change the oil in my car, mow the lawn, and do the dishes. He will fight with me, but he will apologize when he is wrong and forgive me when I am wrong. He will raise children with me. God willing, he will grow old with me. He will be my first advocate and best critic. He will be my constant friend. We will laugh, cry (well, I cry, anyway), and converse deeply together. How thankful I am for him!

Marriage is not the answer to all of our problems; neither is singleness. But either is a good gift to be enjoyed in its proper season.

"Three Hard Eucharisteos"

Ann Voskamp suggests looking for daily gifts from God in the little things. A simple pat of butter can be viewed with gratitude and seen as a loving reminder that God cares. In Voskamp's "Joy Dare Collection" challenge, she lists "3 hard eucharisteos" (three things for which it is hard to give thanks) as a prompt for seeking God's gifts on April 16th. On that day, my daughters were sick with a cold (which they are still getting over). Consequently, sleep was even more lacking than usual, and my husband was primarily taking care of our wakeful, snotty, needy toddler at night since I'm still caring for our two-month-old who wakes a couple of times a night anyway. My three gifts from God that day were:

1. Two sick girls. A reminder that I'm not in control of their health, let alone their choices as they get older. I can do all I can to be a good mom and set a good example, but that's it. God holds them and loves them even more than I do.

2. Sleepless nights. A reminder that God sustains me through the times when I don't think I have strength to get anything done. He gives grace for each moment, including the sleep-deprived ones.

3. Not being able to sleep with my husband (cuddles being an important way I feel connected to him). A reminder that my ultimate comfort, security, and encouragement come from God, not my husband. I can tend to rely too much on my husband for support, though he is just a person, and cannot take the place of God in meeting every emotional need that I have.

Covenant Marriage: Freedom to Fight, Fight to Freedom

I first read about the concept that covenant marriage provides great security for the spouses in Timothy Keller's excellent The Meaning of Marriage a little more than three years ago, when my now-husband and I read the book together during our engagement. But I've never experienced the truth of the idea so explicitly as when, recently, my husband and I went through a couple of difficult weeks during which we got into a nasty pattern of fighting and being angry with each other over some fairly insignificant issues. I suppose that after three years of marriage we have reached a point where we are each trying to figure out what marriage and parenting look like and how we should navigate our relationship through the little trials that daily life brings. Sometimes, as I'm sure every married person knows, tension, tiredness, and frustration can spill over into shouting and resentment aimed at your spouse.

When this pattern of anger happened between us, my husband and I felt confused as to why it was happening and how to fix it. But we did not feel confused about one thing: we are married, which means we have a committed covenant relationship with each other. And that reality is not going away, no matter what we might feel. Having a covenant between us means we are not in this relationship "at will," leaving a back door open for either party to walk out. Instead, knowing we are together as long as we both live means we aren't thinking of leaving as an option. The only option is to work it out.

As we struggled through our bitter fights, we periodically reminded each other that we were still married, and that we still loved each other. I can tell you that we did not feel in love at the time! Far from it. But hearing those words, "I am with you. I do love you," from my husband meant that I had freedom to be myself and work through our fighting and the terrible emotions we were both experiencing without fear of abandonment. There is amazing security in the covenant.

However, the covenant commitment also means that we did not want to stay in our pattern of anger for very long. How awful would it be if we felt anger with no positive change or hope for the rest of our lives? Instead of resigning ourselves to the "fact" of our emotions, we recognized that, precisely because we are committed, we needed to work to make things better. What worked for us in this case was simply setting aside our complaints against each other for a time (not to sweep them under the rug, but as a temporary "truce"), and focusing on being affectionate through basic things like encouraging words and hugs. Maybe this sounds too simple, but it has been helping us. As we let ourselves (through choosing every day to be affectionate) have a break from the habit of bitterness, we found ourselves being more and more able to productively talk about what had been bothering us. Fighting to maintain affection is possible, and emotions can be chosen, though not always easily.

Let me say as a final note that my husband and I believe covenant marriage truly works only when God, who created marriage in the first place, is a party in the commitment along with the two spouses. In such cases, marriage is truly the best blessing and the biggest way God can shape a person into being more like Himself.

Ring

The back of my left hand presses
pleasantly into a cotton blue pillowcase. Through my squinted
eyelid I see
soft edges of a flattened crescent that must have been
cut from back-lit clouds: it is that white -
almost pure light. This
light-shape
sits on my gently upturned finger. I can feel it
cool
in the narrow hollow
where finger meets palm

             a dove
             hiding itself
             in the cleft of the rock

and this
shape lights
the sphere of my sight, making peripheral
the cool, dark masses of the furniture and shadows that
inhabit the room where
I'm lying.

The Hinge

She works - silent, invisible -
      between
husband and children, the chores.

The children move her
back
      and
forth;
she pivots, affixed to
their flexing muscles and electric minds.

Her husband - standing still -
      stills her.
She has so tightly pressed into him
that an indentation in her own shape
now marks him.
Except he splinters, or
she erodes, they are an inseparable
      one.

When she wearies - sore -
she groans, complains, yet still turns.
What she needs:
      free
      cashmere touches,
      free
      orchestral words.

With or without,
she remains - moving and working -
      between
husband and children, the chores.

"Be a Man"

My sister and I, now in our late twenties, still like to sing the funny "I'll Make a Man Out of You" from Disney's Mulan. Every once in a while, something will remind us of the song, and we'll adopt our goofy "man" voices and belt it out. The chorus lyrics (by Donny Osmond) are:

Be a man
We must be swift as the coursing river
Be a man
With all the force of a great typhoon
Be a man
With all the strength of a raging fire
Mysterious as the dark side of the moon.

With the exception of the last line, the characteristics of "man" in this song are related to physical prowess. Even the last line about a man being "mysterious" only seems to indicate that a man should hide something (what he is thinking or feeling, perhaps?). Does being a man really lie in the physical only? Does a man have to be burly to truly "be a man"?

Granted, the men (and one girl) singing the song in the movie are training for battle, so their focus is mostly on becoming physically fit, and rightly so. There can be a problem, though, when we tend to think of the military or similar types of jobs as the truly manly ones and thereby exclude important elements of manliness from our definitions.

I've come across a window decal with two stick figures, one plain and one in military uniform. Under the plain figure are the words "Your bro her."* Under the military figure are the words "My brother." It's fine to support the military, but is lack of strength equivalent to lack of manliness?

What about a man's character, for example? A man can be strong but lack integrity or kindness and therefore not be truly manly at all. Think of a muscly man coming across someone who just dropped a few bags of groceries in the parking lot. Instead of helping, what if he keeps walking, looking the other way? Is he manly?

Or consider wisdom. A man can be strong (and even extremely intelligent) and yet lack wisdom. Maybe he is full of arrogance, takes unnecessary risks, and gambles away his family's finances, leaving them to fend for themselves. Is he manly?

Of course, we can recognize when we think about it that character and wisdom are only two of many elements of manliness. Is physical strength one of them? Yes, on the whole. Generally speaking, men are physically stronger than women (though there are exceptions, of course), and God designed them that way! Their strength can be manly when used in service of the comprehensive masculinity God intends, or it can go against God's design and be used in an utterly unmanly way (such as aggressive, malicious violence).

Perhaps the window decal is referring not to physical strength but to bravery or self-sacrifice required to serve in the military (appropriate characteristics to be admired). Still, I see examples of selfless and courageous men being truly manly in other jobs, such as landscape design and accountancy. Their courage and selflessness show up when they work endless hours for their families, trust God's direction even when it seems crazy, and love their wives and kids even though they are exhausted.

My point is not to downplay the importance of the sacrifice made by those in the military (I cannot imagine the difficulties associated) but to reflect on what truly makes a masculine man. Proverbs 19:22 says, "That which is desirable in a man is his loyalty and unfailing love" (AMP). The ESV says, "What is desired in a man is steadfast love," and the NASB translates what is desired as "kindness." Whatever the translation, clearly an attractive man is a kind, loving, loyal man, who may or may not be physically strong.

*I searched for an image of this decal online and couldn't find it. I learned that the original decal reads "Your brother. My brother." Apparently the version I saw had had one of its "t"s scratched off as a kind of non-thoughtful joke or misguided assertion.

Blind or Bound?

Is love really blind? In Orthodoxy, G. K. Chesterton argues that love, contrary to the common saying, is not blind:

The devotee is entirely free to criticise; the fanatic can safely be a sceptic. Love is not blind; that is the last thing that it is. Love is bound; and the more it is bound the less it is blind.

As an example to support this argument, Chesterton writes, "A man's friend likes him but leaves him as he is: his wife loves him and is always trying to turn him into somebody else." (Given the whole context, it is understood that the wife is trying to improve the husband into his best self, not turn him into something he is not.) In other words, the person who truly loves another person, or a place or object, is not blind to his or its faults, but rather sees them fully and attempts to get rid of them for the sake of the person, place, or object's best interests.

While I enjoy and appreciate this interpretation of love by Chesterton, it reminds me of another favorite set of lines from Shakespeare that take a different tack:

Things base and vile, holding no quantity,
Love can transpose to form and dignity.
Love looks not with the eyes but with the mind;
And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind. (A Midsummer Night's Dream 1.1.238-41)

Shakespeare's character Helena speaks these lines in her revealing soliloquy, and they seem to agree with the expression that "love is blind." I think this speech may be interpreted in two different ways. First, given the immediate situation of the play when Helena utters these words, we can take it that Helena is admitting to loving someone not perhaps worth her unconditional devotion (a man who does not love her back), (and/)or that she is accusing the man who does not love her of loving another woman who is not as worthy of his love as she herself is.

However, a secondary interpretation is, I think, acceptable, on the larger foundation of Shakespeare's themes in the play as a whole: love focuses not on superficial qualities but on inner worth (hence, it "looks not with the eyes but with the mind"). The things appearing "base and vile" may in fact be lifted up to worthiness simply because they are loved. I imagine a scruffy, mangy dog in an alley being taken in and cared for, trained, and loved until he becomes a companion dog worth having. Love is capable of taking pains to make such transformations.

So, is love blind? Or, as Chesterton puts it, is it instead bound? I think these two interpretations may not be exclusive. Instead, they can work together. According to the Bible's view of it, love could be said to be both blind and bound. This, in fact, might be a way of summing up the entire message of the gospel.

Similar to Shakespeare's idea that love transforms base things to dignified things is the Bible's message that God loves people who are filthy with wrongdoing and thereby changes them into people who are clean with goodness. Many verses of Scripture make this statement: "But God proves His own love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us!" (Romans 5:8). Again, "He has rescued us from the domain of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of the Son He loves" (Colossians 1:13). Because of God's loving gift of His Son, "if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away, and look, new things have come" (2 Corinthians 5:17). People are transformed through God's act of love from sinners in darkness into heirs with Christ Himself (Romans 8:17). God's love could be said to look with the mind rather than the eyes, as He sees the value of the person He is transforming rather than the person's outward appearance. Indeed, God tells Samuel that "man does not see what the Lord sees, for man sees what is visible, but the Lord sees the heart" (1 Samuel 16:7). Jesus' followers are told: "stop judging according to outward appearances; rather judge according to righteous judgment" (John 7:23-25). Perhaps God's love is blind, looking not at the superficial but at the true worth of a person, and therefore making the person worthy.

On the other hand, the Bible makes it clear that true love is not blind to errors or wrongdoing. Instead, it is bound to working hard to gain the best for its object, even if that means pointing out faults. John describes Jesus as being "full of grace and truth" (John 1:14); truth is not to be overlooked or ignored for the sake of love. In Paul's famous treatise on love to the Corinthians, he says that "love finds no joy in unrighteousness but rejoices in the truth" (1 Corinthians 13:6). The book of Proverbs explains that God's love involves discipline just like a father's love involves discipline of the "son he delights in" (Proverbs 3:12). God's idea is that love must be bound to the ultimate good of its objects; it cannot simply ignore negative traits that are harmful in the long run.

In the person of Jesus, God's idea of love is perfectly expressed. Through Jesus' death on the cross, God shows His willingness to extend complete grace - a totally free gift of salvation that only a perfectly sinless life deserves. He also shows His righteousness in providing the complete condemnation that only sinful lives deserve. Though Jesus was perfectly sinless, He took on Himself that punishment so that we, deserving of death, might instead have the salvation. God's love is both blind in its willingness to give the free gift and bound in its meeting the righteous requirement of holy justice. True love must be blind enough to look inside at true worth and bound enough to work for the polishing of that worth so it can shine.

List 14: Things I Love about ______

I decided to write a list of things I love about my husband, because there are so many things and I appreciate him so much!

1. He's mine - my very own to cuddle.
2. He listens to audio books and is better-read than I am! We can talk about books almost unendingly.
3. He likes to think.
4. He's a do-er, whereas I'm a planner. When I'm paralyzed by analyzing, he's over there getting stuff done.
5. He loves me just because.
6. He knows when to unleash the tickle monster.
7. He competently drives a manual.
8. He challenges me and makes me remember truth, especially when I'm feeling anxious.
9. He's cute!
10. He's a good daddy, and he plays with our daughter.
11. He reminds me who I am in Jesus.
12. He's a hard worker.
13. He has a good relationship with his parents.
14. He's a runner.
15. He knows how to make me laugh.
16. He likes to cook.
17. He knows how to make pies.
18. He's a loyal friend.
19. He has a servant mindset.
20. He's generous.
21. He is good at hospitality.
22. He can assemble things.
23. He's fun to be around.
24. He lets me pick the movie (sometimes).
25. He's been to a lot of the places I'd like to visit someday.
26. He makes me feel safe.
27. He is unfathomably patient with me.
28. He likes my family and my family likes him.
29. He introduces me to new things. 
30. He is kind.
31. He always told me exactly what his intentions were when we were dating. There was never a need to wonder.
32. He's so easy to talk to.
33. He roasts his own coffee, and it's delicious.
34. He teaches me things, like how to play cribbage.
35. He talks in very poetic imagery sometimes. He comes up with these apt metaphors out of nowhere. It's nice.
36. He's a healthy eater.
37. He doesn't judge me, but he does hold me accountable.
38. He prays with me. 
39. He sticks with me no matter what. 
40. Everything! The list continues . . .

God's Unfailing Love

I listened to a sermon by Tim Keller the other evening called "Can a Mother Forget?" on a wonderful passage in Isaiah 49. In the passage, God asks if a nursing mother can forget her child. Of course the rhetorical question receives a "no" in response, but then God says that a mother will forget, but He will not forget. God's comparison of himself to a nursing mother asks us to draw out the similarities and the differences. Keller points out that the effect of using the metaphor is to get us to understand God's character better with not only our minds, but also our affections. Keller illustrates three ways that a mother is compelled to remember her child (and that God is compelled to remember us). 1: She is physically compelled by the milk production and demand system. She hurts if her baby doesn't nurse. 2: She is emotionally compelled by the hormones that are released during nursing. These hormones promote loving feelings for her baby. 3. These first two ways promote unconditional love: the mother loves her baby without getting anything in return. God, like the nursing mother, loves us because of his very nature. He loves us despite the fact that we give him nothing in return.

I've been pondering some other ways that God is like and unlike a nursing mother.

A nursing mother holds her child for as long as it takes to comfort that child. God holds his children and comforts them, too.

But a nursing mother gets tired. Her back and arms get sore after holding that baby. God never grows weary.

A nursing mother cherishes the sight of her sleeping baby. She knows her baby is getting much-needed restoration. God gives to his beloved in sleep.

But a nursing mother must herself sleep, too. She cannot always be present consciously to sustain her baby. God does not sleep or ever leave his children. He sustains them constantly.

A nursing mother delights in her child, happy to see the child growing and pleased when he or she reaches those important "milestones." God delights in his children, too, happy to see them flourishing.

But a mother cannot cause the most important types of growth. She helps facilitate them, yes, but she is not in control of the child's spiritual transformation. God actually promises to be at work in his children, causing the sanctification that he desires to take place.

I'm sure there are many, many more comparisons to be drawn from this passage. What similarities and differences can you think of? Be encouraged by God's unfailing love for you, stronger even than the love of a mother for her baby!

Storms and Safety

Well, having closed my chapter as an instructor, here I am now, at home most of the time, doing at-home tasks like laundry, cooking, and kitchen cleaning. For the most part I like taking care of my little world here. A common piece of advice we might hear from time to time is not to get too attached to temporary things, like the little objects one finds to take care of around a house. This is good advice in the sense that we shouldn't rely on material things for happiness, but this approach, if taken too strictly, may also prevent some vulnerability that it might be good for us to experience.

In the past week or so we have had some severe amounts of rain and areal flooding. One night when the weather was particularly bad, my husband and I brought in some of the items from our balcony so they wouldn't blow away. We couldn't bring in the potted plants, and I sat there looking out the window with concern. I just knew that my little precious growing things would be destroyed by morning, either by wind or too much water. When I expressed my fear to my husband, his response (after surprise that I would feel so strongly about plants), was a wise one. He told me that when he was growing up in the plains of Colorado, every year farmers would plant their crops. They would tend their crops with diligence. They would hope for a good outcome so they could make a living. And every year, it seemed, some magnificent storm would come through and destroy at least one farmer's crop fairly completely. That was just the way things were. My husband reminded me that ultimately, the things we care for and try to protect are not guaranteed to be safe.

Does the lack of guarantee mean that I cannot invest in loving and caring for temporary things, such as plants on a balcony? No, I don't think so. To protect ourselves from all hurt we would have to close our hearts to all love (C. S. Lewis talks about this in The Four Loves). Loving is not "safe."

Jesus treated children and child-likeness (not childishness) with respect. He said, "Let the children alone, and do not hinder them from coming to Me; for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these" (Matthew 19:14). He also said that "whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child will not enter it at all" (Mark 10:15). Children often seem more fully open than adults are to loving and accepting a cherished thing and also fully grieving it if the thing is lost. In a wonderful memoir called Zippy: Growing Up Small in Mooreland, Indiana, Haven Kimmel recounts some poignant memories from childhood, one of which reveals the full embrace of unfiltered love and grief that a child is capable of. She tells of her pet chicken:

Speckles and I loved each other. Dad never had to tell me to feed her - I couldn't wait to see her every day. . . . [A]s I marched past Dad's tilty tool shed all I noticed was the quiet. When I got to the cage I saw why: one whole side of the cage was ripped apart, and inside there was nothing but feathers. . . . I turned and ran into the house, . . . and threw myself onto the couch. I wailed and sobbed with such abandon . . .

Could receiving the kingdom of God like a child look like this girl's response to her pet chicken and its death? Should we receive our relationship with the Lord (a thing that actually is guaranteed not to be lost) so absolutely, with such lack of self-consciousness, with such matter-of-fact recognition of the goodness of this relationship and its impact in our personal lives? There is no hesitancy, false humility, or self-conscious embarrassment on the part of this little girl as she loves and then grieves the loss of her sweet pet.

As I navigate life and become attached to little beloved things, whether they be plants or even new family members, hopefully God will be teaching me this child-like loving and, when necessary, grieving. There will be a day, though not in this life, when nothing will be lost again, and the open loving will be completely free. I guess watching my plants go through the windy storm without closing my heart to them is just practice.

Killing Love

On my commute today I listened to an audio book borrowed from one of my kind colleagues: The Four Loves by C. S. Lewis, read by Lewis himself (a recording of a radio presentation he did once of a sort of condensed version of the book, as far as I could tell). First of all, if you get a chance to listen to C. S. Lewis' voice sometime, do it! He sounds wonderful. Secondly, listening brought to mind a challenging concept that I encountered a few years ago when I read The Four Loves, Till We Have Faces (a novel by Lewis), and A Severe Mercy, a memoir by Sheldon Vanauken, in close succession. All three books explore the idea of natural loves and divine love (God's love) and how these loves may come in conflict with each other.

The main challenging concept that Lewis presents is this:

Even for their own sakes the loves must submit to be second things if they are to remain the things they want to be. In this yoke lies their true freedom; they are "taller when they bow." For when God rules in a human heart, though He may sometimes have to remove certain of its native authorities altogether, He often continues others in their offices and, by subjecting their authority to His, gives it for the first time a firm basis. (The Four Loves)

Essentially, Lewis argues that all natural loves must be submitted to the higher love of God, that they must in a sense be killed, if they are to be preserved at all and made into something holy.

This subjection of love has to happen in Till We Have Faces as well (warning: spoilers!). The narrator and main character, Orual, suffers the loss of her beloved sister, Psyche, who is "offered" to a god whose existence Orual refuses to accept (the novel's a retelling of the classic myth of Cupid and Psyche). Orual, faced even with strong evidence that the god is there and is good, rather than joining her sister in worship, becomes distant and violently jealous. She fails to submit a natural love of her sister to the ultimate divine love.

In Vanauken's memoir, A Severe Mercy, he tells of his own journey through refusal to submit natural love to God's love and into submission in the end (warning: more spoilers!). When his wife, Davy, becomes a Christian, she begins to devote herself fully to Christ, and Sheldon, much like Orual at first, becomes jealous and cannot find his way to join her in this full devotion and obedience. His love for his wife takes first place in his life, stealing that "throne" in his heart, so to speak, from its rightful owner, Christ.

Both books tell of their main characters' coming to an understanding, as the result of extremely difficult circumstances involving suffering (and even death) of their earthly beloveds, that they must subject their natural loves to the highest love. Orual finally recognizes that through full obedience to the god, her sister has been made "a thousand times more her very self than she had been before the Offering" (Till We Have Faces). Yet still, the ultimate purpose and highest devotion, Orual learns, is to be for the god himself: "if [Psyche] counted (and oh, gloriously she did) it was for another's sake." In Vanauken's case, the literal death of his wife becomes the representation to him of the figurative death that any earthly love must undergo in order to be sanctified, or put in its proper place and thus ultimately exalted, under the authority of God's love. He proclaims near the end of the memoir: "If God saved our love - and, indeed, transformed it into its real and eternal self - in the only way possible, her death, it was for me, despite grief and aloneness, worth it."

And that's the key and the hopeful part of this challenging idea: Even though earthly loves must be subjected (in Luke 14:26 Jesus says we must even "hate" our families and very lives for His sake), ultimately by subjecting them God can transform them into their true selves. The earthly loves can be made even better, fuller, richer, when they are put in their proper places in submission to God.

What does this mean for me? My tendencies lead me to devote much of my attention and affection to my family, my husband, my earthly loves. In and of itself, such devotion is not bad, and God of course commands us to love one another. But my devotion to earthly loves can easily take the place of my devotion and obedience to Christ as the ultimate priority. For instance, when I'm feeling overwhelmed or depressed, I can lean on my husband for support, but ultimately shouldn't I rely fully on Christ for every need? Shouldn't I pray first rather than as an afterthought? Instead of fearing with great dread any time I perceive an earthly good might change or be taken away, shouldn't I acknowledge always that all earthly relationships are gifts from His hand, able to be removed from me? And shouldn't I be willing to accept any such removal without resentment or fear?

This submission is hard (to put it mildly), but I need to remember to cling to Christ alone, who will never fail or change, and to hold openly every earthly love. Hopefully then those earthly loves will be freed to blossom into holy and beautiful loves resting properly in my heart as second things.