On Marriage

Bryan's brother offered a beautiful toast at our rehearsal dinner. Brent shared how he could rejoice at our wedding not because of his confidence in the bride and groom, but because of his confidence in the God Who had brought us together. A union in Him between two people who trusted in His faithfulness was a union that would flourish.

We're ten years down the road from that toast. I would imagine that breast cancer and breast removal surgery could be a real test for some couples' relationships. It doesn't feel like that for us. Instead, we've been having these completely stunning moments together. . .

Here's one: While the kids were away for a few days, Bryan and I had time to just be together and talk without interruption. I asked him if he had any grief in all this. He'd lost something, too, after all, and he is entitled to his own feelings.

He said there was a slight feeling of loss, but that it paled in comparison to the other things he was feeling--sadness for me and everything I was enduring, overwhelming relief that I wasn't going to die, great hope that we'd grow old together. Then he said that the whole situation would be a lot harder if he had lost me in it. If I had slipped into a ball of depression, or closed in alltogether and stopped being the Amy! he knew and loved. But, as things are, I'm still here, still as much his friend and wife as before. "And," he noted, "This sounds strange, but it's as though the things who make you who you are have blossomed even more because of the cancer."

My babyduck.

I'd be remiss if I didn't explain why we are as happy together now as we ever have been. We have Bible verses inscribed on our wedding bands. My verses are Ephesians 5:22-24:

"Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything."

There was a time when I hated these verses, and tried to argue that they don't really mean what they obviously mean. These arguments having failed, I found myself in a pickle: I didn't want to try to do marriage outside of how God says to do marriage. I had figured out by then that not doing things God's way doesn't turn out very well.

But neither did I want to submit to a man.

So I figured I would remain single. And I planned accordingly.

The issue of these verses came up again a few years later in the context of a collection of scholarly work that took seriously objections like mine and gave good answers to them. I won't go into the details here, but suffice it to say that I stopped hating these verses and figured that I'd be OK with them only if the right man came along.

How would I know the "right" man? 1. It would be a God thing in my life and I'd be able to see God's Hand working to bring him along. And 2. He would be a man who took seriously his own set of Ephesians verses:

v 25. . .28 "Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her. . .husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies."

Bryan takes these verses seriously. How did Christ "love the church"? He entered our world and died here, for us. Every day--long before cancer came along--Bryan enters my world--my strange-to-him female, mother of 2 little ones, at-home world, and he dies to himself here.

And now that cancer has arrived, his self-sacrifice has multiplied, not with any great fanfare, he just looks to see how he can help and serve and he does it.

I'm not telling you this to brag about Bryan. I'm telling you to brag about Jesus, Who lives in Bryan. In his own strength, I'm not sure how well Bryan could do loving me in a daily, normal sense, let alone in all the special ways that my health now requires. But he's not living on his own strength, he is living in faith. That's not a mumbo-jumbo statement. The Bible tells us that the same power that resurrected Jesus from the dead now courses through the bodies of people who believe in that resurrection. Bryan believes it. He lives it. He loves me because of it.

This is leadership that is easy to submit to. (Even then, I don't do a perfect job of it.) This is the structure God built for our marriage and--praise be to God for this--it's a structure that is not damaged by something as trifling as cancer.

Thank You God for Bryan, yes. But, also, thank You God for Jesus, that He can make every last thing strong and sweet.