Reverence

Woo Hoo!  The last time I tried to write, Blogger wouldn't let me in.  It has been forever (at least a month) since I posted last.  Busyness and sickness have combined as a lethal force in my life!  I have been doing some excellent reading, and trying to wrap my brain around how to address certain topics.  It is my sincere hope that those who may happen upon this blog will be seriously interested in applying themselves to their marriages with gusto.  However, my aim from the beginning has been to address the discouragement that comes when efforts seem to fall flat, resolutions go unmet, emotional wounds are meted out or spiritual growth is greeted with scorn.  These things do happen.  Sometimes we inflict the worst on our spouses.  Sometimes they inflict the worst on us.  How do we get up then?

    The excellent reading I've been doing has been some of the works of Alice Von Hildebrand.  One of the many themes she plays upon is reverence.  Her husband, Dietrich, called reverence "the mother of all virtues".  When we reverence those about us, we maintain God's view of them.  The lack of reverence is "the failure to recognize the inner nobility and worth of persons and things which leads to the failure to treat them with the deep, tender respect that is due to them."

    Much of the pain I have felt in my marriage has been caused by words and attitudes that have denied the very heart of who God made me to be.  In response I can spend hours, days, even weeks defending myself in the bathroom mirror, or triumphing in a verbal match with the windshield of my car as I drive alone.  How does this solve my problem?  Obviously, it doesn't.  

   By nurturing the hurt, I am doing the very thing to my husband that he did to me.  Not with words, but with attitude.  I have stopped recognizing his inner nobility and worth...granted to him by God, and I have defined him by the wounds he is capable of inflicting.  My spouse was not created to hurt me.  When I dwell upon an incident as though our whole mutual life was building up to the defining moment of his callousness, I am living a lie about who he is.  My husband was created by God for a purpose.  A part of that purpose is to be my husband.  Sometimes he will fulfill that role as God intended, sometimes he won't.  His worth is not based on that.  His worth is based on the fact that God's heart planned his person from before the foundation of the world.  The moments we waste in trying to wrestle for control of the marriage, or in smearing each other with our own self righteousness are moments we will never get back.  They are moments that could have been better used to acknowledge the pain before God and to cry out for a heart of forgiveness, and the strength to walk in love and reverence before the very person that has wounded us.  

   I do not want to minimize the very real, deep pain that some experience in marriage.  What I want to do is to motivate even those relationships where pain seems to be the rule, rather than the exception, to motivate these to a higher calling of hope, of joy, of peace...all encompassed by Love.  I believe that this is possible. Can I reverence my spouse?  Can I believe in his highest calling when he cannot?  Can I visualize him loving God with all his heart, soul, mind and strength, even as he walks a very different path?  I think the heart of God is very tender with wounded wives.  Perhaps we can even believe our spouses into the heart of God.  There we can truly look at each other with His love and know we've arrived home.

Quote from By Love Refined by Alice Von Hildebrand, Sophia Institute Press, 1989