Thoughts on Marriage

“An excellent wife who can find? She is far more precious than jewels. The heart of her husband trusts in her, and he will have no lack of gain. She does him good and not harm all the days of her life.” –Proverbs 31:10-12. “Let marriage be held in honor among all.” –Hebrews 13:4a (ESV).

I enjoy weddings—the beauty, sacredness and promise of love that surrounds them. God ordained that “man should not be alone” and so He “made an helpmeet for him.” (See Genesis 2:18). The family was the first institution God ordained following the creation.

In the beautiful Garden of Eden the first marriage ceremony was presided over by God Himself. When Adam beheld Eve, the wife God had created for him, he exclaimed:
 

This at last is bone of my bones

and flesh of my flesh;

She shall be called Woman,

because she was taken out of man.” (Genesis 2:23).

“Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.” (Genesis 2:24).

Saturday, October 3, 2015 was the wedding of my eldest grandson, Brian David Jones to his beautiful bride, Amanda Owens. The wedding was the sacred, solemn, beautiful ceremony one likes to attend and to witness. I remembered how Brian David had come, the first grandchild of seven, and from the beginning had been a winsome, bright, engaging little boy, beloved and loveable. Here he stood, a handsome man, mature in years, pledging to “love, honor and cherish” Amanda his bride, “as long as they both should live.” As I enjoyed the solemnity of the vows spoken and the beauty of the ceremony’s setting, I prayed that God would bless the union of Brian David and Amanda and give them love deep enough to transcend challenges and strength strong enough to meet whatever life brought their way.

The lines of William Shakespeare’s Sonnet kept hammering at the edges of my mind and I made the poem a part of my prayer for this newly-wed couple, my beloved grandson and his bride:

           Let me not to the marriage of true minds

           Admit impediments. Love is not love

           Which alters when alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove;

O, no! It is an ever-fixed mark,

That looks to tempests and is never shaken;

It is the star to every wandering bark,

Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.

Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

Within his bending sickle’s compass come;

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

If this be error, and upon me prov’d

I never writ, nor no man ever lov’d. –William Shakespeare (1564-1616)

May God’s graciousness and love guide and secure this marriage. –Ethelene Dyer Jones 10.04.2015