Not Enough Love To Go Around
Being engaged is a double-edged sword. On the plus side, I get to
devote all of my love and energy towards one person. But the flip side
is that I have less energy for other people. Let’s say I get to
distribute 100 units of love energy (power, actually, for you science
nerds). Before June (BJ), it went like this:
-
40 goes to friends (people with whom I spend 1-1 time on a regular basis)
-
20 goes to acquaintances (people I see in group settings, such as my Highrock and xanga communities)
-
2 goes to strangers (people I should love more: Third-World starving
children, flood victims, unreached scimitar-wielding infidels, and
members of boy bands)
Notice: that only adds up to 62. So I had 38 extra units of love to go
around, and boy was I looking to spend them! Now in comes June, and my
distribution changes:
-
74 goes to my fiancee
-
20 goes to friends
-
5 goes to acquaintances
-
1 goes to strangers
Now I am totally tapped out at 100. And I’ve fallen off the face of
the earth, as happens to a lot of couples: friends are getting 50%
less, and acquaintances are getting 75% less of their USRD-Ed. But
worst of all, the strangers I’m supposed to love (c.f. The Good
Samaritan, and lots of other Bible verses) are really getting shafted:
they’ve almost fallen off my radar entirely!
This makes me feel like a bad Christian. =( I think June feels kind
of the same way, having given up all of her public ministries to
prepare for marriage and minister to her family and me.
My only consolation comes from Mike Mason, who wrote a neat little book
called The Mystery of Marriage. June typed this out for me in an email
last month. 
Next to the love of God, the "one thing" that is by far the most
important in the life of all married people is their marriage, their
loving devotion to their partner. Nothing on earth must take
precedence over that, not children, jobs, other friendships, nor even
"Christian work".
As obvious as it sounds, this can be a most difficult priority to keep
in perspective. For what that amounts to, finally, is that it is not
just the bad and the selfish in oneself that must be continually
renounced if one is to be successfully married. Even more painful and
bewildering to cope with are all the good and healthy things which
must be renounced or postponed or watered down on account of the
demands imposed by marriage. How many deep friendships that might
have been are rendered impractical by marriage, or must at least take
a backseat to the primary friendship with one's spouse? How many
wonderful activities are interrupted by marriage duties, and how many
good intentions and charitable plans must be set aside each day? How
much energy that might otherwise have been put at the service of the
church or the community is channeled instead into the work of
marriage? Like Judas Iscariot at the site of Mary pouring out costly
perfume over the feet of Jesus, we cry out, "This ointment might have
been sold, and the money given to the poor!" (John 12:5). What
offends us is the terrible waste of marriage, the waste of our
precious lives being poured out over just one other person. We would
like to think of ourselves, perhaps, as having a great impact on the
world, touching and influencing thousands of lives. How great is our
frustration when we realize that we do not adeuqately touch even the
one single life of the person closest to us!
However, part of the secret to the effectiveness and strength of the
peculiar little vows of marriage lies in this very scandal of waste,
this extravagant simplicity of focus. For marriage involves nothing
more than a lifelong commiment to love just one person -- to do,
whatever else one does, a good, throrough job of loving one person.
What could be simpler than that? There is nothing simplier than love.
... While the rest of the world runs after grandiose and unattainable
ideals, marriage partners walk the humbler but more accessible path of
simple caring for one another from one day to the next. It is a task
that is not very glorious from the point of view of the world, but one
which could hardly be more important in the eyes of God. And there is
no greater peace of fulfillment than in doing a few simple things for
the love of God, the things that He Himself has put closest to hand.
When couples observe (as they are very fond of doing) that marriage
requires "work", what they mean primarily is that it takes time. They
mean it robs them of precious time. They mean that marriage gobbles
up unbelievable enormities, scandalous vastnesses, great fantastic
globs and scads of pure, priceless, unrecoverable time. It is like
the amount of fuel that must be fed into a big, powerful, shiny,
eight-cylinder gas guzzler that has to be kept constantly on the road.
You cannot leave a marriage sitting in the driveway even for a day,
because the only reason for marriage is togetherness... It can be a
full-time job just being a passenger in this thing. But like it or
not, you and your spouse are in it together, and in it for life, and
the work of traveling in marriage is the most vital work you can do.
... This is what a radical business these little vows of marriage
involve us in: they pit the needs and wants of one small, frail,
love-starved human creature against the demands of all the rest of the
universe, with all of its urgency and glory and importance, and there
is no contest! It is the one person who wins over the many, the
humble cause of the home which prevails over every other worthy cause
in the world.
-- Mike Mason, The Mystery of Marriage, "Vows"
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