As a fan of brevity, I am surprised to be saying this, but where’s the rest of this article?

I want/need more.

@Robert – Hopefully Sean will take your wanting more as a compliment…the exercise was, after all, a 300 word limit : )

Sean,

I have been married for over thirty years & you just schooled me.

I have often wondered how my wife could question my love for her & never quite grasped that it was because of a warped view of “menkind”. This is often the same warped view that we have of God. We often don’t see or realize the love that is there for us.

Thank you for your essay. I will ponder it for a while.

Grace,
Michael

@Jason – It is 293 words. I thought of adding an extra sentence to be exact but I wanted to appear to have been carelessly accurate.

@Robert – It was hard to say what I wanted to say so briefly and I don’t know if I accomplished it well, but I’ve been impacted lately of the way God uses relationships as actual metaphors.

Another recent example I witnessed was of a husband/wife relationship that is very strained. I know the wife is miserable and I have great compassion on her, but deeper than that, I can clearly see that she is largely cut off from God because of this. She has a very difficult time relating to him. What’s more, this schism causes her to push away the One who is most capable and desperately wants to provide comfort.

And then if we flip the coin, there is the husband who leads so poorly. His short-sightedness not only harms the one he has committed his life to, he also hinders her from experiencing God the way God wants. As a husband, this is quite a tall order.

But it is also an amazing blessing when things go right. One might receive a wife like mine who teaches and blesses me despite my thick-headedness.

@Michael – It is amazing how blind we are and that the things we think we see can be so warped. Yet this is eclipsed by how amazing it is that God stoops, even sacrifices his reputation, to meet us in a way that might make us notice him. We can be so warped that the perfect (loving) God can appear to us as uninteresting, irritating, or even repugnant. And God so loves us that he gets his hands dirty, because dirty hands are the kind of things that get our attention.

This is worth a long discussion in itself, but I have to say, I’ve been pondering it for a while myself.

“God gives us relationships as metaphors to better understand how he relates to us and how we can relate to him. One clear metaphor he gave us was that of husband and wife.”

Very true. Very scary too because being of the flawed nature that we are, we’re inevitably bound to screw up any of our relations we have. Therefore also being a bad witness for the love of God.

“I know the wife is miserable and I have great compassion on her, but deeper than that, I can clearly see that she is largely cut off from God because of this. She has a very difficult time relating to him….And then if we flip the coin, there is the husband who leads so poorly….”

I’ve seen this myself. Although it sounds like the husband is doing a piss poor job (pardon the expression), the wife – although understandably hurt, angry and confused – is obviously not excused for pushing God away. No matter how her husband leads, she (as well as each one of us) needs to rely on the truth that God says. Her husband will be held accountable for his poor leadership and the results thereof – but she too accountable for her personal choices and decisions and can hopefully rise above her husbands example to look directly at Christ’s.

Hopefully this couple will be able to work things out – if not then may the wife find a way to cut her loses and just move on.

“As a husband, this is quite a tall order.”

That IS a tall order and honestly, this is one of the many reasons I believe most marriages just shouldn’t be. The husband and wife BOTH have responsibilities in the marriage (responsibilities with actions that will constantly fall short but….), and until two people understand and are willing to commit to those responsibilities….just don’t commit period.

I think husbands and wives both have tall orders: to look like God by loving each other *especially* at that point when the other is most unloveable (selfish, petty, annoying, mean, bitter, apathetic, unfaithful). Only in our own recognition of God’s love for us when we were at our worst can we find the strength (God’s strength, actually) to embody that kind of love toward others. This is how marriage (and church) should look like Christ.

Now, if I can just live that truth out more consistently!

@Becky – “Now, if I can just live that truth out more consistently!”

You & me both, sister.!!!

Grace,
Michael

Nice job Sean……………let’s hear from you more:)