When the Wedding is Over – Thanks for Faithful Moms
With many minds still savoring the recent royal wedding in England and it being Mother's Day, I thought it appropriate to share the thoughts of a young mom whose wedding day is 10 years past. In this writing she is imagining sending a letter back in time to herself just before her wedding. She gave it to me a while ago but I saved it for today. I am humbled by a wisdom beyond her years. She has an integrity that plays out in front of us daily as she struggles well to step into the roles and life God has given her. Enjoy.
A Letter to Myself as a Young Bride:
The calendar nears the tenth anniversary of the marriage vows you are about to make. I reflect on the covenant you are about to enter, and I ponder…how did “you” become “me”?
You are right to tremble at the magnitude of this undertaking. Though you are eager, you are serious, and that is a good place to begin. You know that to be married will be difficult, raw, and costly. Though you know to expect it, you cannot know how it will feel to walk through it. Imagining happiness and then feeling happiness are different things. Imagining pain and then experiencing pain are different things. That’s why your vow doesn’t include escape clauses or conditions. You are wise to promise a commitment that will not depend on how you feel.
Yes, I would still make the promise you are about to make. But I wouldn’t speak those words with the brightness, or certainty, with which you are about to utter them. You speak from an untested heart. You approach the ceremony with your head high. I tell you, if I were to renew those words, I would position myself on my knees, with my head bowed, and my heart contrite. It’s likely that tears would mar any perfectly applied mascara. Because, this time I would know that I am powerless to keep my end of the bargain. I would know that trusting in even a shred of affection I have for my husband will be chaff that blows at the first winds of despair. You do not know it now, but marriage will be the great winnowing fork in the next decade of your life. The Lord God wants more of your devotion, and He will use the frailty of your marriage to draw it out of you.
Into your ear I whisper caution, against holding too tightly to the ingrained American idea that you are an individual with your own rights, and your own schedule, and your own body. Your entire vision for your future is soon going to be overwritten by God’s hand. You dream of a career and a Pottery Barn house in a desirable neighborhood. And then kids. In that order. All of these dreams, of course, are couched in a loving partnership with the man awaiting you at the end of the aisle.
But God had others things in store for you.
He planned for your marriage to welcome four babies before your sixth anniversary. All of your ideas of fun, creative, energetic parenting are going to die at the altar of necessity. They will be reborn as a more enduring, steady form of focus and prayer. They will not be the Kodak moments that our culture idealizes and advertisers market as the “good life,” but they will be the ancient values that God instills in the hearts of His people…the ties that really bind.
You will learn very early that human effort is utterly lacking. Your self-sufficiency will be laid low. You are going to learn that the Jesus you thought you knew is far more dependable and intimate than you believed before. Those times when you cannot get away for a moment alone, or when little people cling to the hem of your clothes wanting something from you, or when they wake you in the middle of the night (again)…Jesus is going to be the comfort and the gentleness that sustain you. He will teach you patience and compassion because He was tested this way too, and yet His perfect life will stand in your stead when all you have to show for is exasperation and anger.
That graduate degree that you aspire to…you’ll earn it, but at a price. It will be through the tears of a mother torn between her love of learning and the raw realization that once the clock of motherhood is begun, it cannot be stopped, and you only get one chance. You are going to make the decision to let go of all of those straight-A’s in order to offer more of your heart to your children. You are going to hate it…and I think that’s the point of the pain, to teach you that loving someone else more than you love yourself is costly.
That public persona of “competent professional” you imagined yourself as having is going to vaporize. In its place you will take on the humble mantle of the homeschool mom. There will be little acknowledgment of your efforts. You will feel utterly incapable. But you’ll know God better here, too. You’ll feel the weight of Deuteronomy 6, and it will nearly crush you. Your only hope in this will be to turn to the Word of God with a dependent quality that, I am afraid, you currently make light of. But after the refining fire of this submission, you will rise with the inner joy of obedience to the calling of God, who equips and strengthens his chosen people. You will learn to hear and love the voice of your Shepherd.
That magazine-worthy house you imagined will never materialize. In its place, God will humble you with one of the greatest lessons of your life. He is going to set your little family down into a neighborhood unlike any you’ve lived in before. You will be among the poor, and the unfashionable. You will be confronted with the knowledge that your Christianity is marred by traces of racism and classism that your safe choices, up until this point, could never have exposed. You will be shocked at how deep your materialism goes. You will want to move away from the social problems plaguing your neighborhood. But, God will keep you there so that you take ownership of your depravity and your pride. He wants to give you His heart for all people…and you will struggle against this, complaining that you feel more equipped to “minister” to the middle-class, suburban white people you grew up next to. This will be a bitter cup for you. Just when you think you’ve mastered it, more sin will be uncovered.
The greatest warning I can give you is to expose your thoughts about significance and gender. Your life is a classic example of the words to the woman of Genesis 3. If I could teach you anything right now it would be that feminism has a greater hold on you than you think. You assume that your years of being raised in a Christian home, school, and church have purged that from your system. I weep for you. No lesson will cost you as dearly. No pain will be as personal as the peeling of this sin from your heart, your thoughts, and your theology. Your marriage will be strained to its thinnest when you play this card. I wish you would respect more deeply the difference between who your husband is as a male image-bearer, and who you are as a female image-bearer.
You are right to insist upon inherent dignity that you have from your Creator. But that is not the truth that counters the lies of a power-hungry, androgynous culture. The truth you need to learn is to rest in the role you have been given, because that will most glorify God. You are woman because He imagined you that way, and he wants your spirit to delight in Him thus. You do not understand the nature of God’s love for you and you will ignorantly inflict pain on your marriage because of this.
I wish that this letter could really traverse time and reach you. I wish I could let you know that ten years, two marriage counselors, a Bible Study called “Five Aspects of Woman” and a few good sermons later, your pain will ease and joy will trickle in. You will even begin to understand the mystery of marriage as a picture of Christ and the church…no, I’m not kidding on that one. It’s real. I know you don’t recognize yourself in my words, but I think that’s the point. Ten years from now I hope to, myself, get a letter from a wife of twenty years. I dread the stories of gray hair and adolescent turmoil she’ll tell, but I look forward to seeing who she is.
