in defense of marriage

An article caught my eye this morning.  The headline declared: "41 percent of births were to unmarried women in 2008"

 

It confirmed what I've been sensing for some time: marriage is very much in decline.  Somehow we have made the genders competitors rather than completers.  The beauty of God's design is that marriage provides a home for the most different of human beings: men and women.  No doubt we can endlessly discuss and debate the causes for marriage's precipitous drop in popularity.  But I have an idea that it comes from one basic problem.  We no longer cherish how each partner complements the other.  The inherent beauty of marriage is something like the completion of a jigsaw puzzle.  Men and women each carry a bag of puzzle pieces.  At a certain point they decide to find out just what the picture in the puzzle looks like.  They can only do that by pooling their pieces of the puzzle and by taking time to complete the picture.  We have an individual identity as men and women but there is another identity that marriage creates which is some marvelous composite of the two.  The marriage makes a home and creates a place of dynamic tension and balance that is perfect to safely introduce children to a world where balance and tension are the norm.  Marriage is not a merger of convenience that provides certain financial and tax benefits.  It is a wonder that rivals the atom, where negative and positive particles are tightly held.  So long as those forces are in balance the atoms become molecules and the molecules become all the matter that makes the physical world.  Split the atom and you release the power that has been needed to hold them together.  That released power is destructive, but retained in the atom, marvelously constructive.  The power God has placed within marriage is the glue that builds lives, communities and countries.  Sadly, the world has lost the beauty of this completed puzzle.  Perhaps we can show them another way!

 

Matthew 19:⁴And he answered and said unto them, Have ye not read, that he which made them at the beginning made them male and female,  ⁵And said, For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they twain shall be one flesh?

 

blessings,

Rob Smith