Part 5: Achievements are useful if you plan to die today.
I once owned an electric guitar. I never played it. I have a senior picture of me holding a guitar that I didn't know one note on.
I was in the marching band, but I always had trouble playing complicated saxophone parts while I was also trying to move up, down, across, and diagonally on a football field. When the parts were simple, I was a marching sax player; other times I was just a guy walking around on the field.
In fifth grade I was a football player. I took the field once, got laid out by a kid twice my size, and hid on the sidelines as I nursed an "injured"wrist. Was I still a football player or a lethargic cheerleader?
Sometimes people introduce me to others as a "good writer" when, secretly, I haven't written anything in months. Didn't Einstein say time was relative? If that's true, I still consider myself a football player.
Technically, at specific moments in my past, I have been a guitarist, writer, football player, marching sax player, skateboarder, dancer, good Samaritan, employee-of-the-month, and on three separate occasions, a cross-dresser. Technically speaking, at some point, a lot of us have been a lot of things, but in reality, we were just in a phase or pretending. We would consider ourselves stupid if we went around saying that we were something that, in fact, we hadn't been in years.
With the exception of writer (if I stretch the truth), I don't consider myself to be any of the things I listed earlier. I dabbled in them. I tried them out. But I can't say I ever integrated any of them into my identity.
"So when is a deer not a deer?" When it's dead meat.
In my life, I have known a lot of people who were married. I knew very few who had a marriage. Now, I have voiced this before to one of my married friends (one whom I consider to have a marriage) and he said, "You can't judge a marriage from the outside. I respect anybody with the guts to get married and stay married."
I've thought about that and I do agree that you can't judge a marriage from the outside. I can make observations on your marriage. I can even attempt to draw some educated conclusions if I get to know you two enough, but I could never judge the quality of the marriage because I don't know what happens in your home when it's just the two of you. I don't know what your hearts are toward each other.
But I do disagree with my friend that you can get married, stay married, and then call it a win. The people I have seen who have a pulse in their marriage of any kind, are people who are constantly working on their marriage 3 years, 7 years, 15 years, and even 30 years after they get married. They work on communication,. They work on showing love to each other. They get into fights and resolve them by seeking truth and compassion and grace.
You got married? Who cares? Anybody can get married. Ike Turner was married. Hugh Hefner has been married multiple times.
Oh, you're still married? What's so hard about that? I knew a couple who were married for 20 plus years, slept in separate bed rooms, and hated each others guts. Let me get you a medal.
Don't get me wrong -- if you are married, you should feel very blessed; but you have to understand that the difference between being married (an act that occurred in the past) and having a marriage (something that you intentionally take the time to grow daily) is the same difference between owning a hammer and building a house.
If you want a hammer, you just go get one: a red one, a blue one, a classy, trophy hammer, or a cheap, crotechety, old hammer. Some people own several hammers. Some people get a new hammer every couple years. Just be careful, I knew a guy who had a spare hammer on the side and his main hammer found out and bludgeoned him.
Oh, but to build a house with that hammer! To take the time to draw and redraw the blueprints. To have a vision of where the rooms will be -- and not just where they will be, but to scout the land and to see where the sun will rise and set and what the light will be like on the inside of the house. You sketch out what the view from the bedroom window will be when you wake up in the mornings. You plan and design what you want the center of your home to be -- the focal point -- the living room, the kitchen, the garden?
Then to build that home, to take your tools and to construct and build and tear down and rebuild. Over and over again, you just tear down and rebuild until it is perfect. And this house doesn't just go up in a month, or a year, but this is a house you are working on and tweaking until you die. There will always be windows to fix, creaky boards to silence, and other normal wear and tear repairs to make. But even more so, you have the chance to turn this nice little house into a home, filled with memories of joy and, yes, some hard times too.
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There are two things that I pray for for my both my friends who are building a marriage and my friends who are building other kinds of houses: a passion, a ministry, working toward another goal...I pray for them that God would give them perseverance and diligence.
I think that next to God's will for us in those areas, perseverance and diligence are two of the biggest blessings we need when we try to move from "having done something" to "doing something."
Perseverance and diligence are huge traits that I've seen in marriages that aren't just states of being or legal statuses for the parties involved, but are marriages that are alive, and adventurous, and have this contagious ability to make the people around that marriage want to live as well.
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You know, we always make fun of the guy who was the star football player in high school and can't let go of that. You've maybe met people like him. I have. He's the guy who's 20 pounds over weight and just can't let go of the past. He still follows his Alma Mater football team and complains that the conference was so much more competitive back in his day. We make fun of him because he lifts up this achievement from 20 years ago like it's central to his identity.
Truth is, we're just like him most of the time.
You had a spiritual awakening in college. You went to some church events and got saved. You spent the next year in small groups and reading every Christian book you could. You did devotionals every day. You prayed before every meal. You bought all of David Crowder Band's albums.
But now it's 6 years later and you still go to church every Sunday, but you haven't read your Bible in a year. You still listen to K-Love Christian Radio, but you haven't grown spiritually. You got saved, so you are a Christian, but you don't talk to Jesus much anymore.
You got married. You fell in love hard. On your honeymoon, you and your bride spent the whole week in bed just getting to know each other's touch. Now it's ten years later. You watch a lot of TV together, you see each other every day, and you still make love occasionally, but the passion is gone. But so what? That happens to everybody.
Every morning, you wake up next to a woman you married long ago, so you have a marriage, right?
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I end this series with this: You husbands and wives out there, you have it hard. You wake up with rich blessings hopefully, but you also have terribly difficult challenges ahead of you.
Please, persevere.
Please, be diligent.
Sons and daughters are counting on you.
Future couples who will need you as an example of how to do it God's way are counting on you.
Your spouse is counting on you.
You have much to teach the singles of this world.
Don't half-ass it.
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