I have been married for three months and seventeen days now…

and I can’t even express how glorious it has been. Kirsten is the perfect match for me and we are able to really push each other in areas where we need it (some may not understand what I mean by that). Yet this past week was our first big holiday together as husband and wife, and that holiday obviously being Thanskgiving. We discussed at multiple different times what should our plans be: stay here in Wilmington, go to Charlotte w/her family, VA w/mine, back to Mexico (maybe not the last). We decided on Thanksgiving for a couple different reasons. 

So we headed 6 hours north-west to Broadford, VA where it is about a 45 minute car ride to the closest Wal-Mart, so it is in the deep mountains of Virginia. The entire trip was very relaxing and calm. The gist of it was eating, watching football, watching movies, and cracking quite a few jokes at the dinner table with my older brother, younger brother, father, mother, and Kir. Kirsten really just settled right in and looked like she had been part of the family her entire life. In essence it was a great Thanksgiving with the family and everything seemed normal.

But it was on the final 2 hours driving home to Wilmington that I discovered something. And that something is once you say the “I Do’s” it is easy to become really, really lazy when it comes to taking care of and trying to impress your wife. And what I mean by “impressing” is to go out of the way to make sure she notices you love her, care for here, do not want her to think there is another guy out there for her. This is what I did when we were dating. I was not the sweetest guy when it came to flowers & cards, but I did my best to always be sure to look out for her, and try to make sure she knew I was her man.

Now after the “I Do’s” it seems so easy to forget those things. Now that there is this covenant of marriage I seem to think that she can’t do anything about it now. If I forget to call, email, plan a date she can’t breakup and call it quits, she is in it for the long haul. Unfortunately this mindset that we easily fall into is terrible. Now is the time more than ever to step up and be a man! Keep opening up that car door, keep thinking of where to surprise her on Friday, keep making that same meal every Thursday b/c believe me, SHE LOVES IT!!! 

Then I realized one last thing as she began to sing at the top of her lungs about an hour away and I held back b/c I did not want to embarrass myself. Next thing I know I am going after it, because we are not dating, we are married. And how I sing out loud does not matter to her. Before this was a big deal, but she loves to hear me sing way off key (I think). All those small details we as guys were always worried about when dating are gone now (well, for most I hope). We have a freedom to act ourselves around our wife without wondering if she is going to call back tonight.

But remember we still have that same freedom to plan that date night, cook her dinner, and do something as simple as open her car door. 

**Side-Note: We were introduced to a new iPhone game by my younger brother titled, “Pass the Pigs”. A great game that I find a must now on long trips.

Still learning and growing…

After a difficult lunch break yesterday with Kirsten due to some misalignment with our conversation or lack there of. Sometimes I just drift off into my own world when it’s obvious that is not where I should be. We drove back to work and I took about 30 minutes and dove into some scripture and then remembered a section from Rob Bell’s book: “Sex God”. What follows is what I sent to Kirsten through email (she loves receiving emails throughout the day, one of the things I have to work on). There was some personal stuff afterwards I am choosing to leave out right now, but here is what woke me up…

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“Therefore a man leaves his father and mother and embraces his wife. They become one flesh.” | Genesis 2:24

Now the one flesh seems to be about their having sex. Which, or course, it is. But there is so much more going on here. Even having sex in this story is about something else.

In Jewish tradition, words are extremely meaningful. In our english language the dictionary has somewhere between one or two thousand words, yet the Hebrew language sits somewhere at over seven thousand words!

So when it is said in Genesis that a man and woman will become “one flesh”, the word for one in Hebrew is the word “echad“.

Echad is oneness made up of several parts or members. So the man and woman are two people, two separate, independent beings, and yet when they come together, they’re one. The word is significant because it occurs in one of the most well-known passages of Scripture in Jewish history. It’s a prayer from the book of Deuteronomy that begins, “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one.”

This prayer, called the Shema, fro the word “to hear”, is the central declaration of the Jewish faith, a way of reaffirming all that life is about.

The Lord is one.

The Lord is echad.

God is echad.

It’s the same word as “one flesh” in Genesis: “And the man and woman shall be echad flesh.”

Central to the Bible is the affirmation that there is one God. Not many, one. An sex between the man and woman has something to do with God.

Who is God.

What is God like.

Adam and Eve are one as God is one.

Same word.

This marriage between a man and woman - their having sex - is about something bigger - is about something much bigger than the relationship itself. It points beyond them to somebody else - to God.

The point of marriage isn’t marriage.

It’s a picture.

A display.

A window that you look through to something else.

A marriage is a mission.

Our world is echad. It isn’t one. It’s broken, shattered, fractured, with pieces lying all over the floor.

We have friends who are broken from “broken homes“.

A couple “split up“.

A spouse is “shattered” by his lovers infidelity.

Somebody’s marriage fell apart and she’s “picking up the pieces“.

When our trust has been betrayed and those who were supposed to stand by us don’t, this naturally has consequences for how we think about God. It becomes hard to trust that God is good when our significant relationships simply aren’t that good.

A marriage is designed to counter all of this. Not to add the brokenness of the world but to add to the “oneness” of the world. This man and woman who have given themselves to each other are supposed to give the world a glimpse of hope, a display of what God is like, a bit of echad on earth.

*excerpt taken from “Sex God” by Rob Bell