grace given me

This past Sunday, my husband and I celebrated 24 years of marriage. That milestone often evokes congratulations and admiration. But considering that just 2 years ago we were teetering, this was more of a precious, grateful celebration. What could have been a slow crumble has, by God’s grace, become a resurrection story—one not of perfect spouses, but of a perfect God. 

Our beginning felt like magic. I recently stumbled across old emails my husband and I wrote to each other. They were passionate and poetic. We wrote things like, “You are perfect to me,” and “I just can’t get enough of you.” We felt complete in one another, and it seemed like the height of joy. I thought, this is love.

Then life. Challenges came: bills, jobs, kids, family dynamics, stress, disappointments, unmet expectations, misunderstandings, and hurt feelings. But what really got us into trouble… was us. Our flesh. Our pride. Our thinking we knew what love was. I had believed—perhaps not outright, but deep down—that marriage was designed for my gratification. I saw it as a source for emotional highs and romantic affirmation. But I’ve come to learn that marriage is not primarily about feeling fulfilled, or feelings at all. I hear my kids say, “They have feelings,” or, “They lost feelings,” and it echoes the cultural narrative all around us: Follow your feelings. But friend, don’t take the bait.

Did you know that marriage was designed to reflect the saving love of God for us? Tim Keller, in The Meaning of Marriage writes, “Next to our relationship with God, marriage is the most profound relationship there is. That is why, like knowing God himself, coming to know and love your spouse is difficult and painful, yet rewarding and wondrous.” Keller goes on to explain the shallow ideal we often chase: “A marriage based not on self-denial but on self-fulfillment will require a low- or no-maintenance partner who meets your needs while making almost no claims on you.” How many of us approach both marriage and God with that same posture? We want all the blessings with none of the sacrifice. We bring our sin, our self-centeredness, our brokenness, and expect that the act of “falling in love” will fix it all. But that doesn’t change us—God does.

We had to discover that locked within marriage is a mystical treasure. It is patterned after the very nature of God. In the Trinity, we see the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—co-equal, yet each humbly seeking to out-give and glorify the other. There is no striving for dominance, no selfish withholding. Just perfect love. But we are not naturally like that. We must be changed. And the process of being changed is neither easy nor quick. Marriage, in its challenges, drove me deeper into the arms of Jesus. Scripture reminds us in 1 John 4:19, “We love because he first loved us.” And in Romans 5:8, “But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” That’s love. Undeserved. Sacrificial. Transformational. When it became hard to love my husband, I had to go to the source. I had to drink deeply of God’s love for me. I needed the truth that nothing—not my weariness, not my woundedness, not even my failings—could separate me from God’s love. And as I let that love wash over me, in time, something shifted. My thoughts changed. I changed.

I used to miss the early days—the butterflies, the longing emails, the easy adoration. But now I see how fragile that love really was. “Madly in love” is just our pride relishing that someone we find amazing finds us amazing too. As Tim Keller notes, “When you first fall in love, you think you love the person, but you actually love the idea of the person.” Now, I treasure where we are. Our love is not built on illusion or idealism. We are building a love that is rooted in Christ and refined by fire.

Lord, I praise you because you are love. You have taught me what real love is by loving me first. I pray for marriages. I pray for real, strong, tender, joyful marriages. I pray for powerful encounters with you that rock people to their core and strip away shallow definitions of love. I pray for the courage to dive into the deep—and get swallowed up in your ocean of love. May the love that starts in you, overflow into marriages, and ripple out into families and communities. Amen.