Since Susan has finished her course and has now entered her rest in God’s paradise, I get asked occasionally how I feel about getting married again. A number of my friends who have lost their spouses were married again in less than a year from their spouse’s passing. If I were to follow their pattern I’d be getting married within the next couple of months.
(At this point I need to tell you that I am not passing judgement on anyone one else’s choices in this regard. I am simply sharing my journey.)
When asked I usually deflect the question by saying something like, “Right now that is the farthest thing from my mind. I am just trying really hard to get through today.” Or, I might say, “I don’t know what God has for me going forward, this is all new to me, even the old stuff has changed, and I am adjusting to too many other things to give that any thought.”
I am also amazed at our capacity to “put on a happy face” when in reality we are broken and poured out. I suppose that is in part because we are trying to pull ourselves out of our personal slough of despondency and in part, we sense that in those around us are growing weary as we struggle for some sense of normalcy. Or perhaps it is the difference in the loves we share.
Truth is, I don’t like being alone so much of the time. But, at the same time, I’m not sure I want a wife either. I’d love someone to share things with . . . someone with whom to have an affectionate relationship and not so much romantic one. A friend who was widowed within the last year about this and I remember saying to him. “I am not closed to the idea of remarriage, but God would have to put her in my lap and then slap me on the back of my head if it is going to ever happen.
I believe Susan and I did not choose each other. Oh, to be sure we were attracted to one another, and we made choices that brought us together. But as life was being lived, we discovered that our choices were nothing the fulfilling God’s will for our lives. We came to believe that God had chosen us from the foundation of the world to be husband and wife. I know, few will accept this, but I remind you that God does these sort of things and probably more frequently than we think.
We believe that God created us for each other, and God brought us together. We were each other’s destiny. We were meant for each other. This accounts for the width and length and height and depth of our love. Susan loved the way God does and from her I spent a lifetime learning the real meaning of “Agape love.” She loved me the way God loved me, and she trusted me the way we should trust God. She could do that because she loved God with her whole heart, mind and sou. It was the only way she knew how to do love and it made her beautiful person.
That love pulled from me the kind of love that is totally committed to the one who loves me. Susan knew that I would lay down my life for her. I remember when I learned she had pancreatic cancer I went to my office and as I wept, I cried out “O my dear Susan! My precious Susan, I wish to God it was me and not you!” In those moments this David felt like his namesake, King David at the death of his son. It took months after she went to be with the Lord for me to say from my heart to God, “Lord, you gave her to me and you have taken her to yourself, blessed is your name.”
This love affair that Susan and I shared did developed over a lifetime, but it was ordained from before we met. God had birthed us for each other. The astrologer would say our stars where rightly aligned and the biologist that our chromosomes were perfectly matched, but we believed God would say “my will, will be done. “
(Want to know the whole story of how we came together . . . buy the book when it is done.)
I believe some couples who God joins have a unique spiritual identity. Just as a baby has an equal number of chromosomes from their father and mother that makes them unique in the world, so a couple brought together by God have an equal number of spiritual chromosomes that make them into the complete person God wants them to be. Jesus once said about such a couple “So they are no longer two, but one flesh.” (Matthew 19:6) Paul magnifies this in Ephesians he speaks of this as a profound mystery that it is illustrative of the relationship between the church and Christ.
We find ourselves wondering why some seem to recover from their grief in short order and then there are those for whom it is a daily struggle without an end in sight. Believe me when I say, “I cast no aspersions on anyone. Whatever you must do to find a normal life take it as from the Lord and embrace it.”
However, my analytical mind is always searching for the reasons behind things. I am interested in the fact . . . the “what is.” But I seem to have an insatiable need for the “how” and the “why” of things. So, when it comes to loss . . . especially the loss of a one spouse in a couple that has achieved a high degree of "oneness" . . . it is as though, and maybe because it has, half of your soul has been ripped from you. Precisely where I find myself.
I think the depth of grief is directly proportional to the degree that a husband and wife fulfilled God’s intention for them to become “One.” It appears to me that the intensity of the “oneness determines the intensity of the grief when God removes half of that union.
What do I mean by “oneness?” Oneness is the product of building a relationship that transcends the physical and embraces the spiritual. Oneness is the product of a man and a woman coming to the place where they love each other like God loves them. It is a couple whose love has grown from the eros of the flesh through the phileo of men until it has become agape of God.
It is that rare couple who have successfully navigated life together. They have reached the place in their relationship where they love each other with their whole heart. Their relationship with one another becomes an expression of the way God loves us. They are in union at every level of our human existence and at the highest levels of intensity: body, soul and spirit.
Some would say, “That sounds like idolatry to me.” I will concede that it could sound like idolatry but not that it is idolatry. Idolatry would mean that you love your spouse more than you love God and that you place them above God. Idolatry is not possible because it is both the nature and intensity of our love for God that enables us to love one another at such levels.
Rather than idolatry I suggest to you that it is more likely to become an example of (1) how God loves, (2) how we are to love God and (3) how other husbands and wives are to love each other. It is one aspect of Jesus word when he said, “A new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another; even as I have loved you, that ye also love one another” (John 13:34) and again, “Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it;” (Ephesians 5:25.) If anything, it is evidence of the height, depth and breadth of our love for God.
It is God’s love for us that enables us to say, “Jesus is Lord.” It is His loving lordship that enables us to love as does He. In First John 1 John tells us, “Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins . . . we love him, because he first loved us. Our love for God and our ability to love like God comes from God Himself.
Indeed, we are to strive to love as God loves. It is not the kind of love that we have but the priority that we place on the object of our love. God is first among equals only when we speak of the Holy Trinity (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit). Otherwise, there is none like unto Him in all the earth. Our love is to ultimately be like God’s love for us . . . Agape.”
Now, back to the husband-and-wife expression of love. The marriage relationship is the only context in which love in its most complete and fullest sense (body, soul and spirit) can take place that is morally acceptable to God. Marriage is th only place where love can be expressed at every level of our being and toward God at the same time. This process of learning to love as God loves within the marriage context is the heart and soul of husband/wife oneness.
It is the relationship between a man and a woman in which every aspect of their live is supercharged by the love of God . . . it is where what is done in the body is in harmony with what abides in the soul and energized by the spirit. It is within this kind of marriage relationship that we will have some understanding of the “breadth, and length, and depth, and height . . . of the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge . . . .” (Ephesians 5:18-19).
There is so much that could and probably should be said about the oneness between a husband and wife that obtains this level but suffice it to say that when the earthly journey of one of the spouses living in such a God joined union the effects are extraordinarily painful. My first response when Susan left to be with Jesus was, now I better understand how Jesus felt when he cried out to the Father, My God, My God why hast though forsaken me.” It seems the separation of God for Him was worse that the becoming sin.
The deeper the love in life the longer the pain after death. I have been conditioned by God over more than 60 years of companionship with the same person (almost 55 as a married couple) into the person I am and now for the first time I feel the forsakenness of which Jesus spoke that day on the Cross. With Job “Though He slay me, I will hope in Him. Nevertheless, I will argue my ways before Him. This also will be my salvation . . . ." (Job 13:15-16).
