When we were Wed

When we were wed I planned to make you happy and was sure you would make me glad.
You were the focus of my life and I had high expectations of life as husband and wife.
I expected to be the centre of your life, delighting you, as our mutual joy nourished us both, so we needed no other happiness.

I was wrong to hold such expectations. Not that we cannot be happy, but God did not make us sufficient to meet another’s need.
Our design finds chief completeness, meaning and happiness in God and our walk with Him, so we need no other.
Looking to you to please me and wanting you to look to me for happiness, I set us up for disappointment.

We have now achieved a lifetime of joy and challenge together.
The real blessings have been through God, Himself, with only transient happiness from each other.
Yet we hold a place of great privilege and power for one another.

No one hurts us as we hurt each other. No one blesses us as we bless each other.
We are the other’s chief human joy and greatest personal pain.
As we journey to new freedom and victory we journey to ‘letting go’ of each other.

Not that we will ever part, or can ever replace the other in our heart and life.
But we hand each other to God and revoke reliance on human source in place of reliance on God.
Looking to each other we are vulnerable to pain that human weakness brings.

As we find our source more soundly in God we are freed from pains fostered in each other.
Our joy is to be free from each other, while having each other all the more firmly in our lives.

When I no longer need you, I will more freely love you.
When you no longer need me you will more joyfully endure my limitations.
When I find God as my all, you become a bonus and my joy.
When you find God as your all, you won’t come up empty any more.

Our future hope is not in each other, but in being free of the other, finding God as our all, not impacted by each other’s good or bad.

We have made strides in this direction, yet have miles to go.
Even now we better survive and recover from the other’s failings, yet greater freedom is needed.

With this sweet truth I invite you to take my hand and venture into tomorrow.
I make you no promise that has not been made.
I ask nothing of you that is not already given.
I seek simply to journey closer to Him, with you at my side as both beneficiary of my progress and the one who shares your joys with me along the way.

I love you, my bride, and I long for us to enjoy each other more, free from limitations our humanness imposes on our happiness.

Come away my love.
Let us run to the mountain of the Lord, where the air is clear and the laughter sweet, and where human ills dissolve in heavenly glory.
There let me share my love with you, and there find your greatest joys at my side and in my arms.
Come, my love. Come away.