Arm In Arm

Those who know my wife know she is an extremely affable, kind, and just plain good soul--beautiful inside and out. I know this too, but I also know all the day-to-day foibles behind the scenes that also makes her human; this is my exclusive privilege as a husband, to know her in the flesh and in the spirit. 

One of the greatest gifts and graces of our marriage is that my wife and I have been walking together, serving the Lord, since our beginning. I know it can be a painful cross for many, including those I know, when they are 'unequally yoked' to either a lukewarm Christian or an unbeliever. But this is not our cross. 

In The Matter Of Life And Death, I wrote about my father in law in his final days. As those days are now drawing down to hours, I have been reflecting more about the role my wife is playing in my father-in-law's final chapter of life. She has always been a dutiful daughter, but her care for her father these past few weeks in his final decline has exemplified the life of a Christian. It is a period filled with grace and intimacy. Wiping and cleaning him up when he needs to be changed. Arranging appointments and coordinating care. Reading him the psalms as he sleeps. Attending to his every need. Living the Fourth Commandment as a witness to the man who gave her her life. 

I have done my best to hold down the fort while she's been away. I do a lousy job, and it's been a strain trying to work, watch kids, homeschool, and cook/clean/wash even for just a few days. Where my wife's sanctity excels, mine staggers in survival mode pettiness and an embarrassing self-centeredness. I can't do what she does on a daily basis, and it's glaringly apparent. 

The only thing I can figure in all this is to meditate on "the helpers" throughout scripture, the supporting cast, the sideliners: Simon of Cyrene, conscripted to help Jesus carry his cross when he had no strength to. Joanna the wife of Chuza, the manager of Herod’s household; Susanna; and many others who were helping to support them out of their own means. Silas, Priscilla and Aquila who aided Paul in his ministry. Simon Peter's mother-in-law. They didn't have a big role to play, but they did have a role. Even mighty Moses needed his arms held up by Aaron and Hur to win the battle against the Amalekites. 

Marriage is a school. You learn to love each other, but you also walk arm in arm--sometimes edging ahead, sometimes falling behind your lover. Sometimes you need them to pick you up, or sit with you in the mud on the side of the road. Sometimes you need to carry them on your shoulder. The important thing, though, is that you are facing the same direction.

The Lord saves, but we sit at his feet to learn how to love. Then we practice on each other in the most intimate and mundane of settings as husband and wife. We learn the subtle cues, the unspoken signals, the ways of forgiving, and how to support one another. We learn the depths of our own selifshness, the root of sin. Sometimes it is our spouse themselves who become our cross, the enemy that has dipped his hand in the cup with us, who betrays and denies us before men. 

But because we walk not eye to eye, but arm in arm to our Golgotha and new Jerusalem, we play a supporting role in each other's sanctification. In observing my wife living out her role as a daughter, I am strengthening my own vocation as a husband and father. In praying together with her at the kitchen table in the early morning before sunrise, her robe becomes perhaps a future relic that brushes up against my arm. 

For us married people, the witness of our faith can happen on our knees in the pew, but that's a fraction of it. It's more often than not at the kitchen table, the bedside, the bathroom, the hospital room. The places we visit in order to live out the love that has been poured into us from Christ himself in our marital sacrament. He has stooped down from Heaven to teach us how to stoop down ourselves. He humbled himself and opened not his mouth to show us what humility looks like in the flesh. He gave us our life so that we can pour it out for not only each other, but the world. The world right in front of us. The world we walk through together, arm in arm.

I know her secrets. I know her weaknesses. I know her little foibles. But I also know her love--for her Christ in the sky, and for her father in the bed before her whose muscles are atrophying and who can no longer swallow. She wipes his brow, holds his hand, consoles his heart for the passage ahead. She has given me and my children the privilege of witnessing it from the sidelines with the other helpers, teaching us what an ordinary holiness, and a commandment lived out, looks like in real time.