Among other things…

Marriage is teaching me things and people aren’t disposable like I’ve treated my shoes or even lots of stuff. It’s life long and you have to keep tending it.

It’s a good practice in indisposability! No one gets discarded! Also marriage fights consumer mentality-looking at others primarily in terms of my needs and wants, desires. I-it-ing others rather than I-thou-ing them, as Buber would put it.

Marriage helps us overcome the commodification of identity. I cannot treat you as a product to be bought and sold and used if we are married. I have to treat you as a whole person, who, like me, is becoming more themselves daily.

For some seasons, we’re not “worth” much in a business sense anyways! Maybe we are sick, or going through healing, and not much use to others. Then, to still love one another, is something like faith. That each of us is still worth everything, even dying for in our weakest state and moments! Each of us poems forever. Included in the collection of poetry by God.

When you commit to care for someone for life, it shifts something in your orientation. You consider how to steward the other’s whole lifecycle less and less selfishly. There’s many ways to learn that, but marriage is a good one.

A great challenge in a disposable, get the next big thing, as soon as you want it, culture. Moves in the opposite manner, marriage. That’s why it’s a high metaphor, a life long formational teaching. And a form of suffering, or dying to self towards and into more wholeness! Marriage is a great rehearsal for eternal life!

Marriage is also a means to the formation of God in us. It is a high medium of encountering and being transformed by Him, as we offer our lives to one another. It’s an accelerated route to spiritual growth, in other words! It’s easy and necessary to die quickly to self in marriage if you want it to work.

Marriage is a tabernacle to meet God in.