Just returned from the website of a couple of students I had in a writing class three or four years ago. I hadn’t known that their nuptials were finally going to happen. I got an e-mail from the new husband—one of those mass e-mails—that directed family and friends to check out the wedding pix on their website. There were hundreds.
Both kids I liked, a lot. I really wanted them to get married, and, quite frankly, I think they lolly-gagged far too long. Like most twenty-somethings today, they dawdled, finding it difficult, I suppose, to commit. I’m not sure what it is about their generation, but drawing a bead on the future—marriage, profession—seems really arduous task for them. It is, I guess. Or should be.
No matter. I’m glad the two of them finally got married. I looked over some of the pictures—fairly typical stuff—a bunch of friends at the night-before barbeque and the rehearsal; then the wedding, some standard shots, many nice ones taken in the bride’s family’s orchard, fruit trees running down away from a family of smiling faces.
I wonder what happened. I wonder how they finally determined that this courtship of theirs—a good chunk of it carried on with a half a continent between them—was actually finally going to end in ceremony. Maybe one of them said it was time to fish or cut bait.
Thirty years ago, when my wife and I got married, it was easier to make commitments, perhaps because, as children of an ethnic and religious ghetto, the length and breadth of this world didn’t seem as endless, the dangers as immediate, or the choices as wide. The world seemed smaller, more manageable; commitment didn’t loom so ominously. Half of the wedding pictures people snap during this summer’s round of nuptials will be burned within the next few years—or simply deleted. Lots of marriages fail. They had reason to pause, I suppose.
Commitments aren’t easy for any of us. Yesterday’s newspaper told the story of a local soccer star who had signed to play for a college after getting all sorts of ink for committing to a different one several months ago. So much for that commitment.
“Commit the Lord,” the verse says—buckle yourself in, sign on the dotted line, become part of a team, draw up a contract, become a part of something.
Commitments are daunting because, once made, choice goes cold; and our world today finds nothing as precious as the freedom to choose. Commit to a college and your choosing is behind you. Commit to a spouse, and you’ll have to pick up your clothes and hang ‘em in the closet. Commit to God—and what?
Commit to God, and pack up all the other commitments and relationships—love of money, love of fame, love of power—and most of all, love of self. Commitment, an act of will, means giving yourself away. There are great rewards in committing to the Lord, but there’s some cost: yourself. The very essence of religious experience—you choose the faith—is the denial of self. Maybe that’s why we balk so easily, kids especially, in this affluent age.
The road before my former students, now married, is straight and narrow. But love is worth it. Love is best.
I pray those pictures will last.
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