By day the LORD directs his love, at night his song is
with me— a prayer to the God of my life.
Half of all marriages fail.
Why? Good question.
Some of the best researchers on the subject, professionals
who’ve listened to hours and hours of conversation between ordinary married
people, have come up with very interesting findings. Good lovin’, they claim,
may not be at the heart of long and happy marriages, even though good lovin’ is
what we’d like to believe in; a marriage drenched in passion isn’t necessarily
a marriage which will last.
Okay, but what then? What
researchers have come to understand is that the success of a relationship may be
more dependent on the ability to fight than the ability to love. Go ahead and
read that again. Marriages fail, they
claim, when spouses can’t deal with inevitable conflicts. Maybe I can put it this way—couples who learn
how to fight, learn how to love.
Conflict occurs even in the best of relationships. Those marriages that make it, do so because
spouses learn to keep those conflicts from escalating into the kind of murder
that kills love and respect.
I don’t know how our fights—my wife and mine—rank with
others. There have been some stiff ones,
I know. Thankfully, I’ve not been around
enough other couples’ tiffs and rants to judge the relative nastiness of ours. But we’ve been married now for 52 years, and
I seriously doubt we’re in any kind of trouble, thank the Lord. We must have learned to manage our brawls, I
guess, but don’t ask me to write the “how to.”
The fact is, it’s impossible for me to imagine myself alone
now. In the give-and-take of marriage,
I’ve pretty much lost the egoism that being single affords. I’m not perfect,
and I still want what’s mine—and then some; but I can’t remember the last time I
told myself, bitterly, that the only reason I’d done something I didn’t want to
do was because, dang it, I was married, done something totally (grrrrr) for
her. It’s been a long time, thank the
Lord.
All of which is not to say we’re home free. I’m not too old to be shocked, even by
myself.
Mostly, this great psalm, Psalm 42, is lament. Three times (vss. 5, 8, 11) when he’s almost
lost in the dark night of the soul, David has to pinch himself to God’s goodness;
he has to push himself to engineer an way out of seemingly pathless despair. Twice,
in fact, he falls back into the darkness after trying the best he can to pull
himself out.
I don’t want to be prescriptive because God’s love comes in
so many shades and sizes that no one size fits all; but I’m wondering, when I
feel the wild emotional amplitude of this famous, short psalm—I’m wondering
whether some believers, not all, need to understand that, like a marriage, God
almighty and his people—some of us at least—stay together only because we’ve
learned to fight, and in so doing, how to love.
No one ever talks about that in Sunday School, but the proof
is here in one of David’s roughest song, full as it is with darkness. And there
are others like this one, lots of them, more than we’re often willing to admit
or certainly advertise.
Maybe David—or whoever wrote this great psalm—has
learned how to love the Lord in all his mystery, only because he’s learned also
how to fight.
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