My brother-in-law posted a post on Facebook today about marriage that was really good. It reminded me of a 5th Sunday lesson my wife and I gave in our Church years ago. http://ldstalks.blogspot.com/2009/01/unity-in-marriage.html
Here is my brother-in-law, Randy Roberts, post that I really liked. https://www.facebook.com/725060327/posts/10160484362515328/
Our loving Father in Heaven gave a commandment to the prophet Joseph Smith, He said “…be one; and if ye are not one ye are not mine.”
Other times He referred to us being one-
John 17:21 That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us: that the world may believe that thou hast sent me.
22 And the glory which thou gavest me I have given them; that they may be one, even as we are one:
Ephesians 5:31 For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall be joined unto his wife, and they two shall be one flesh.
John 10:16 And other sheep I have, which are not of this fold: them also I must bring, and they shall hear my voice; and there shall be one fold, and one shepherd.
I believe that there is a strong cord between the phrase “be one” and love. Christ commanded us to “love one another” but what does it mean to love? His first and greatest commandment is to love God, and the second is like unto it, to love our neighbor as ourselves.
So how do we love and what is the connection to becoming one? We are all brought up watching romantic comedies and seeing how couples fall in love in the sweetest, funniest, and most heart wrenching ways, but it seems that seldom do we see what happy marriage looks like afterward. We are taught that love is the infatuation that we feel upon finding someone, and that once that initial novelty is gone that there must not be any more love, that we must have fallen out of love.
Well, to me that doesn’t sound anything like the commandment to “be one”, and to “love one another”. So what I have been able to decipher about love is that there is more that one type. The first type of love is an immature selfish love that is interested in making ourselves happy. We feel lonely and want someone to fill that lonely void in our soul and fulfill our physical desires. All of that sounds nice and is actually still keeping the first commandment to multiply and replenish the earth, but it falls short of being one. After this initial immature love hopefully comes a deeper love where we become more than “one flesh” but “one in spirit”.
Let me explain. Whenever we do anything for anyone, we make a small deposit of our time, talents, and interests into that person. In other words, we have spiritually deposited a small portion of ourselves into that person. As we make these small spiritual deposits, and they are accepted by others, we slowly become one spiritually. We now have a small portion of ourselves invested into the other person. The person we are commandment to love or serve first and foremost is our God. Second our Spouse.
If we allow anger, hate, bitterness, envy, or jealousy to enter into our spirits because of acts that others do, then we slowly do the opposite and we become separated.
Both of these things depend upon our free agency. We are free to give of ourselves and our love, or to build up walls of hate. Nobody can do it for us. Some believe that the actions of others justify our walls, but they don’t.
Our Savior is the perfect example of this. No matter what anyone did, He frankly forgave and loved them. No matter what anyone of us does, He loves us and His arms are stretched out still. He has done everything possible to become one with us. He has completely given of His physical body, as well as His Spirit, entirely to us without reservation. It is up to us to receive it.
He is not asking us to do anything that He hasn’t already done for us. He even compares our relationship to Him as a husband wife relationship. In other words, we get no excuses for not loving our God, spouses, or anyone else for that matter.
If we are struggling in any of these relationships, He is willing to take our burdens from us, He suffered them already so that He can take them away from us. He waits with outstretched arms to lift us up and bear our burdens so that we don’t have to.
My reason for writing this at 3 in the morning is because I am sick in my stomach because of all of my friends and family members that are getting divorced. I am so saddened by all of the families that are being destroyed due to what I believe to be a lack of understanding of their own roles to selflessly give and love… forever… no matter what.
Some may point out that I am divorced, yes I am, and I am nowhere near perfect. In my divorce, I probably never (hard to know for sure) would have left my x-wife. I was served divorce papers one day at work and was never given an opportunity to even speak with my x again. When I left a voice message telling her that I still loved her, I was asked to never call her number again. Even still I waited for her to remarry another before I felt comfortable moving on to marriage myself. When someone in my ward asked her why she left me, her response was “well, ‘so and so’ got divorced”. She couldn’t even give a reason of why she was getting divorced. She had just fallen out of love so it must be the right thing to do in her mind from what I have been able to gather (never having been given a reason).
Marriage is the most wonderful thing in the whole world, and I couldn’t ever imagine being as happy as I am now with my wife Kristina. But I give of myself to her like crazy. I work very hard every day to make sure that all of her and my children’s needs are met, to completely give of myself, body and soul to her so that I can one day stand before the pleasing judgement seat of our loving God and say “I did my best to become one with thee, and with my wife, and with my family, and with my friends and neighbors, and with strangers”. As I have strived to do this, I have found more happiness than I ever did in any selfish endeavor. I have found no happiness in selfishness, only in selflessness, and in giving of myself. That is the lie of the world. The world continues to teach that one day, once we realize all of our selfish endeavors, that is when we will be happy, but that day never comes. It is only in selflessly giving of ourselves that happiness is found, and it can be found now,as we become one first with God, then with others.
If in all of my days, I am able to play a small role in saving 1% of one marriage, then I will consider all of my efforts to have been worth it. Please spouses, lets love each other more than ourselves. Please if you are considering divorce, please just keep trying. I know it seems like a difficult road, but it is the road that we promised to keep trying at when we got married.
So here is another thing I learned about love, love is a language. Sometimes when our spouse is speaking it, we don’t understand it. Sometimes when we are speaking it, our spouses don’t understand it. It takes time, energy, patience, long suffering, humility… (the beatitudes) to truly understand and communicate love. If we don’t learn those traits that Christ taught us, then we won’t be able to properly give or receive love.
So until we have become perfect as Christ has commanded us to become, then I think it is hard for us to be the judges of our spouses and condemn them. I believe that to be what divorce is, condemning the other.
I know that am nowhere near perfect in any of these things, and I know that sometimes I must come off as arrogant, self righteous, preachy… but I am willing to make a complete fool of myself if it might be helpful to a struggling soul somewhere.
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