In her recent blog post “3 Ways to Live the Ultimate Romance” Ann Voskamp ponders her relationship with her husband, marriage, and what love and romance truly look like. She writes,
“Real love is when you live the daily faithfulness of making whole decades of minutes tell the truth about the glorious gospel. Your days have done this.
You have told me the truth about who Christ is, how He dies to self and gives when there’s nothing left and gives up what is His and gives to those who don’t deserve, so they can have more, and I have seen Christ in you, the way you live, the way you make your life about laying down.
A good marriage isn’t about reliving a good movie, but reliving the Good News. Nothing is more attractive than sacrifice.”
In a world perpetually obsessed with flashy weddings, engagement stories, and clinging to youth at all costs, Voskamp’s musings on faithfulness are encouraging to a generation of believers struggling to raise godly families and deal with life’s frenetic pace without losing appreciation for one’s spouse.
Many others with a heart for Christ and for healthy marriages have weighed in on this topic. At Crosswalk.com, counselor Debra Fileta advises connection, affection, confession, laughter, and friendship to keep a marriage strong. Wendy Alsup, in a piece on husbands loving their wives as Christ loved the church, shares that the truest love from a spouse can only come after self-sacrifice and thorough knowledge of each other.
In her recent piece on her blog, Lisa-Jo Baker admits of her husband: “He’s never run through an airport for me” (something she read a teenager say was the test of true love). Instead, Baker chronicles her husband who makes late night grocery runs, roadtrips with three young children, and cares for her in times of illness. She writes,
“He’s unloaded a hundred loads of laundry and put the dishes away.
He lays down his life and it looks like so many ordinary moments stitched together into the testimony of a good man who comes home to his family in the old minivan, the one with the broken air conditioning.
It undoes me every time to look around and find him there, having my back in the day to day and the late night into late night and then next year again.
He’s run a thousand times around the sun with me and we hold hands and touch feet at night between the covers even when we’re wretched and fighting we’re always fighting our way back to each other.”
Perhaps the most inspiring thing is to be able to watch how real-life couples succeed in love and faithfulness – even in the most unlikely of circumstances. In Justin Buzzard’s piece on Crosswalk, he includes a video of Dr. Bob Mounce, a husband in his nineties who cares for Jean, his dependent wife of over 60 years. A similar story is that of Bill and Glad, another elderly couple who so clearly represent self-sacrificial love. Finally, watch The Incredible Love Story of Nic Vujicic and His New Wife. Their story is touching proof that true love extends far beyond the physical...even when a person has no arms or legs.
“Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God; and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God” (1 John 4:7).
Debbie Holloway is the Family Life Editor for Crosswalk.com
Publication date: August 5, 2013
