No marriage can ever reach a perfect peak and stay there. Every day brings new challenges, new insights, new temptations, new experiences. Marriage begins over again every morning, from Ground Zero, but God's faithfulness and mercy begin again each morning too, so that God can support your marriage. God's faithfulness supports our faithfulness; God's mercy inspires us to be merciful; God's enduring love is a rock on which we build our enduring love for each other. If God is faithful to us each day, we are empowered by God to be faithful to our marriage.
And our faithfulness is lived out in ordinary ways clothed in extraordinary, merciful love. By doing dishes - because you love the ones who ate from those plates. By folding towels, because they dry warm, tender, beloved bodies. By holding a daughter's hair back as she vomits into a toilet because you can feel her pain. By throwing a ball back and forth with your son because you rejoice in his growing strength, height, and agility. By trudging to and from a tiring, sometimes boring job - because doing the job houses, clothes, feeds, and gives safety to the ones you live for and would die for. All of this is God's faithfulness, mercy, and enduring love springing into new and unique life in you!
A wonderful morning prayer is to ask God, "Increase your mercy in me, Lord." Mercy flows from patience and understanding. Your love relationship began with infatuation and idealizing that handsome hunk or beautiful woman you married as being someone who will always understand you, always know the sensitive and right thing to say or do. Now you've discovered that your loved one has limits and failings. But mercy teaches you that you're not perfect either. When you accept that you aren't perfect, the spiritual gift of patient, understanding mercy can give you a tender and forgiving heart.
Mercy gives birth to the right words for you to say when your spouse does not remember that appointment or job to do, even when you reminded him/her over and over. Mercy creates the right action for you to take when your son or daughter is rebellious, disobedient, or irresponsible. Mercy inspires you to forgive yourself and forgive your loved ones whenever strained nerves lead to an explosive argument. Mercy empowers you to be silent and smiling when your spouse repeats a story to you or at a party that you've heard one thousand times before. Mercy empowers you to bite back a sharp or sarcastic reply when your son or daughter is too immature and inexperienced to understand where you're "coming from."
A marriage begins anew each morning because each of you is someone new each morning also. Each day, God's new mercy helps you recognize that your spouse is a Mystery whom you can never fully know or appreciate in a lifetime. If you pay attention, you can always discover something new and amazing about your spouse: an untapped potential; a font of wisdom that he or she hasn't shared until today; a dream unspoken until this moment; a childhood hurt never revealed until suddenly today you both are ready and vulnerable. If you really listen from the depths of your loving heart, you discover the right comment or the right question that will reveal a new facet of your spouse that is as bright and alluring as the facet of a diamond.
Marriage begins anew each morning, but each day of a marriage can generate seeds of faithfulness, mercy, and enduring love, which, planted in your fertile souls, yield an everlasting harvest. Faithfulness, mercy, and enduring love often seem to bloom most plentifully in the rain of sorrow and suffering. These storms strip us bare, reveal the strengths we never knew we possessed, teach us that we are never completely in control of our destinies. Days can pass in which our souls are narrowed, numbed, and darkened by tragedy and bitterness. But if you believe that each day grants us new mercies, you will be patient with yourself, with life, with God, and, deep beneath the darkest storms, you will be open to hope. Then you will be ready for the gradual return of the sun of God's joy.
Famous author C. S. Lewis married late in life. He was surprised by the passionate love of a woman named "Joy," whom he married, and was devastated by her death. Yet, even in his suffering, he knew that this passionate and faithful love relationship changed him radically, and helped him grow into a more mature and unselfish human being. In the day-to-day passionate fidelity of Joy's love, he experienced God's love. He realized that only through vulnerable loving can we find the path to God and Heaven. He said,
"To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one...Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket – safe, dark, motionless, airless – it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is hell."
Allow your marriage to begin anew each morning. Be alive to the wondrous, God-given possibility of the two of you becoming more one, of your passion rekindling even if it has been dormant, of your delight in each other growing deeper, of forgiveness erasing bitterness, of hope giving you light to solve your problems and trudge through tragedies. Be vulnerable and open to God filling your hearts and souls with faithfulness, mercy, and enduring love, even if you realize that vulnerable hearts at some point are broken. Remember that at his Last Supper with his friends, Christ broke the bread and said, "This is My Body." His body was broken through a life and a death borne out of faithful, merciful, enduring love for us. Our bodies and souls will inevitably become tired, arthritic, and broken by the life-long repetition of loving and sacrificial acts for one another, and by watching helplessly as a loved one suffers and dies. It is the only way to become Another Christ. Only a person who has been broken by love can be healed, transformed, and resurrected.
C.S. Lewis also said, "“Relying on God has to begin all over again every day as if nothing had yet been done.” Rely on God every day to be a part of your marriage. Rely every day on His promise that "Great is His faithfulness; His mercies begin afresh each morning."