“A covenant is an agreement between two people…it is formal, solemn, sometimes even sacred.”
- Vocabulary.com
I am done with marriage. Whatever it used to mean, or the promise it once held, seems long forgotten. It has been reshaped, translated, redefined, and contorted. It doesn’t seem to resemble what we used to know. With a marriage license fee of $81 (in my county), it is the easiest and cheapest contract you can enter into. And not even worth the paper it is written on, with over 50% of those contracts being broken, usually by another far more expensive legal document.
Ironically, failure doesn’t make us better at it like it does many other things. Second marriages fail at over 60%, and the latest numbers show third marriages ending 73% of the time. All our family trees seem to have piles of broken branches beneath them.
Covenant, however, is something else altogether. In the same way the Divine asks us to encircle our lives with theirs, where hope, restoration, healing, and redemption are the outcome; covenant says to do the same with our marital union. Encircling those relationships with the Creator holds the possibility that our struggles and challenges will not divide but as redeemed, actually make us much stronger.
All that is broken can be restored.
All that is sick can be healed.
All that is captive can be set free.
I think drawing that line and guarding it, to the exception of all others, is the only way my wife and I survived 34 years.
Bono says, “Marriage is a grand madness. It is like jumping off a cliff and believing you can fly.” The view from the top is fantastic, and there seem to be endless frontiers and possibilities as far as the eyes can see. But once you leap, gravity takes hold. And gravity can be a real @#%&$.
You feel that force pulling you down, correct? The one set against the lifetime commitment you made to your spouse? Other than clinging to the hope, promise, and restoration found in the covenant, there is no way our marriage would have made it 34 years. But, in the covenant, all those things that might have destroyed our relationship, as redeemed, actually made it stronger.
We talked about the covenantal circle with a young couple at a recent wedding. We told them to draw a dark and deep circle around that union. We’ve told young couples to enforce that with hedges as well. But given the state of things, we shared that constructing battlements around them might be a better analogy. We suggested that when they allow the drawbridge down to cross the chasm, they only allow the people who encourage, support, strengthen, and celebrate their union, inside.
Our prayer for them was for a “grand madness,” endless horizons and possibilities, and a gravity-free union.
Consider
Are you married? Do you look at your marriage as a covenant?
Do you think it would materially change the success rate of marriage if more people looked at it that way?
What do you need to do in order to think of your marriage as more of a covenant?