I fear.

I fear broken relationship. I guess I've just been thinking a lot about how often it happens, and I fear it for myself.

I want to know sooooo badly the thing. You know, the thing (or things I suppose it could be) that causes people to end marriages, to leave spouses. What happens? It's with great sadness I yearn to understand the downward transformation some people experience. It's awful. I understand that sometimes it is necessary to get away from abuse, but I think it's safe to assume that breaking up is never easy when you're in a marriage.

I want to understand why marriages end, because I want to avoid that thing that causes it. Who's to say my marriage will last? And what can I do to make sure that it doesn't? How do we avoid the thing?!

I thought and thought and thought. But came up with nothing expect the following.

Christ.

I cannot do marriage. I am not strong enough. Selfless enough. Sacrificial enough. Devoted enough. Loyal enough. My ability to love another person at the intensity that marriage requires comes only from God. I can't do it. Mr. Kern and I are not exempt from the hardships that end marriages. But we have the strength of God to empower us.

Only by God. I can't love without Him.

Get ready for it. Don Miller to be quoted once again. I'm reading Blue Like Jazz. And I absolutely LOVE the ending of his chapter on romance. It really speaks for itself, and puts great words on this idea of finding strength for marriage in God.

"I had been working on a play called Polaroids that year. It was the story of one man's life from birth to death, each scene delivered through a monologue with other actors silently acting out parts behind the narrator as he walks the audience through his life journey. In the scene I had written... I had the man fighting with his wife. They were experiencing unbearable tension after losing a son in a car accident the year before. I knew in my heart they were not going to make it, that Polaroids would include a painful divorce that showed the ugliness of separation. But I changed my mind. After talking with Paul [a married friend] I couldn't do it. I wonder what it would look like to have the couple stick it out. I got up and turned on my computer. I had the lead character in my play walk into the bedroom where his wife was sleeping. I have him kneel down by her and whisper some lines:

'What great gravity is this that drew my soul towards yours? What great force, that though I went falsely, went kicking, went disguising myself to earn your love, also disguised to earn your keeping, your resting, your staying, your will fleshed into mind, rasped by a slowly revealed truth, the barter of my soul that I fear, the soul that I loathe, the soul that: if you will love, I will love. I will redeem you, if you will redeem me? Is this our purpose, you and I together to pacify each other, to lead each other toward that lie that we are good, that we are noble, that we need not redemption, save the one that you and I invented of our own clay?

I am not scared of you, my love, I am scared of me.

I went looking, I wrote out a list, I drew an image, I bled a poem of you. You were pretty, and my friends believed I was worth of you. You were clever, but I was smarter, perhaps the only one smarter, the only one able to lead you. You see, love, I did not love you, I loved me. And you were only a tool that I used to fix myself, to fool myself, to redeem myself. And though I have taught you to lay your lily hand in mind, I walk alone, for I cannot talk to you, lest you talk it back to me, lest I believe that I am not worthy, not deserving, not redeemed.

I want desperately for you to be my friend. But you are not my friend; you have slide up warmly to the man I wanted to be, the man I pretended to be, and I was your Jesus and, you were mine. Should I show you who I am, we may crumble. I am not scared of you, my love, I am scared of me.

I want to be known and loved anyway. Can you do this? I trust by your easy breathing that you are human like me, that you are fallen like me, that you are lonely, like me. My love, do I know you? What is this great gravity that pulls us so painfully toward each other? Why do we not connect? Will we be forever in fleshing this out? And how will we with words, narrow words, come into the knowing of each other? Is this God's way of meriting grace, of teaching us of the labyrinth of His love for us, teaching us, in degrees, that which He is sacrificing to join ourselves to Him? Or better yet, has He formed our being fractional so that we might conclude one great hope, plodding and sighing and breathing into one another in such a great push that we might break through into the known and being loved, only to cave into a greater perdition and fall down at His throne still begging for our acceptance? Begging for our completion?

We were fools to believe that we would redeem each other.

Were I some sleeping Adam, to wake and find you resting at my rib, to share these things that God has done, to walk you through the garden, to counsel your timid steps, your bewildering eye, your heart so slow to love, so careful to love, so sheepish that I stepped up my aim and became a man. Is this what God intended? That though He made you from my rib, it is you who is making me, humbling me, destroying me, and in so doing revealing Him.

Will we be in ashes before we are one?

What great gravity is this that drew my heart toward yours? What great force collapsed my orbit, my lonesome state? What is this that wants in me that want in you? Don't we go at each other with yielded eyes, with cumbered hands and feet, with clunky tongues? This deed is unattainable! We cannot know each other!...'"

And the kicker.

"'... I am quitting this thing, but not what you think. I am not going away.

I will give you this, my love, and I will not bargain or barter any longer. I will love you, as sure as He has loved me. I will discover what I can discover and though you remain a mystery, save God's own knowledge, what I disclose of you I will keep in the warmest chamber of my heart, the very chamber where God has stowed Himself in me. And I will do this to my death, and to death it may bring me.

I will love you like God, because of God, mighted by the power of God. I will stop expecting your love, demanding your love, trading for your love, gaming for your love. I will simply love. I am giving myself to you, and tomorrow I will do it again. I suppose the clock itself will wear thin its time before I am ended at this altar of dying and dying again.

God risked Himself on me. I will risk myself on you. And together, we will learn to love, and perhaps then, and only then, understand this gravity that drew Him, unto us.'"

I think love is beautiful when it's seen as a covenant. When your effort to love someone is independent of how much effort they put in to love you.

Now that is Christ.