Wedding season is in full bloom. In McKinley Park and Downtown churches, I’ve seen the lovely dresses spilling from stretch limos, flowers flowing, jewelry sparkling.
Looking at this outside view, I see signs that the couple spent countless hours sweating the details of their lavish affair.
But long before this summer spectacular, I hope someone remembered to ask the couple this question:
“You’ve prepared for the special day, but what have you done to consider the lifetime you are committing to?”
It’s a question I always asked in my role as officiant and premarital counselor. But questions the couples asked me sometimes throw me off guard.
For instance, just a few weeks before a wedding, I had a groom-to-be toss me a “by-the-way” bomb.
“My fiancée wants to omit the promise, ’Till death do us part. Would that be a deal breaker for the ceremony?”
Deja vu. It was the same question from a bride-to-be who asked me to change the promise to read, “’Till love do us part.”
I told both couples, “I really have to stick with the unabridged format.”
The first couple found another chaplain. The second dissolved their marriage when the groom left on a Navy cruise and the bride found a land-lover.
Unfortunately, marriage counseling is less comedic and more frustrating.
The most frustrating thing is I feel like I’ve been blessed with a marriage I can’t clone for others.
A good marriage is a complicated dish. I don’t have the recipe. Often, I come home from a difficult counseling case and hold my wife tight.
There’s no greater priority than my marriage because I believe God gave marriage to mankind as the closest equal to unconditional love. Despite God’s intention for marriage, many are willing to take the risk of making marriage analogous to hell.
While working as a hospital chaplain, a respiratory therapist burst into my office. “Chaplain, Chaplain! She said, ‘Yes!’”
“She” was another therapist who accepted his wedding proposal after two years of dating. I thought their biggest challenge would be to stop smoking. Yes, some respiratory therapists smoke.
He heralded the news from floor to floor until he arrived on the bottom floor—literally and figuratively. His last stop was the nurses’ station where his old girlfriend was shift manager.
She invited him into a supply closet where her congratulatory “hug” went farther than it should have. In a hot Texas minute, a two-year relationship went up in smoke.
Hospital administration congratulated them both with unpaid vacations.
When I see people risk something so precious, I’m often shaken. It makes me try to define and categorize what I have in an effort keep and control it.
I’m not sure what my wife and I have. It’s the kind of love that continues whether I burn the toast or my temper. It’s a love that tells me I’m forgiven before I ask. It’s the kind of love described in our wedding vows that “halves a sorrow and doubles a joy.”
Like many couples, we sometimes go to bed dead tired, sometimes too tired for the fun I seek and too tired for the prayers she wants. But we rarely are too tired to talk out our day and absolutely never too tired for our three good night kisses and “I love you.”
Still, maybe there’s a thing I know about marriage that respiratory therapists know about smokers.
Therapists who watch smokers die know they are no less likely themselves to become smokers.
Ministers who watch marriages die aren’t any less likely to divorce. It takes work to quit smoking. It takes work to make marriage successful.
I realize there is something Freudian about the way my fingers often mistype “sweetheart” into “sweatheart.”
The typo is a great reminder that a good marriage takes a lot of work and spiritual sweat. Good marriages require honest heart work. And real sweat work, sweatheart.
Norris Burkes can be reached at comment@thechaplain.net. Follow us on Facebook and Instagram: @insidesacramento. Burkes is available for public speaking at civic organizations, places of worship, veterans groups and more. For details and fees, visit thechaplain.net.
