One

I recently wrote a series of posts on Adam and Eve. My intention with each of them was to put myself in their places for just a moment. It was my intention to imagine what life might have been like for them.

I wanted to know them. To imagine what might have gone through their heads and hearts at any moment. I wanted to feel what they might have felt.

I wanted, for a brief moment, to experience the awe they might have felt as they began their lives.

Now I’d like to take it just a little further. In the post I titled ‘What was it like for Adam and Eve?’ I got into what marriage might have been like for them.

But do we understand what that really meant? Do we even understand what marriage really means? Yes, we know the definition. Yes, we know what marriage is. But do we truly understand just what it is, what it represents? I’ve written on that before and yet I don’t feel I’ve done it justice. I don’t think I will ever do it justice.

Marriage is something I always considered sacred. I remember in my teens, when all my extended family treated marriage as something that was more or less disposable, my thoughts on it were different. And yet…I didn’t know why it was that I saw it that way. And as I got older my thoughts on marriage stayed the same. It was something sacred. It was something you don’t mess with. Even when I still didn’t understand why I felt the way I did, I knew that I felt that way. Deeply.

Today I understand why I feel the way I do. I understand why I think it’s sacred. Because it’s sacred to the Lord. It’s a representation of Christ and the church. It’s the forging of one person into two.

A few days ago my daughter told me that she had a dream that my husband and I got a divorce. She couldn’t tell me anything else about the dream because she woke up as soon as we got the divorce. For me her waking up was significant. I wake up when I have a dream that takes me somewhere that scares me or makes me uncomfortable. I believe that is why she woke up as soon as the ‘divorce’ happened. It was a scary or uncomfortable place for her.

I assured her that that was something that wasn’t going to happen. My husband told her it was something Christians don’t do. And the moment passed.

But the memory lingers. It was one of those brief discussions that happen and then they’re over but the effect can stay behind. I don’t, for a minute, believe that my husband and I will ever divorce. We are both too committed to the Lord to do that to Him much less to each other.

But as I think of what it would mean to divorce, I think of severing something that can never be healed. My husband is so much a part of me that he is much like my relationship with Christ. Without him, I’m not me. I wouldn’t want to live without him.

My husband is fond of saying ‘and the two shall become one’. He says that often. Until I married him I had no idea what that really meant. We have forged a bond that began with Christ and has spread out over our entire marriage.

There are so many aspects to our marriage. And in each one we have become one. There’s nowhere in my life where he isn’t welcome, nothing I won’t share with him, nothing I won’t tell him. And I’m that deeply ingrained in his life.

We are quite simply…one.

And out of that oneness comes a closeness I never thought possible until I married my husband.

It’s with that oneness in mind that I think of Adam and Eve’s marriage. It’s with that oneness that I wonder what the first marriage was like. It’s with that oneness that I imagine what life might have been like when you had your spouse and no one else.

I don’t plan to cover the same things I covered in that post on Adam and Eve, I simply wish to elaborate.  More precisely I want to capture a feeling that I’m not sure I can capture.

Oneness.

As I think of the children my husband and I created together, I think of that oneness. Not because of the physical relationship that created them but because of the becoming one in everything. The babies, in some way, are a representation of the oneness between my husband and I. It is the making of a whole new person through us. Because of my husband and I, our babies had life. It is a melding of the two of us much the way we have melded our lives together.

It took parts of him and of me to make them. The Lord took me and my husband, mixed them together and created a new person.

In a similar way the Lord took my life and my husband’s life and melded them together until we had one life not two.

I’ve seen marriage ceremonies where the couple lit a candle together, poured two different colors of water into the same vase, and poured two different colors of sand into one jar. With the candle, where there were two flames they create one. With the water…red and yellow made orange. And with the sand the two colors made layers that could never be separated again.

Of the things above my favorite was the sand. The candle left the two original flames and just created another. The colored water took two colors and made one. But the sand…it mixed the two different colors into layers where you could see both colors but melded them together in a way that you couldn’t separate the individual colors again if you tried. But it did something else too. The sand that was once in each bottle, solid colors that weren’t all that nice to look at by themselves, layered together to create something interesting that could keep you looking at it for a good long time. It took the ordinary and made it extraordinary. It took two, mixed them together and left the same two but better than they were before.

My husband and I did none of those things at our wedding. We didn’t need to. Those things were only an outside representation of what was happening with our lives. The Lord took the two of us, once completely separate people, and layered us together so that the two of us still exist but that we were mixed together in a way to create something new and better. Our hearts, minds, and souls have met and meshed.

Together we became the vessels the Lord used to give life to our children. Together we became the vessels the Lord used to represent something sacred. Together we became…

One.