Joy in Marriage

Marriage is a daily dying to self, which is hard to recognize with popular images of lifelong romance and mutual satisfaction.  Endurance has been the way of man since the Fall--finding joy not in the absence of suffering, but in the midst of it.  When Christ said, "Take up your cross and follow Me," he wasn't talking about a cute little gold cross that some people dangle from their chests as a signifier of their spirituality.  Christ was talking about the sort of cross with weight and jagged splinters to which each of us nails his pride, his self pity, his selfish wants, his dreams of how the world ought to treat him.  Marriage is, for many of us, an essential part of our sanctification.  In it we die, every day, for other people--for our spouses, for our children.  Can joy be born in this?  I can tell you that the answer, miraculously, is Yes.  But not unless you endure.

Somewhere More Holy, Tony Woodlief