Christian Living

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So Who Do You Cherish?
©
by

Stephen A. Peterson


As I drive to work from Shawnee to Oklahoma City on week days, I listen to Ed Young on the local Christian broadcast station. Those familiar with Pastor Young for a while come to quickly realize that he is a passionate, logical, often humorous speaker of the Word of God. One Tuesday, April, 2004, Pastor Young spoke about the current crisis Americans face with respect to their marriages, families and relationships. While listening to his words, I was sent back to a time nearly forty years ago when I was a teen sitting in my English Composition and Literature class under my high school teacher, Sister Rita Clare. Each and everyday Sister would make what I would call a profound statement that she would write out on the board and I would copy down and keep. Why? I just did! On Wednesday, November 3, 1965, she wrote:

A teenage boy, a teenage girl walking hand in hand down the street.
She trips, he lovingly says, “Be careful, Sweet!”
Now married for a time they walk the same street,
She trips, he angrily says, “Dumb woman, pick up your feet!”

From Sister Rita Clare’s written statement, I learned that the street was the same and so was the woman but the married man now a husband had somehow forgotten what the young teenage boy lover at one time knew—how to cherish the woman he promised he would love and cherish for the rest of his life on earth! What a terrible, terrible loss!

Forgetting to cherish—it can be so easy to do and dangerous to our marriages, families and the children be they young or older who depend upon their parents for love and stability. I have done it and I am fairly certain that the person reading this commentary/story/essay has as well. Sure, it is directed towards men. However, it may easily be said of the girl/woman who is reading this piece as well!

So why don’t we sustain our love for the one we practically worshipped a time before? Pastor Young suggests we tend to:

1. Forget God.
2. Be frustrated by their faults (as though we don’t have any).
3. Refuse to forgive their trespasses.
4. Emphasize too much “Me”.
5. Make sexuality the center of our relationships and not God.
6. Forget how to interact (that is, LISTEN and respond).
7. Never come to the understanding that marriage is hard work.

So while driving to Oklahoma City and having been challenged by Pastor Ed Young’s words and recalling what my high school teacher wrote, I decided to make a list of things about my wife:


1. What does she like__________________________________
2. What does she dislike________________________________
3. What she is good at__________________________________
4. What does she dream of______________________________
5. What makes her so special____________________________

I am willing to bet that I will find quite a few things I have forgotten, as Pastor Young has said, time and time again, that I never knew about her and myself.

Now let’s get personal, you can try it, too—with your spouse, child (children), best friend, or any person or persons you have taken for granted of recently. Just before He suffered the pain and degradation of the Cross for humankind, Jesus Christ used the moment of the Last Supper to command us, His followers, “to unconditionally love (cherish) those who we love. He gave humankind a wonderful gift when He gave us our wives (husbands), daughters and sons, friends and families to cherish for a life time. So who do you cherish?

Prayer: Heavenly Father, on this day, I will especially cherish____________________
(Name)
for these reasons.

1. ____________________________________

2. ____________________________________

3. ____________________________________

4. ____________________________________

5. ____________________________________

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