Marriage

Keeping The Fullness

by Terry Barlow
01/23/19
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Our closest human relationships (especially marriage) are given to each of us in part to teach us about the central relationship of all relationships, our personal relationship and fellowship with the living God.  I have noticed of late how easy it is to cut corners and to neglect vital interaction and exchange in my marriage relationship.  The pace of life tends to become so rapid, even in “retirement”,  that certain communication containing crucial, specific information is likely to be left behind if one does not make a concentrated and disciplined effort to make time for it and include it.  Yet these details can be so enriching and, taken all together, are  actually making up the heart of the relationship. They are indeed the essential “stuff” of relationship. It is worth it to go back after them. When they are jettisoned in the press and rush of everyday life, we are impoverished for it because the fellowship has been lost, only the husk of relationship remains.  The husk of relationship is a hollowed out relationship. (not a hallowed relationship!)  A hollowed out relationship is a hollow relationship, let’s face it.  But a hollow or empty relationship (empty of real fellowship) doesn’t mean we are not cordial with each other.  Neither does it mean we are not respectful and even affectionate toward one another.  But it does mean that we are separate and independent of one another and incapable at that point of true intimacy.  We are just doing our own things but it so happens we are doing them together. This is in fact where all relationships are headed naturally if left to themselves, without deliberate disciplined intervention on our part. No counsellor or therapist can change that or do our own intentional part for us, as helpful and important as they can be.  As at least one President and his wife in our nation’s history did for reasons of convenience and political expediency, we may be keeping up appearances but we are living separate lives.

If this can happen and often does in a human relationship, it can also happen, and often does in our relationships with God.  The conditions of our relationships with God are reflected, after all, in our human relationships.  One cannot rush or program intimacy any more than one can push the hands of a clock ahead, or speed up the seasons, or hurry the development of an infant or a child.  One has to allow for spontaneity in cultivating intimacy the same as one has to allow for periods of silence.  Intimacy can’t be planned or controlled, but it can be cultivated, and it can come into being as a fruit of self discipline.  Certain kinds of questions and observations, and feelings of gratitude or expressions of appreciation may take time to surface in our consciousness. We have to wait on them, allow them their travel time, their processing period.  We didn’t even know, perhaps, that we had those questions or perceptions until they popped up as we were hanging out together.  Jesus was a master at hanging out,  in places like the garden of Gethsemane,  in restful availability to his disciples who were also his friends, and hearing and seeing amazing results from that, as wisdom and longings emerged and surprised them from the depths of their souls.