I recently talked with a friend who is wanting to get married but is struggling to know how to do it. He wants it, but he doesn’t know how to find someone or how to know when he’s found the right person. This short essay grew as an attempt to respond to his concerns. And if you’re hoping for three steps to a happily ever after, you’re reading the wrong blog. There are more than enough of those articles being published. Continue reading
“He will turn the hearts of the parents to their children, and the hearts of the children to their parents . . . .” Malachi 4:6
We are parents to a 15 month old girl named Zina, with another’s anticipated arrival in less than two months. Before Zina joined us, we had a miscarriage. (Perhaps Dia will someday post some of her thoughts about that difficult experience.) Over the three years of our marriage, we have had our hearts turned to our children—and to our parents. We have more fully joined the drama of the generations: more than before, we recognize that we are participants in a circling narrative of birth, parenting, marriage, and death that stretches vastly beyond our lives’ short timelines in either direction.
I wish I knew more about my ancestors. Their hopes, their dreams, their hobbies, their passions and preferences and personalities. I’m sure that I figured in some of those hopes and dreams, in some shadowy way. Dia recently wrote about how people in earlier ages, to a much greater extent than we, pinned their hopes and the very meanings of their lives on the prospect of posterity to continue their legacy, to carry on their memory and their way of life, to continue to build the cathedrals when their hammers and their bodies were spent. Continue reading
Romance:
Before we were married and while we were still in the midst of determining if we were truly compatible, my girlfriend (now wife) and I came to that brink that all relationships eventually arrive at–when you have progressed as far as you can without either taking the next step together or drifting apart. For us, that next step was marriage. Was she the one? Would our love and happiness last a lifetime? Did we really love each other enough to get married? Was there someone else out there that would be more compatible with me? Continue reading
In my last article I wrote about how marriage ought to be painful because it means that two separate wills are trying to function together. If there is no strife in a marriage one might assume the couple is quite lonely:
The loneliness is straightforward. A child who has captured the imagination of other children soon seems to be playing a game with himself—his own imagination reflected back at him from the other children. Likewise, when the one I love becomes a means to fulfilling my own desires, they take on the image of a mirror. And there is loneliness: a lack of the other person—a lack of another’s will and desire that stands against my own.
I would like now to elaborate on this concept Continue reading
Over the last week my wife Sarah and I have moved to a new state, got an apartment, began to wage a war against cockroaches, went thrift store shopping to any number of places to try and find decent furniture that won’t give us lice, bought a new mattress, carried many heavy objects through ridiculous humidity, built a bed frame to save a few dollars, etcetera. Stress levels have been high and my wife and I were more than a few times upset with each other, which only makes everything more miserable, which only makes me more upset that we’re upset because things are bad enough as it is, which makes me more miserable, which makes me more upset, and so forth. At moments of resentment, for whatever silly reason, rather than a helpmeet, Sarah has felt like an inconvenience, and I know Continue reading
The Brothers Sabey 