a word to a young couple

Given as the message at the wedding of my nephew and his fiance, June 19, 2009. Part of it was crowdsourced through an invitation on Thursday.

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Here we are.

All those people watching, they are ready to get to the “for better, for worse” and the “Ladies and gentleman, Mr and Mrs.”

I understand. I am too.

But this is a big deal. So I want to talk to you two a bit more, and then to them and then we’ll get to the promises and the party.

When we were talking a couple weeks ago,  I said that I didn’t understand the faith that it takes to be a farmer. Every year, a farmer takes their whole life and buries it in the ground. And if it is a good year, then life is good. And if it’s a bad year, with storms at just the wrong time, then life is stretching.

And then I started thinking about what I could say to you, what would help you think about today differently.

And I realized that I do understand the faith that it takes to be a farmer.

Here’s a bag of dirt. [I handed Adam a plastic bag of dirt]  It comes from land that you know well, Adam. Your mom knows it better. Your grampa knows it even better. It’s part of the second Kies farm.

[Note: The Kies family has owned a farm in Hillsdale county Michigan for 175 years. They have owned a second farm, the one where Nancy and her twin Jodie, Adam’s mother grew up, for more than 50 years. That farm is being farmed by Nancy’s dad, brother, and nephew.]

The reason that this farm is being plowed by the third generation of Kies’, the reason the original land is being plowed by more generations of Kies’ that I can count, is the same reason that your marriage can grow.

Generations of Kies’ have taken the dirt, this thing called a field, and they have cared for it.

• In the middle of the summer, when the last thing you want to do is to walk the rows of soybeans pulling up corn from last year you do it. because if you don’t, it will mess up the yield.
• In the winter, when the last thing you want to be doing is riding on a tractor pulling a machine that is throwing manure around, you do it. because you know that it will help the field work better.
• In the fall, you start before sunrise and you work until it’s dark because after you put so much into this field, into this crop, you aren’t gonna let winter take it.

Just owning a field doesn’t make you a farmer. Farming does.

Kids, you are like young farmers being handed your own field. It’s called “Adam and Becci Dobbs.” It is yours. It’s scary. You really don’t know what difference being married is going to make.

And now you get to decide how well this field is going to produce.

You could just throw some seeds in and come back in a few months and see what happened.

Some people do that with their marriages.

They wonder what happened.

But you don’t want that.

• Instead, you can spend time together preparing the soil, talking, walking, breaking through the crust that can form in the busy-ness of life.
• You can pull out the weeds together, the arguments, the ideas other people have about what you ought to be doing, the distractions that pop up.
• You can take turns going out and spreading manure. I know that everyone is coming up with their own images of that…but those of us who are married know that there are things that you have to do that are miserable, but help the relationship grow. Spending the night up with a sick child. Cleaning up more than your side of the room. Incredibly unromantic things.
• In the crisis times, you can be working side by side, bailing out the basement, holding each other when someone dies or someone is attacking your reputation or your job.

People will tell you how to take care of your field. People do that to farmers all the time.

Last night, when we were rehearsing, I said that i was asking the internet for what to say. Some people laughed. I was serious.

I asked a lot of my online friends what to say.

And they answered.

• have fun together. Play. laugh.
• tell them not to be so serious in serious times, not to be so happy in happy times. tell them to Have Fun Together.
• It’s easy to call it quits. It’s harder to stick it out. So put on your armor to survive the MANY challenges a marriage faces.
• Tell them to always be kind to each other.
• Complete Honesty. Sense of humor. Lots of intimacy
• That the deepest measure of love is choice!
• Chose to love every day. You don’t get to be angry because they are angry and you don’t get to mad because they are mad. You get to love.
• After 40 years of marriage (May 30), there are several key words. I’m sorry! (and mean it) I forgive you (and mean it)

[Note: I had many more responses, but I was already talking too long. So I edited.]

Lots of people have lots of suggestions that are very good. Lots of people will be very happy to tell you how to live.

But here’s the deal.

You, Adam, are the only one, starting in a few minutes, whose job is Becky. You, Becky, are the only one, starting in a few minutes, whose job is Adam.

When you make these promises to each other, God is handing you the responsibility to care about and to care for each other. And to break all the rest of those responsibilities that people think they have.

We can support them taking care of each other, but we, parents, family, friends, have to let go of being the ones who run our kids lives.

One year from tonight, I will look at a young couple as say those same words, as a parent of half of that couple. And I will understand how hard that is. But it is still true.

If you have any questions about this marriage, questions about how right they are for each other, dismiss those questions right now. If you are looking forward to probing, to hearing about what Adam did or what Rebecca said, let your dream of divisiveness vanish. For when they leave their families, they are turning to each other. And as I have told them, if you hear about the problem but not the reconciliation, you will be cheering against them, and they don’t need that at all.

What they need is for each of us to encourage, to pray, to celebrate, to rejoice and weep with them.

What they need—is to be married.

First date

I am not a fan of seafood. I used to like popcorn shrimp because you could hardly taste the shrimp. Now that I am a little more aware of health, I just ignore seafood, even at seafood restaurants.

I’m not sure, therefore, exactly why Nancy and I went to Red Lobster for our first date. (This one, on Army Trail Road in Carol Stream, Illinois.) I know, of course, that it probably was because she liked (and still does) seafood. I probably was trying to impress her. Which was interesting because our first date came two weeks after we decided to get married and about a week after our first kiss and about two weeks before we got engaged.

Our story is an interesting one for understanding something about faith, for understanding something about leaps of faith.

When we got married (about 8 months after this first date), we didn’t know nearly about each other as we thought we did. We probably didn’t know as much as we should have. We just knew that getting married to each other was the right thing to do. We decided that all the stuff that many other people do before getting married, before deciding to get married even, could wait. Because we just knew that we belonged. We did, however, decide that we needed to have one date. Just to say we did.

Do I recommend this to everyone? Not at all. Some people need to understand everything before making a decision. They need to know everything they can about the other person. They need to know that they will be accepted no matter what. They need to know that they have explored all the options, considered all the implications, talked through all the possibilities. They need to know for sure that this will work.

We, on the other hand, knew that we couldn’t know everything. We knew, as we sat on a rock after a long walk, that we should get married. It just made sense (to me anyway. I spent the next 8 months wondering whether Nancy would come to her senses and realize how nuts I am and call the wedding off). We had faith in each other, and we were pretty sure that the God we both know had faith in us, enough to bring us together.

We’ve spent the last 25 years getting to know each other. We are far more real to each other than we were back then. We have grown into marriage and grown into adults and parents. Although we don’t try to impress each other much any more, we are thoughtful about caring for each other.

And a couple weeks ago, we went to Red Lobster yet again. There were five of us this time, celebrating Andrew’s 21st birthday. Apparently, it’s a milestone kind of restaurant for us.

Maybe believing comes easy for me, easier than for other people. Maybe, on the other hand, recognizing is what comes easy. At the right moment. On a rock. Alone in the universe with the (suddenly) love of my life.

my word

We usually hear that phrase when something has gone wrong, as a mild way to express frustration. “My word, child, you are ….”

Yesterday, I thought of that phrase in a whole new way.

I went to a funeral calling, to the time of visiting with family and seeing the body. I walked into the funeral home, chatted with some people I know, got in the line for visiting, and then looked up the line. The person I came to see wasn’t in line.

That wasn’t too surprising, since I came to talk with the first wife of the man who had died. It made complete sense that the person standing closest to the casket would be the second wife (and widow). Since I’ve never met her, and don’t know three of the four children, I got out of line. I went back up the hallway and found the back door to the large room, the door where people were leaving. Going through that door, I found the person I was looking for.

I’ve know Kay for about four years, I think, since she started as the director of the childcare in the church where I was the administrative pastor. We talked a lot during the year that we worked together, until the childcare closed (through no fault of hers). Every conversation with her, my respect grew.

You see, several years before, she had been the wife of the person who was then pastor of this church. This church had been her life, the people were close friends of the two of them. And then the two of them became two different thems. He had made promises to her and to God and decided that he didn’t want to keep those promises. He left that church, left that wife.

It was a hard thing for her as she battled physical illness and the pain of someone else’s spiritual illness. She worked hard, prayed hard, loved her kids, loved her God, and lived.

If you are a reader who notices when familiar phrases don’t appear, you will notice that I didn’t use the phrase, “moved on.” She lived on, but she had one interesting quirk. Just because he broke his word, she thought, didn’t give her permission to break her word. Being committed, being faithful to one man didn’t stop with divorce. It didn’t stop with his remarriage. It didn’t stop when he didn’t believe that he had done anything wrong. It didn’t stop when she struggled with her health and the health of her family. It didn’t stop when his example affected their children. It didn’t stop when she could have found it very easy to say, “God? Why should I trust you when pastors and churches and people and life aren’t trustworthy.”

Did she think they would get back together? No, she didn’t. Not in marriage. But she did earnestly hope and pray that he would someday acknowledge that he hadn’t kept his word.

He died last week, of a brain tumor. During the past couple years, bridges were rebuilt, slowly, painfully, a rope at a time. (Some bridges, after all, are massive concrete structures; others are rope bridges hanging high above and abyss, allowing one person at a time, with fear and trembling, to cross). Near the end there were some moments of clarity, both physically and spiritually. She saw what she had earnestly asked come to pass, without drama on her part. She had offered forgiveness long ago. At last, without her prompting, the need for that forgiveness was acknowledged.

So yesterday there was one casket and two grieving women. They could see each other. They acknowledged the role each other had in his life. The first wife was present, invited, welcomed, at the request of the second wife.

She kept her word. And ultimately, so has God.

I told this woman, older than I, deeper than I, far more faithful than I, “I’m proud of you.”

And, my word, I’m humbled by her.