1 Corinthians 13:4-13
Nearly twenty years ago now, Jim Collins and Jerry Porras wrote a business best-seller titled Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies. You might think that a book about business is a strange place to begin a meditation on marriage. But when I asked Janelle to tell me a story about her childhood, she concluded the story by saying, “writing this reminds me of what a strange child I was. I’m sure Eric and I will be in for a treat when we start our family.” Indeed, you will be.Here’s the story Janelle told. “I knew from a very young age that I wanted to have a career. My career goals changed from secretary to lawyer, then from astronaut to teacher as I got older, but at the end of the day my education and career was always very important to me. In the third grade my mom bought me my first suit . . . seriously. It was a navy pleated skirt, white-collared shirt, yellow jacket, and a navy neck scarf. I am sure I looked ridiculous, but I wore it every Wednesday!” So if the bride is a woman who began dressing for business in the third grade, a book about business might not be such a strange place to start a reflection on marriage at her wedding.
Eric told me a story about the day when he was eight years old that he announced to his parents that he was becoming a man, but I’ll leave that story to another setting. I will tell you this one, though. Eric’s first job out of college was working at a power plant in a tiny town called Roxboro, north of Raleigh, NC. Eric wrote, “I was unhappy with the location of my job in a rural, tobacco-farming town that was semi-stuck in time. There was not a whole lot going on for a twenty-five-year-old single guy, so I began coming home every weekend, a four-and-a-half hour trip. One of my good friends, Matt Cagle (yo, Matt!), was one of Janelle’s best friends growing up, and the three of us crossed paths several times during my Greenville visits. I quickly grew fond of her, and we began to see each other on a more serious note after a few months. Eventually, being away from her began to wear on me, and I began looking for jobs in Greenville once I had worked my job with Fluor in Roxboro about a year and a half, so I could be closer to her. That was five years ago, and the rest, as they say, is history.” As an aside, I want to point out God’s sense of humor. Roxboro, NC, was too far away from Janelle, so you took a job in Greenville that takes you to Afghanistan for weeks on end. That seems to me to belong in the category of “be careful what you pray for.”
In Built to Last, Jim Collins and Jerry Porras say, among many other things, that it is core values, not charisma, that make for a successful company. And the same is true of a marriage. For a marriage to be “built to last,” shared core values are far more important than personality and passion. Now let me be clear: I’m in favor of personality, and I’m a big fan of passion. But personality and passion are the icing on the cake of shared core values. In the time we have spent together, we have talked about some of those core values that the two of you share. As Collins and Porras point out, successful businesses, like successful people, change and evolve, grow and develop over time. So do successful marriages. As your marriage grows and develops, changes and evolves, it is your shared core values that will make your relationship “built to last.”
In 1 Corinthians 13:4-13, the Scripture that you selected as the biblical foundation of your marriage, the apostle Paul identifies three core values that are the ground of our relationship with God and our relationship with one another: faith, hope, and love are lasting. We grow and mature from childhood to adulthood, Paul says. He could have gone on to say that we continue to grow and mature, develop and change, during our adult years. The constant is our core values: faith, hope, and love are lasting, Paul says.
In a nutshell, faith is trusting your life to God no matter what happens to you. Hope is never, never, never giving up on God, on yourself, or on each other. And love, well the greatest of these is love. “Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.”
God grant that it may it be so for you. God grant that you may make it so for you as long as you both shall live. Amen.
Photo by Wayne-Amethyst Photography, used under license of Creative Commons.
Copyrighted © 2011 by Jeffrey S. Rogers. It may be copied or disseminated for non-commercial use, provided this notice is included. The author can be contacted at jeffrogers110@bellsouth.net.
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