Practice Your Promise

by Ted Lowe

This spring I was going for a run on a popular trail in our area, I saw custom made signs every 20-30 yards from a boy to a girl asking her to the prom. It was obvious these signs took this guy some effort. As I’m running, I’m thinking, I sure hope for this guy’s sake this girls says, yes. If not, he’s going to need to process this with a professional.

I mentioned what I had seen to a few friends and they informed me that prom proposals were now a huge deal, so I googled around a bit . . . they were right! Who knew? I bet these guys grow up to put great effort into their marriage proposals.

I get that, because I went to pretty crazy lengths to ask Nancie to marry me. (That’s a story for another day.) Then comes the actual wedding. It wasn’t so long ago that everyone’s wedding looked the same with the exceptions of slight tweaks of style to wedding attire. Not now. Couples are freed up to get married wherever they choose like barns, hot-air balloons, underwater . . . all carefully crafted with what my wife calls “Pinterest” pressure.

Oh and what about the receptions? No more is a first dance as husband and wife or a father/daughter dance enough, now they are more carefully choreographed than a Super Bowl half time show.

While all these relational launches can seem a bit much, there is something great about them. People are symbolically shouting in a jaded culture, “We have mammoth hope for our marriage!” Through these giant spectacles they are in essence saying, “We don’t care about the stats and the world-weary view of marriage. We believe that our relationship will be great and will last a lifetime. So take your ball and chain, serial marriage rhetoric and go far, far away!”

Yes, couples STILL long for a lifetime of love like the one in the movie, Up. That’s right, couples still have gargantuan hope for their marriage. And personally, I think that is great, great news. I also believe more than ever that they can have what they hoped for on their big days. We can too. We just have to practice in the every day what we promised on the big day.

You have to practice your promise. Whether you wrote your own vows or used the traditional vows, you, I, promised some pretty amazing things. And every day, we are given the opportunity to bring laughter, respect and love into our spouse’s lives. (PAUSE. Think about this.) We have to be so intentional with how we treat our spouse because they trusted us with much of the happiness of their lives. Not that we replace God in any way, but God certainly wants to use us most to show how He loves them. Again, if our spouse is going to experience what it is like to be really loved, in large part, it is going to be because we choose to love them in a big way. What an honor. What a responsibility. And while on our wedding days, we may have been naive about how easy it was going to be to have a great lifetime together, we were spot on when we empathically knew we could have a great lifetime together.

So for the remainder of 2015, every Friday, we are going to take a look at what it means to practice what we promised, turning our big day into the days we hoped they would be. And you if you do anything stellar, make sure you post it on social media with #mpdates. (After all it doesn’t really happen unless it gets posted, right?)

 

Ted Lowe is the Director of MarriedPeople, and the co-author of Married People: How Your Church Can Build Marriages That Last. Follow Ted on Twitter @tedlowe.

 

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