Chapter 29: A Union
A UNION
MARRIAGE is a union. It takes two to make a union. One cannot do it. When God created man, He saw that it was not good for him to be alone, and He created a woman from and for him, specifically designed to help him, to be suitable for him, to be his mate. The woman is totally other, totally different, totally God’s gift to man, and each stands in relation to the other, responsible to the other in obedience to the command of God, responsible to be a man or a woman, and, in marriage, to unite as one flesh. It is for this reason that a man leaves his parents. He forsakes all other ties in the flesh in order to establish this most intimate one of all, the only one which is a perfect union of one flesh.
There is no competition in a union. There is no playing off of one against the other, no keeping score, no making of comparisons or insistence on a fifty-fifty division of anything. Each is for the other, pulling with and not against him.
But we are human. You, being my daughter, know very well that I am human and full of flaws and make no claim that things always work flawlessly. Once, before your father and I were married, I learned that he felt we were competing and this was a hard thing for him to take. We were both studying Spanish under an Ecuadorian lady, and she had to correct his pronunciation more often than she had to correct mine. He was not upset because he thought she was being partial. He was upset because he thought she was right. I knew nothing about it until once when we were walking together and he spoke of it. It was not that he was asking me to slow down, to “act dumb,” to be an inferior student. Nothing was further from his mind. He only wanted to confess his difficulty with this competition. I recognized that I had been enjoying it, and had probably studied harder than I would have if I had not had it. He recognized that difference of gifts is one of the facts of life and he was able eventually to accept this. It was a question of feelings, not reason, and he saw it as such. Both of us began to learn —and this is a lesson which we never stop learning —that whatever gifts either of us had were not that we might flaunt them but that we might use them for the sake of other people. After we were married we discovered how our various gifts fit together astonishingly well, and thus we began to learn the lesson of 1 Corinthians 12:17-18: “If the whole body were an eye, where would be the hearing? If the whole body were an ear, where would be the sense of smell? But as it is God arranged the organs in the body, each one of them, as he chose.”
There is union in the physical body —all the members joined together in harmony and for the good of the whole, all subject to the head. So there is union in marriage, two separate persons made one in the flesh, and, if they are Christians, one in Christ, subject to His leadership. If they are one in Christ, they have not only union but communion, and this is a priceless thing.