Place me like a seal over your heart, like a seal on your arm; for love is as strong as death, its jealousy unyielding as the grave. It burns like blazing fire, like a mighty flame. Song of Solomon 8:6
McKinney, Texas
We gathered here in an old cotton mill, not so far north of Dallas, to witness and share in the wedding of Jenna and Seth. They are young — both in their early 20s — and in love and by virtue of their age untested as yet.
Their enthusiasm is unbridled and their passion, of course, is deep and voracious and consuming. Within the salvaged and reclaimed remnants of this old mill, where stone and steel and burnished wood speak to other kinds of endeavors, we watched and listened as they pledged their love to God, their love to one another, and officially began life anew. Together.
Beneath an expansive dome of blue sky above, the sun poured its refreshing light down upon all of us and warm friendly breezes pulled at the hems of skirts and knocked ties askew and mussed the hair of moms and aunts and cousins. We sat upon white folding chairs, a cloud of witnesses gathered from near and far.
And as he so often does, God showed up.
He came to teach me once more about life. For there is much to be learned — no matter how long we have been married — about ourselves and our own hearts when we attend a wedding. It is impossible to attend one and not revisit your own; we cannot help but be stirred by the ritual and the rite.
For me, I cannot attend a wedding without remembering detail upon detail upon detail of my ceremony, from the sight of my wife as she stepped through the door at the rear of the church — a tan, statuesque beauty wrapped in white with flowers in her hand and tears in her eyes — to the church bells chiming as we left.
But more important than the old memories is a new perspective that comes from such melding of present and past. And in this old Texas mill, with Seth and Jenna saying no other will do, I suddenly find myself realizing how absolutely fierce is the love that makes a marriage.
In the play between present and past, in the memories that well up of good days and bad, from somewhere inside the landscape of my heart, God says “look.” God says “listen.” God says, “do you understand how incredibly important this act is? Do you realize how absolutely fierce is the love that connects man to woman, husband to wife, you to me?”
I think marriage: special, unique, one of a kind. I think tender, pliable, resistant, patient, voracious. But all is drowned out by the word fierce welling up from within. No matter what image or thought I have, no matter whether I am at the wedding of Jenna and Seth or thinking of my own or whether I try to take myself to some other place, the idea of fierce love overwhelms my senses.
I am unable to shake the idea. Marital love is fierce. I hold it in my brain and let it dance through me. I test the idea and silently pray, asking God, is this just a whimsical thought I dreamed up on my own or are you reminding me, teaching me that marital love is fierce.
The message comes back stronger than when I first thought of the word. The love that makes a marriage is fierce: fierce as in wild or raw or eager. Fierce as in relentless, intense, and passionate. Fierce as in deep and powerful and wonderfully volatile.
It must be amazing in ways we cannot easily describe or articulate, only feel and experience — even in ways that sometimes scare us.
Next to me, I look at Myra. The sunlight on her face, the way her legs are crossed just so, the way her hand fits in mine. I am thinking about fierce love and our marriage. I am wondering how often have I taken her for granted or forgotten that look on our wedding day or not described to anyone the love we share as intense, passionate, fierce.
Fierce as in uncontainable. Fierce as in people would kill to have it. Fierce as in incomparable. The sense of the word fierce is scraping away at all the barnacles clinging to me. It is polishing away some of the dull. It is reinvigorating my thinking, reigniting my senses, setting my heart ablaze once more.
Jenna and Seth each took a vow in that place. I left after taking one of my own to not let all the stuff of day-to-day life dull away the fierce love that connects a husband and wife, man to a woman, me to her.