Sacred Marriage : III

Learning to Love: How Marriage Teaches us to Love

Yes, it is difficult to love your spouse.

This chapter, while not quite as engaging at the first two, focuses on the inevitable challenges that we face in marriage, the biggest being love.

Thomas points out that God teaches us a lot through our marriages - we've already touched on that a little bit already in the first two chapters, but Thomas now focuses our attention toward love; teaching us to love, through our marriages.

We read about Matthew 22:34-40, where we are told that we are to 1) Love God, and 2) Love our neighbors. Thomas points out that there is an attitude (towards God), and an action (loving others). Jesus has connected the two ideas for a purpose; Thomas suggests that they are connected to demonstrate to us that if we love God, we must love others - even our spouse - even when we don't want to - even when they are nasty towards us - even when we disagree. Thomas says this:

We show our love for God in part by loving our spouses well. We can never love somebody "too much." Our problem is that typically we love God to little.

He continues:

If I can't love my wife, how can I love the homeless man...? How can I love the drug addict or the alcoholic? Yes, this spouse might be difficult to love at times, but that's what marriage is for - to teach us how to love.

And finally,

To fail to love my wife and kids rightly in the name of loving other people rightly is a sham.

If somebody tried to describe your love for God solely by how well you love your spouse, what would he or she conclude?

How much time do you spend thinking about how to make your spouse happy, compared to the amount of time you spend thinking about how well your spouse is pleasing you?