MAINTAINING OUR MARRIAGE

 I mentioned in a previous blog that we live in a self-absorbed culture. But the culture is the sum of individual desires, and any cultural change must start with me. Today, I want to share with you three imperatives Ann and I consider necessary to maintain our marriage.

First, I’m sure you’ve noticed we are all different, as different in personality as we are in looks. Ann and I are probably the ultimate example that, like poles of a magnet, opposites attract each other. Of course, common interests, common beliefs, shared pursuits and desires, all aided in making us one.

But the differences that attract us to each other can eventually exasperate us because we each do things differently. Then I may try to make Ann over into my own image. If successful, the difference that attracted me fades, the source of excitement is lost, and I may venture elsewhere to fill the void. 

The disordered way in which Ann loads the dishwasher—compared, of course, with my efficient arrangement—is not the time for irritation and rebuke. No, it’s a time to rejoice that the vitality I first admired is still in the house and relish that happy incompatibility. 

Second, our culture of easy divorce promotes lack of commitment. It encourages the attitude: “If it doesn’t work for me, I can always leave.” At the first sign of trouble, it’s too easy to consider the marriage has failed and bail out. 

But an old adage tells us: “A ship’s captain doesn’t learn his craft on a calm sea.” We enjoy the green pastures and still waters God provides that nurtures our love. But Scripture encourages us to consider it “pure joy, whenever you face trials of many kinds.” 

Marriage is not built holding hands on a glassy sea. It is the perseverance through the storms that erupt upon it that deepens and matures our marriage, and forges the bond that will last a lifetime. Conflict exposes our readiness to sacrifice for the one we love. Joy is the outcome of conflict, for happiness is the by-product of service. 

Third, my devotion to Ann measures my devotion to God, for the first purpose of marriage is to reflect God’s faithfulness to His own. How I serve her betrays what I really believe about Christ’s sacrifice for me. So Paul admonishes us: “Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.”

Now, practicing this belief not only strengthens marriage, but fervency of faith is also the greatest legacy we can pass to our children. Families generally proliferate and bring joy beyond imagination. Children and grandchildren will learn the reality of God’s love and grace as we joyfully persist in our intimacy with God. 

That is necessary, not optional, if we wish to draw our children to faith in God. Even after 61 years of marriage. Our prayer remains: “May those who come behind us find us faithful.” 

 

Some of this material is adapted from our book, Happy Together: Daily Insights for Families From Scripture, obtainable from Amazon or directly from us at www.pebblepress.ca 

 

CHILDREN OF GAY MARRIAGE AND SINGLE PARENTS

Last week we blogged on children of divorce. Today, we consider the many children denied a sense of identity due to unknown or absent parents. Both gay and single parents using donor sperm or a known donor for conception purposes will produce children with an innate drive to know their missing biological parents.

When society changes marriage, it changes parenthood. The divorce revolution and the rise in single-parent childbearing has weakened ties of fathers to their children and introduced a host of other players at times called “parents.”

Gay marriage and intentional single parenthood doubles down on the trauma of divorce, as it desires children without one biological parent that supplies their identity. Wanting a child, without considering that child’s wellbeing, springs from the same root as using sex primarily for recreation: personal self-interest. It perpetuates adult “rights” to a child at the expense of children’s need to be raised by their natural mother and father.

The Commission on Parenthood’s Future, published ten years ago, documented many cases of children denied the knowledge of their biological parent’s identity and the pain it caused. Many consider themselves “lopsided,” or “half-adopted.” The donor, usually unknown, is often characterized as “half of who I am.” A mother of a donor-inseminated child admitted: “It never even occurred to me this child might want to find her biological father someday.”

Brandi Walton, a lesbian’s daughter, in a letter to the LGBT community last year, complained, “I yearned for the affection that my friends received from their dads, and spent as much time with those friends as I could.” After several aborted relationships, she met her husband, “and everything clicked.” Later she “tried to talk to my mom about how difficult my life was, but she simply cannot relate because she was raised by a mom and a dad.” Even with male support from grandfathers and uncles, “it always felt second-hand.”

These children do not speak for all gay-raised men or women. Parents of all families, whether traditional, gay, or single, make good and bad parents. But too many children eventually fall into this identity fog. Unfortunately, experience has shown the LGBTQ community to be intolerant and self-absorbed, demanding tolerance with passion, yet not returning it. They attack and silence anyone who disagrees with them.

As irregular families increase, those perpetuating the drive to gender mainstreaming will continue to ignore the mounting number of children in pain. Studies constantly show a powerful consensus among social scientists of the benefits of traditional marriage for children. The New York Times not long ago reported: “From a child’s point of view, according to growing social science research, the most supportive household is one with two biological parents in a low-conflict marriage.”

There are no reports of children from traditional families ever wishing they had gay or single parents! The unnatural forcing of these irregular families is self-defeating, and a general return to natural families will eventually prevail.

CHILDREN OF DIVORCE

In recent blogs we have concentrated on outside forces determined to destroy traditional marriage. But what about those forces within marriage that lead to breakup. Easy divorce and increasing common law union make marriage a transitory alliance, and with it the loss of stability and security.

This age cries for conservation, recycling, that we treat the earth with respect. But euthanasia and abortion have devalued earth’s most sacred commodity, human life. Now divorce continues the legacy of abortion, not in disposing of children, but destroying their ability to cope with life. 

Judith Wallenstein’s study of children of divorce, The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce, makes sobering reading. Here is an excerpt.

The life histories of this first generation to grow up in a divorce culture tell us truths we dare not ignore. Their message is poignant, clear, and contrary to what so many want to believe. They have taught me the following: 

From the viewpoint of the children, and counter to what happens to their parents, divorce is a cumulative experience. Its impact increases over time and rises to a crescendo in adulthood. At each developmental stage, divorce is experienced anew in different ways. In adulthood, it affects personality, the ability to trust, expectations about relationships, and ability to cope with change. 

The first upheaval occurs at the breakup. Children are frightened and angry, terrified of being abandoned by both parents, and they feel responsible for the divorce. Most children are taken by surprise; few are relieved. As adults, they remember with sorrow and anger how little support they got from their parents when it happened. 

They recall how they were expected to adjust overnight to a terrifying number of changes that confounded them. Even children who had seen or heard violence at home made no connection between that violence and the decision to divorce. The children concluded early on, silently and sadly, that family relationships are fragile and that the tie between a man and woman can break capriciously, without warning. They worried ever after that parent-child relationships are also unreliable and can break at any time. 

Easy divorce? Easy for whom? Certainly not the children who learn early in life relationships cannot be trusted, and so are prone to repeat the cycle later in life. Most of the grown children of divorce in Judith’s study said vigorously, “I never want a child of mine to experience a childhood like I had.” Sadly, their parents’ divorce robbed many of the tools needed to avoid it. 

Divorce is not subject to laws that tighten or ease divorce. Laws in most countries tend to follow the dictates of its citizens. As I stated in an earlier blog, once sex becomes recreational, children become an inconvenience to personal “happiness.” That idea flows into marriage and, too often, the children become secondary.

None of this denies the intense pain that many go through; divorce hurts everyone involved. While probably no direct fault of our own, we are caught up in a self-absorbed culture. But the culture is a product of individual desires, and any cultural change must start with me, the individual. What are my priorities?

A CULTURAL DEATH WISH

Last week I reported on the program of gender mainstreaming, in process now for several decades. Under pressure from well financed and influential groups many western governments are adopting it—Alberta and Ontario leading the way in Canada. Its end aim is to dispense with the traditional idea of male and female, and replace it with a genderless society.

This may seem far-fetched, but elimination of the terms “father” and “mother” from children’s kindergartens and schools shows how the program is progressing. “Parent one” and “parent two” (or three or more) eliminates the opposite-sex understanding of parenthood.

Gay “marriage” already leads the way to the lesser significance of traditional sexual roles. The inclusion of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer (LGBTQ) as alternate genders further dilutes the idea of two distinct sexes. 

Sexual deviation no longer exists, only sexual orientation, which allows freedom of all sexual expressions and removes the stigma. Declare these “human rights,” and liberating our baser instincts becomes human achievement.

However, this direction is unsustainable. Let me present two primary reasons. First, the decay of western nations by attrition is this culture’s death wish.

The rush to satisfy personal desires, masked as “rights,” has resulted in lowering birthrates and populations. Gay “marriage,”—essentially infertile—abortion, euthanasia, and contraception have reduced Canada’s birthrate to 1.61 children per female, which continues to fall far below the minimum 2.4 needed to maintain the population.

Most western nations are experiencing similar inadequate birthrates. While the west promotes the laudable influx of refugees from disaster areas, the need for importing people to make up for birthrate loss is an undeclared motivating factor. It is unlikely that national “adoption” of imported families will be able to alleviate population loss in the long term.

Yet, while our culture demands we preserve the planet’s ecology as nature requires, the culture defies nature’s plan of male and female for procreation and nurture of offspring. We have already seen the disastrous imbalance of men over women after China’s “one child” policy, and India’s infanticide of girls—the two most populous nations on earth.

Second, gender mainstreaming opposes truth. During preceding centuries, the bedrock of Christianity provided a system of complying with nature as God created it. With all its faults and wars, western culture has continued to flourish until this century. The current decline of western civilization follows a retreat from its former godly heritage.

Christianity is struggling against increasing hostility and persecution, aided by the apathetic response of most Christians. If Christians pursue their personal goals in place of the imperatives of the faith, Christianity will continue to weaken and the errors plaguing our culture will grow.

Christianity is resilient, however. Repeatedly, as Christianity’s end is predicted and persecution intensifies, its basic message of hope revives the hunger of people for God’s transcendent order of life and the equality and dignity of all humans before God. Genuine, concerted prayer for revival, and fearless proclamation of the truth, will unmask the false directions of our times.