This week has had me circling the same idea from a few different angles, that marriage isn’t something two people invent and then have to hold together by sheer effort. Jesus states it more plainly than I ever could. When he was pushed about marriage, he didn’t start with rules. He went all the way back to the beginning, to how God made us male and female and brought the two together, so that a man leaves his own family and is joined to his wife, and the two of them are no longer two. Then he says the line that’s been staying with me all week. What God has joined together, let no one separate.

I keep catching myself treating my marriage like a project I’m supposed to manage, the right words today, the right amount of patience, the right balance of give and take, as if the whole thing rests on how well I perform it. Some days I manage that better than others. But that isn’t actually what Jesus said. He didn’t say two people join themselves and hope it holds. He said God joins them. The holding isn’t only mine to do.

That doesn’t let me off the hook for showing up. It just changes what I’m actually doing when I show up tired on an ordinary Sunday. I’m not inventing something out of nothing. I’m tending to something that was already joined, by someone a lot stronger than me, before I ever said I do.

What would actually change today if I believed that about my own marriage?

Today’s Bible Study

Long before anything went wrong in the garden, God looked at the man he had just made and said something that still catches me. It is not good that the man should be alone. That isn’t a punishment or a fix for sin. It’s spoken while everything else in creation is still being called good, an honest word about the one thing still missing. So God made him a companion, someone to stand beside him rather than just be admired by him. Marriage didn’t start as damage control after the fall. It started as part of the original goodness, something God wanted for us before anything had gone wrong at all.

Recommended Reading

If you want to read more on this, the Catechism has a short section called Marriage in God’s Plan, paragraphs 1601 to 1605. It says plainly that the call to marriage is written into human nature itself, not invented by any one culture or generation, which is worth remembering on the days it feels like we’re making all of this up as we go.