Covenant Love

I heard a story yesterday that pulled me down from all my philosophical, metaphysical, and cosmological stuff and dropped me, hard, to where my faith should be.

A man in my church, working in end-of-life care, told about elderly individuals, in their 80s or more, coming into the facility to visit their spouses and attend to them (at least the best that they could).

“Jane and I have been married 72 years,” he would hear them say. Or: “William and I got married 65 years ago, and I am going to be with him until the end.”

He was always moved by the dedication so unabashedly unmasked there, especially because these elderly people’s own health struggles didn’t stop them from attending to love.

He then told me a story that, having touched him, touched me as well. An elderly man in his late 80s came to attend to his dying wife. My church friend wondered how long they had been together.

I heard a story yesterday that pulled me down from all my philosophical, metaphysical, and cosmological stuff and dropped me, hard, to where my faith should be.

“How long have you two been married?” he asked, assuming decades, a half dozen at least.

“Oh,” he said, slowly shuffling to her room, “seven years.”

Seven years? The man who told me was astonished.

“I would have thought,” he said to me, “by how dedicated he was to her, coming every single day, helping where he could . . . I just assumed that they had been married 70 years or something. But seven?”

His words hit me, too. Seven years? They both probably had lost their first spouses. Yet—with much of their lives already used up, and both having been forever cemented in their ways (which at times must have clashed with each other), and surely after the fires of the flesh had long smoldered—they covenanted together in marriage. And obviously this old man took his end of the covenant seriously.

A story like this gets you to ask yourself (at least it did me), What would I do? Decades of marriage and commitment is one thing . . . but only seven years? And yet here the old man was, day after day, attending to his wife. Was it love alone, or covenant obligation, or both?

I’d guess both. It would have to be. Given their ages, given their relatively short time together in contrast to the great span of their two lives having been lived separately—and all the loves, the experiences, the joys, the sorrow, the tears, and the songs unshared between them—what else could it be? I would guess, too, that some days, when not feeling well or even particularly loving, he came anyway, honoring the covenant commitment that he had made only seven years earlier to a woman he surely didn’t know anywhere near as well, or as intimately, as his first wife.
It’s no coincidence that the Bible, Old Testament and New, uses marriage to depict God’s relationship with His covenant people. And though Jesus tells us that the first commandment is to “love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength” (Mark 12:30), how many of us always love God with all we’ve got?

And yet—what? We stay faithful only when we do? We trust in Jesus’ merits only then? We obey the law only when our love for God shines within? Or do we—like those married seven years (or decades), who fulfill their covenant obligations with their spouses, regardless—fulfill ours with the Lord as well, regardless?