What I Saw

I recently attended an engagement party for a young couple who are getting married later this year. It was a happy occasion, with lots of family and friends in attendance. It’s hard to be at a party when you don’t know many of the guests. I didn’t stay long because of that, but I was there long enough to watch people interact, both young and old, and to make some observations.

I am sad today because of what I saw, and what the guests couldn’t. I look from a vantage point, a place of one who has lived many years. I see through the eyes of my experiences. I look from the place of one who has loved and who knows loss in life and I have learned to embrace the lessons from both. I look from the place of knowing, because of the Holy Spirit who lives in me.

I am saddened by men who don’t understand the gift they have in their wives. I have a heart for marriage and family because God does, and here’s what I know; God created the wife to respond to her husband even if the woman is unaware. God’s creation is still the same, and He created marriage. So, she usually does respond to however she is being treated by her husband.

I am not saying that the wife is not responsible for her actions. She is. She is accountable to God for how she conducts herself in the marriage. But ultimately, the husband holds the greatest responsibility. To whom much is given, much is required. As the leader of the home, the husband bears the majority of the weight when it comes to how his marriage and family function.

Most husbands don’t know the power that they possess because they are too preoccupied with the power they can never obtain. They could have a rich life with the woman they have married but they are blinded by an idea of riches beyond their reach. Each man’s family is the true treasure and yet they don’t see. Or perhaps, they don’t see yet.

There were tables of food in this more than modest house, and a well-stocked bar to boot. The cute paper umbrellas were enticingly placed in the glass of liquid lies, that promises to fulfill when in fact, it only leaves you feeling emptier, while beckoning you to keep searching for things you will never find here on this planet, without a relationship with the Father who loves with an unfailing, everlasting love. An umbrella drink doesn’t even come close.

I’m sorry too, for families–husbands, wives and kids who have lost the special moments along the way, and maybe more importantly, the seemingly mundane that make up a lifetime, because of preoccupation with the unattainable. The clock doesn’t stop ticking and the young don’t stay that way for long.