Beginnings

by Elanor

Peter says your view of God changes when you get married. I find this to be true, and the change has affected every aspect of my relationship with God. When I was at Wheaton shortly after starting to date Edwin, I saw evidence of the change in that there was another person who joined God in the background of my mind in everything I did. When I came back to San Jose and started spending all my time with Edwin, the change was even more apparent because I found I did not know how to relate to God anymore. I didn’t talk to Him in the same way I used to. I would try to ask Him questions as I usually do, but I found my questions almost always redirected towards Edwin, who would answer them with wisdom and understanding. It was strange.

I think a large part of the strangeness came from being in between singlehood and marriage. I didn’t particularly like the in between part: both Edwin and I wanted to be married right away so that the whole awkwardness of boundaries would be over. Now that I am married, I think my relationship with God is becoming clearer.

Everyone has been asking me how it feels to be married. In many ways, it feels exactly the same as being single. But in this way, it feels completely different: I see myself having to learn everything over again in terms of how to relate to God. It is as though the ties I had with Him have been all knotted together, and I have to untangle them to put them back in their proper places. But I know that, after I have gone and done over again the work I have been doing for the past three years, I will have covered twice the distance as I did the first time.

I started reading through the Bible in order to help relearn things I once thought I knew, so I thought I would share about what it says to me.

Genesis 1

I would quote the whole chapter, but it would be too long. To get the whole effect, though, read verses 9 through 26 and see how God furnishes a world to make it paradise and then creates a king to rule it.

Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth…” Then God said, “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the surface of all the earth, and every tree which has fruit yielding seed; it shall be food for you.” (Gen. 1:26, 29)

I have heard of no other religion which teaches the earth has been given to the human race as a king gives to his son a portion of his kingdom to rule over. C. S. Lewis had it right when he made four ordinary children kings and queens over all of Narnia. For you can see how each person spends his or her life trying to attain mastery over a certain part of this kingdom: as we go and find jobs, as we search for what we’re meant to do in life, we are finding the land where we are to rule. A housewife is the empress of her kitchen, because she knows where each spatula and pan belongs. She fights disorder with cleanliness so that her kingdom can produce food.

An electrician might not have read much literature and he might not know a thing about biology, but when he is called in to fix a circuit board, his feelings of inadequacy are replaced by confidence, because this is where his expertise lies, this is what he knows and rules over.

You can see where things have gone wrong by looking at how people treat one another. We have mistaken the gift of the planet for the gift of all the people on the planet. Too often, the search for mastery consists of trying to subdue other people to our rule. We must learn from St. Francis of Assissi, who “treated the whole mob of men as a mob of kings” (G. K. Chesterton). We must submit to one another in love as we are learning to master the earth.

This is not to say we can do whatever we want to the planet, either. Bad kings exploit their kingdoms to line their palaces with gold. Good kings are no less in charge of their kingdoms, but they rule them for the purpose of bringing out the best in their lands. We should be good kings, not because we are stewards who are afraid of punishment when the Master returns, but because it makes us happy to see our kingdoms prosper. God has given us a gift: He’s not going to ask for it back.