Wooing

Last semester was all about children; this semester seems to be all about marriage. It could be because two of my brothers are getting married...or because February lesson plans include poetry (of course!)...or because there are similarities between living together in marriage and the living together struggles of a girl and her church and a new neighborhood...but this is all hypothesizing. :) No matter the reason, there has been enough of a marriage theme running through the last weeks that when a blog entitled "How to Make a Marriage Bed" by Ann Voskamp arrived in my inbox, I laughed up at God, raised an eyebrow, and settled in for a read. Allow me to share a section with you all:

Why is it easier to earn love than simply accept it?

Sometimes when I stand skin nervous, too exposed, before the hangers and the choices, his hands find the waist and fingers around the bare that has stretched wrinkle thin six times and I cringe. He says it then in the light, what he whispers in the complete pitch with the door latch hooked close.

I doubt that word beautiful from his lips and I shake my head and I regret hurting him, but I can’t help it. To accept it would seem a lie but he says it is his God-honest truth. Why do I argue?

And why would a woman rather scrub the grime of the tile grout in the bathroom for her husband, make him plates of heaping mashed potatoes, light the candles, scour the pots, wash his underwear, rather than say yes to his wooing? Is it pride or is it shame (and maybe they are the same only by different names) or is it a symptom of a deep wound bleeding unseen or just blatant apathy and why rebuff the advances of the man who gave the ring and his promise and all of his bare male heart?

I thought of the blog during Bible study, when half of us were engaged in pouring tea rather than listening to the Bible reading. I've thought of it again during business meetings, English classes, my own Bible reading time, times of worship...so many instances when I find myself and others seemingly coming before God with the idea that we have to do something—scrub the bathroom, prepare the offerings, ready the church lunch, feverishly produce programs—to be worthwhile. Coming before Him so busily that we reject His wooing--running away from the awe and overwhelming thought of intimacy with the King of creation. (Note: these aren’t accusations of other church members as much as they are actions I find myself doing…)

Being the bold English teacher that I am, I brought an entire copy of the blog to English class and read it to my advanced students. They loved it--for both its slightly scandalous content (for a Japanese English classroom) and its honest questions. No one had ever given them permission to ask such questions before.

I wish that I knew how to ask such questions for myself, for the church members…wish I knew how to receive and communicate a freedom to rest and be loved.

Tomorrow is the annual all-church meeting, and I’m praying that there’s some wooing that goes on in the midst of excitement and the making of plans. God-and-human wooing—after all, the Church is the bride of Christ.