It was in a social studies class my junior year in high school that I worked out a mathematical formula about marriage. If 1 + 1 does not equal 1 then divide. At the ripe old age of 16 it was pretty clear to me, if two people cannot function as one then it’s better to end the whole thing.
It’s always amazing to me how something complex can be reduced to a simpler understanding. Relationships are no an exception to that rule. As life continues to progress it seems that small doses of understanding are dispensed.
Some years are a drought, others a flood of learning and greater understanding. Hopefully, our greatest lessons are not due to personal failings, but because of deeper insight and understanding at the enrichment of everyone in our lives.
After many years of being in a committed relationships, I had one of those revelations: The Power of Two. We are always told that a marriage is about loving the other person through thick and thin, richer and poorer…. you know the rest. What I did not see was this other seemingly hidden purpose – to help make me a better man.
Funny though, that aspect of marriage was waiting for me to figure it out all along. How is it that one minute I am blind to something and the next it magically appears right in front of my face- like the lost keys to my car?
The relationships to my wife, children and work are not just about what I am suppose to be doing or how to make the other persons life easier and more comfortable- which is pretty much always a good thing. They are equally about building me into the better person I long to become. The more I see this purpose in my relationships the more I find myself receiving it.
In what ways is your relationship to work making you a better person?
What is one way can you change your relationship to work to help you become an even better person?
In college at Reed many many years ago, I dropped my math class the first day after the professor asked us to prove that a+b equalled b+a. When the professor asked me why I was leaving before the first class was even over, I said I could “take that proposition on faith.” It seemed like such an obvious and undeniable proposition to my young self. I have thought many times over my life what that equation means in so many circumstances. When you apply that simple math to the two people in a marriage, I realize that faith is exactly what you need to prove that proposition. It is faith (and committment) that you need to keep things balanced between two people in a marriage. You always have to make sure that you remain constant for each other even when life flips you around!
I completely agree. Our faith is often tested by our resolve to understand a situation differently than how it may appear- which is true in virtually every aspect of our lives. To push our self beyond what we see is to allow faith to take us where we otherwise might not tread.
Thanks for sharing that, it really makes one think past the standard way of looking at things.