That is why a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and they become one flesh.
Genesis 2:24 (NIV)
Why a Man Leaves
The water comes to a rolling boil in the big pot and the whole kitchen turns damp. A woman lifts jars out two at a time with tongs and stands them upside down on a dish towel. It isn’t noon yet, and her daughter writes the year on each lid in pencil, because ink runs in this heat.
God took the woman out of the man, and the man must have known her on sight. Bone of my bones, he said, and flesh of my flesh. That is why a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and they become one flesh.
A man leaves his father and mother because God had already taken the woman out of the man, and the two become one flesh on the strength of that. A husband and wife spend years putting a life together, getting it wrong and starting over and holding on through the parts they never expected, and they put all of it on top of work God had already finished.
Nothing here says who gets a marriage or how long it lasts. Marriages come apart and people are widowed, and other people wait years for something that never arrives. God took the woman out of the man long before there were fathers and mothers to leave, and nothing that has happened in anyone’s house since touches what he did.
Her daughter asks whether her grandmother taught her to do this. “I wasn’t taught,” her mother says. “I was kept in this kitchen every August until I knew it by heart. The year I left this house I took four boxes of jars with me and not much else.”
A Prayer to Remember
Father, I read my own life as the record of what you’ve done, and I get it wrong that way every time. You took the woman out of the man, and the whole of it started there. Make me sure of that this week, on the days my life reads like an argument against you.
In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.
