Marriage should be honored by all, and the marriage bed kept pure, for God will judge the adulterer and all the sexually immoral.
Hebrews 13:4 (NIV)
Honored by People Outside It
The card has two names on it, hers first, and people take it and say something warm about working alongside your husband. They ordered five hundred when the business opened and there are two boxes left in the hall closet. He stopped working there nine years ago, and they’ve been married thirty-one. You don’t reprint a card with two boxes left.
The people who got this letter were being told how to live with each other: keep loving one another as brothers and sisters, take strangers in, remember the ones in prison as if you were in there with them. Marriage gets the same treatment as the rest of it, and it’s addressed to everybody listening. Marriage should be honored by all, and the marriage bed kept pure, for God will judge the adulterer and all the sexually immoral.
By all. Most people in any room aren’t married to each other, so most of the honoring in that line gets done from outside a marriage of your own. You say things about a couple when one of them isn’t in the car. A married man starts telling you his wife doesn’t understand him, and what happens in the next ten seconds is partly yours. A woman whose own marriage ended reads that line too, and the writer gives her the same work he gives the rest of them.
That same everybody gets the marriage bed as well, with two married people keeping faith with each other and the rest of the room staying clear of it.
There’s a second half to it. God will judge the adulterer and all the sexually immoral. The honoring goes to the room and the judging goes to God, and anybody who has ever wanted to settle a case like that himself gets to put it down.
The license has names on it too, and two witnesses signed under them and drove home. They’d been given a job that morning by people who barely knew them, and most of it gets done in rooms those two will never walk into.
A Prayer to Remember
Keep me out of marriages that aren’t mine, God, in the way that actually matters. No opinions about a couple I see once a week, and nothing repeated afterward. If a man starts telling me about his wife, make me slow. And when I want to decide who was at fault, remind me you kept that part for yourself.
In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.
