Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
--William Shakespeare
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
--William Shakespeare
Sixteen years ago, this was my definition of love. Shakespeare is terribly romantic, is he not? And I was a girl in love with being in love. I had my life all planned out. But my natural inclination toward romance led me down some pretty dark paths.
Praise the Lord, I met R! I shared the story of our courtship & marriage here.
Shakespeare was part of our ceremony, along with this often used passage:
"Don't urge me to leave you or to turn back from you. Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God. Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried. May the LORD deal with me, be it ever so severely, if anything but death separates you and me." - Ruth 1:16-18
I wasn't a Christian at the time, but I chose to include this in our vows because I honestly thought R & I would be able to live up to that promise. Obviously, I was more than a little naive.
Less than two years after we were married, the testing of our vows began. For the next 8 years, we walked through the fires of hell. And, by the grace of God, we are still standing.
I can't claim that I've never tried change R when I found something that needed changing, or that we've looked on the storms and never been shaken. I guess by Shakespeare's standards, we fall short.
Still, I can say that, with the Lord's help, we've never turned our backs on each other. We've been able to understand the vow Ruth made to Naomi. R's God did become my God. And He is good.
Visit Christine to find out what others are saying in this week's Marriage Monday topic.
Melissa
