Fiddler On The Roof

Have you ever seen The Fiddler on the Roof? There is a scene in the movie that has really been making me think a lot lately. 

Pondering the announcement by their daughter that she is in love, the husband and wife get into a discussion about their arranged marriage.  The husband begins to ask "Do you love me?" The wife asks "After 25 years, why talk about love right now?"  She goes into a list of all she has done with and for him and then questions herself "Do I love you?"

I think my favorite part is where she says "Do I love you?  I'm your wife!" and he responds with "Yes, but do you love me?"  After determining that they do in fact love one another, they end the scene with "It doesn't change a thing, but even so, after 25 years it's nice to know."

I have found myself pondering this scene for many reasons lately.  The first is the idea of arranged marriages and "learning" to love your spouse.  As a child I never understood how arranged marriages could work.  How could they ever be happy?  Didn't one need to fall in love and get all goosebumpy for a marriage to work?  As an adult with 6 kids, I'm liking arranged marriages more and more. 

But it's not so much the idea of someone else choosing your spouse for you that has recently been intriguing me.  It is the idea of choosing to love the one to whom you are married.  Perhaps you are thinking, "shouldn't you already love the one to whom you are married?"  Perhaps.  However, with the rate of divorce as it is, perhaps we need to redefine this idea of loving your spouse. 

I know that there are married people who either don't love their spouse or, like the wife in this movie, question whether or not they do love their spouse.  If that is you, take heart.  There is hope.  If you don't love your spouse, or don't know if you do, here is a simple plan to help you.  Ready?  Okay.  Love your spouse. 

See?  Easy, peasy, lemon squeezy.

What?  Not good enough?  Okay, how about this.  You have likely heard "love is a verb not a feeling" blah, blah, blah.  Well the good news is it can be both.

You know those crazy people that actually like exercise?  Why do they like it?  Because at some time, they forced themselves to get up and do it.  They forced the mechanics, made themselves run, walk, zumba, whatever.  And on the days they were tired, they got up and exercised anyway.  Soon, they discovered that they actually felt better after they exercised. They began to see that on days when they didn't exercise they felt yucky.  At some point the mechanical act of forcing the behaviour of exercising rolled into an actual emotional and attitudinal change toward exercise. 

Love is like that.  Force yourself act in loving ways.  Each day think of one thing that would be nice for your spouse and do that one thing. It doesn't have to be earth shattering.  You may be surprised to find what small things it actually will take to show your spouse that you love him or her.

Early in our marriage, if I didn't have to work, I stayed in bed while my husband got up for work.  He went to work and ate instant oatmeal at his desk.  He ate PB & J at his desk for lunch, and if he was really lucky got to take me out for dinner.  At some time I decided it would be nice to fix him breakfast.  Now I get up (something I hate) and make breakfast for my husband.  I pack his lunch, make his coffee and (usually, barring nasty weather) walk him to his car.  If he's really lucky, he still gets to take me out for dinner.  This little thing has changed our marriage.  It shows love to him while allowing us a little alone time.

I don't tell you this to brag.  On the contrary,  I'm a miserable failure in dozens of other ways, but the fact that I make him a priority sort of hides some of my faults.  He doesn't go out of his way to find things I'm doing wrong.  The mechanical discipline of getting up to show love to my husband by making breakfast and lunch has become an emotional connection for us.

I don't know about you, but I don't want to ask my spouse in 25 years "Do you love me?"  I definitely don't want him to ever have to ask me "Do you love me?"

Looking Back, the View after 15 Years.

I spent yesterday at a pow wow with my family.  If you've never attended a pow wow, you should take the opportunity to do so sometime.  It's an interesting event to view. 

My husband and I met somewhere around 20 years ago in the pow wow world.  I was 16 and he was 15 when we fell head over heals deeply in love.  Or so I thought.  Who knows the heart of a teenager.  They are crazy.  But I do know that it is to this world of pow wows and friends that I owe my opportunity to meet the man who was to become my husband.  Okay, honestly it was to the great and awesome God who orchestrated the whole thing.  It amazes me that while I did not yet know Him, He was situating me for a future life so full of His blessings that I would be unable to deny Him, not that I want to.

I can pinpoint the exact moment I fell in love with my husband.  I remember exactly where we were and the circumstances surrounding it.  We were, surprise surprise, at a pow wow in Oklahoma.  It was a dance that years later we would attend together as a freshly engaged couple.  I remember that moment, sitting on that picnic table when I realized that I was in love with this kid. 

We were such kids.  Of course we wouldn't have believed that if you had told us that.  We knew so much.  We knew what we were going to be doing for the rest of our lives.  We couldn't imagine a life where one didn't pow wow 6+ times a year.  We loved our week long trips to Oklahoma, or our long weekend trips to Oklahoma.  We even spent our honeymoon at a pow wow.  Okay, not a pow wow, THE POW WOW.  The biggest and best pow wow in this area, the National Pow Wow.  This dance is held only once every 3 years.  It is this same dance that we attended yesterday, 15 years and 6 kids after our honeymoon.

God is so awesome.  I got to see a few old friends who I don't see much any more.  I got to share something I used to love with my kids.  I got to enjoy the music and dancing I often times miss.

Despite the fun I had, I got a much bigger message.  About 8 years ago, my husband and I walked away from this life.  The reasons are complicated.  We didn't know at the time how complete our removal from this world was going to be.  Where we once imagined ourselves raising our kids, we suddenly were no longer.  I don't think either of us intended to remove ourselves so fully from this lifestyle.  But it was several years before we returned with our kids to visit a life that had become so deeply ingrained in us.

Now, looking back, I can totally see God's hand and wisdom.  We cannot believe some of the things that we thought were so important.  We see danger and harm in things we once felt were so benign, even helpful.  Now we see the bigger picture with our children and understand that the things that are such vital values and beliefs to us would be practically impossible for us to teach well in this environment.  Not that others cannot.  I know many good people in the pow wow circuit who love their children and teach them well.  I am not criticizing them.  However, I know that my husband and I would not have been able to do so. 

God led us, without our knowledge or understanding, to walk away from that which would have been detrimental to our marriage and our children and led us toward a life far more fulfilling than we could ever have imagined. 

I still miss my old life sometimes.  I miss the fellowship, the late nights, the music, the dancing, the flashy clothes.  We now feel more able than before to take our children out to experience this occasionally without getting pulled into all that goes with it.

But yesterday I was given a gift.  God gave me the opportunity to fall more in love with Him, seeing much of what He has done without my understanding.  God also gave me the opportunity to fall more in love with my husband, the man God gave me to share this life with. 

I can truly say, as I watched my husband of 15 years dance around the arena carrying our 6th child in his arms, that I love him more now than I did during that National Pow Wow 1996, just days after marrying the man of my dreams.

More on Love and Relationships

After a 6 month break and major crazy life chaos, I am returning to my challenge to help myself - and hopefully you - learn to love like the bible commands in I Corinthians 13.  I urge you to reread my January post On Love and Relationships.  I had to reread it myself.  

In the first post, I challenged us to pray for God to show us ways to show patience to our loved ones.  I must admit, that though I daily feel like I am failing, as I look back I see overall progress.  I feel as though I am I offering my children more grace when they frustrate me, hurrying them less and in general losing my temper less.  If you have been working on patience in relation to the I Corinthians model of love, please comment below on your successes.  Encourage one another, you may well find it encourages you.

After "Love is patient", we find that "Love is kind."  What does that mean? I honestly can't say I know.  Today's challenge is to seek God in how He wants us to show kindness to the person you have challenged yourself to show more love toward. (If you feel lost, you really want to read or reread the previous article.  Go to the Archive button in the left column and click January.)

According to an online dictionary, the following are synonyms for kindness: benignity, benevolence, humanity, generosity, charity, sympathy, compassion, tenderness,  good turn.  A person who is kind is described as being of a good or benevolent nature or disposition.  Reading the synonyms still didn't help me a lot, so I looked up the antonyms.  The opposite of kindness is malevolence or cruelty.  Malevolence is defined as hatred.  So the opposite of kindness is essentially hatred. 

 

Wow.  Now THAT spoke to me.  So I began to wonder, is there a middle ground, a neutral?  Something between kindness and hatred?  The best I can find as a word that is neutral, somewhere between kindness and hatred is indifferent.  

I'm not sure being indifferent toward your loved one isn't equally as bad as hating them.  Honestly, who among us want to think our parents, our spouse or even our best friend is simply indifferent about us?  Would you care if your parent didn't hate you, but was simply indifferent toward you?  As if your very existence means nothing, good or bad, to them?

That may sound really harsh, but it seems to me you have 3 choices as to how you behave toward this person you have chosen to love better:  with kindness, with hatred, or with indifference.  Looking at it that way, I pray please Lord help me show kindness to my children each day.  Help me to never cause them to feel as though I either hate them or that I am indifferent about their existence.  Help me, today, to be the mom they need and You have created me to be.