Continuing from a previous post . . . A Hireling’s Contract or a Shepherd’s Covenant III (now. . .conclusion)
Bruce C. Hafen continues:
No other relationship could possibly be as meaningful—or as demanding—as a marriage based on covenants without limits. As President Boyd K. Packer taught: “No relationship has more potential to exalt a man and a woman than the marriage covenant. No obligation in society or in the Church supersedes its importance.”
M. Scott Peck wrote in The Road Less Traveled that the development of genuine, loving relationships within marriage and the family is the highest hope of which honest, disciplined, human love is capable. We can’t truly “love” huge groups , much “humanity’ in general, he said, because actual love is truly extending one to nurture another individuals growth.8 With that premise, “if one can say that one has built genuinely loving relationships with a spouse and children, then one has already succeeded in accomplishing more than most people accomplish in a lifetime.”9
A small, lighthearted example of the “blessings measured” in a covenant marriage occurred one winter morning. A young man couldn’t budge his car from a frozen, snow-bombed Utah driveway. After trying to dislodge it until he was late for work, he caught a ride with a neighbor. Later in the day, his wife melted away the ice by carrying pan after pan of hot water to the driveway. When she called him at work to say his car was no longer stuck, he said with relief and gratitude, “Thanks. I really owe you one, “She replied, “You know why we’re married for eternity, don’t you?”
He didn’t catch the implication. “Why are we?” he asked.
“Because,” she responded with her gentle knowing laugh, “that’s how long it’s going to take for you to pay me back for all the ones you owe me.” In that little exchange is the spirit of a covenant marriage. It is not a “pay me back” contract, and nobody keeps score. Both the blessings and commitments are unmeasured.
As his first sentence in the classic Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy wrote, “Happy families are all alike. Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” In some sense in which I believe Tolstoy meant it, the spirit of unlimited commitments in a covenant marriage makes all such marriages alike; but every contractual marriage is contracted in its own way, because one way or another, its commitments are qualified, its partners each holding something back.~~~Bruce C. Hafen, Covenant Hearts Marriage and the Joy of Human Love (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2005), p.82-84 For the first post of this series, click A Hireling’s Contract or a Shepherd’s Covenant.
