Unashamed

My thumb hurts. I can't use it--the one on my left hand. I'm left handed. I have gout. The first time I had it was just after I turned 25. That was eight years ago. I woke up one morning and I thought I had broken my left ankle. In my sleep. It took a year and two more flare ups before the doctors stopped thinking of me as a clumsy drunk (I was going to the campus clinic) and actually considered that something medical might be wrong. Up until six months ago I thought I only got gout in my knees and ankles. But this winter I got it in my elbow. Yesterday it set in in my thumb.

Today, I have been married to Beth for four years. She is truly a saint and my relationship with her is a gift to me from God. I pray that for her, I am at least half of what she is to me. I'm older than Beth by seven years. The men in my family seem to die (or almost die) before the average age of American males. The women in Beth's family live into their late eighties and early nineties. Since Beth and I have been dating, it was obvious that my body is going to fall apart at a sooner date than hers.

I had to ask my wife of four years today to apply my deodorant for me. I can't grasp it in my left hand right now. I can't use my left hand for much of anything right now except to keep my watch from falling off of my wrist. It was humbling experience to stand there as she helped me do this simple task of reducing the amount that I will sweat today. But it wasn't humiliating. I don't know if I would have not been embarrassed four years ago to ask her to do this. Four years ago I might have just not put on deodorant and kept my right arm close to my body all day (which would have been awkward at the reception when we danced to Y.M.C. A).

Marriage is not just about humbling one's self to one's partner to help and to serve, but it is also about humbling yourself to be served. Perhaps marriage can help to take us back to the point in the Bible where the first people were with each other, naked and unashamed--a nakedness that extends beyond the physical and includes the entirety of the person, revealing the Imago Dei in which we were created to both others and ourselves.

God said it is not good for humans to be alone. Being alone does not make us less human, but outside relationships I'm not sure if we can know exactly who God is and who God is calling us to be.

Thanks be to God for the people in our lives through whom God reveals God's self to us.

Thanks be to God for Jesus who shows us what it means to be loving servants and friends to one another.

Thanks be to God for my relationship with Beth, without whom I'm not sure I'd be the person and Christian I have grown to be today.