Commitment

It should come as little surprise that I've been thinking a lot about commitment lately. Sarah and I are getting married in three weeks. We're headed down to TN in a few days to look at houses and hopefully make an offer. I'm about to start a tenure-track position, a kind of agreement between institution and individual that has been described as a kind of marriage.

Till death do us part. 30-year fixed. Tenure. It's commitment all over the place.

And I'd be lying if I said it wasn't at least somewhat freaked out by it all. Don't get me wrong; they're all good things. Great things. Wonderful ones. But then I hear from good friends who are getting divorced after six years. (I was at their wedding; it was beautiful.) I hear, too, about more job loss, more foreclosures. At times it seems like we've hit the bottom in terms of this recession, and then we realize the abyss is a bit deeper still. And my position is open in part because someone got let go. Didn't make tenure. The harsh reality is that commitments aren't always commitments. They can fail, especially when humans are involved.

At my cousin's wedding a few weeks back, I was talking to my Uncle Kevin, someone I admire and look up to. It hasn't been easy for him. He's been married, oh, three decades or so. They've had some good times and some hard times, but the hardest has been the fact that his wife, my Aunt Jean, has multiple sclerosis. She's had it for years. I can remember when she could walk, when we'd go up to Maine on vacations together. But that was a long time ago, and now she's confined to a wheelchair. She can smile--boy, does it light up a room--but she can't really say anything. She can't do anything for herself. She's totally dependent on the folks at the nursing home to feed her, bathe her, put her to sleep.

And on my uncle. He spends most waking hours by her side. Sleep, work, Jean. Repeat again. He talked to me about commitment, said Sarah and I are in a good place because we know who we are. Said we'll be fine. But I think about the kind of commitment he has for his wife, and I'm humbled. Floored. Provides a whole new meaning to "whether in sickness or health."

I've also been reading Donald Miller's Blue Like Jazz, a book that I've started several times but am just now getting into. He's a decent writer, but what I really like about him is his openness. It's not quite brokenness to the level of Anne Lamott, but his honesty challenges me. In his chapter called "Grace," he talks about how he once tried to live legalistically, as a fundamentalist. Then he realized he was rejecting what is arguably the core of Christianity: grace. "I am too proudful to accept the grace of God," he writes. "It isn't that I want to earn my own way to give something to God, it's that I want to earn my own way so I won't be charity."

Miller says he was humbled by his realization, and I have to admit that I am, too. I don't want to be charity. I want to earn my keep. I want to pay my mortgage faithfully. I want to write a good dissertation, be a good scholar, a good teacher. A good husband.

We live in such a merit-based society that it's hard to reconcile our day to day existence with grace, that radical manifestation of God's love for his creation. But then I think about the utter dependence of my Aunt Jean, and I think about the selflessness with which my uncle has devoted his life to her, and I'm reminded that, in many ways, that's our dependence on God.

I pray I can be like my uncle. I hope I can love and commit to even a fraction of what he demonstrates. But I hope I can be like my aunt, too. I hope I can depend.