This episode of Bright hearth is brought to you by garlands of grace and our supporters at patreon.com.

The vows are serious, staggeringly serious, but you did not take them trusting in your own strength to

perform. The grace that enabled you to take those

vows will be there to draw on when the performance of them seems impossible.

The kind of love that makes a marriage work is far more than feelings.

Feelings are the least dependable things in the world.

To build a marriage on that would be to build a house on sand.

When you promise in the wedding ceremony to love,

you're not promising how you expect to feel.

You're promising a course of action,

which begins on your wedding day and goes on as long as you both live.

Your feelings cannot help but be affected by riches in poverty,

health and sickness, and all the other circumstances

which make up a lifetime. Your feelings will come and go, rise and fall, but you make no vows about

them. When you find yourself, like the unstable man in the Epistle of James,

quote, driven with wind and tossed, end quote. It is a great thing then to know that you have an

anchor. You have made a promise before God to love. You promise to love,

comfort, honor, and keep this man. You vow to take him as your wedded husband.

To have and to hold from this day forward, for better or for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health,

love and to cherish according to God's holy ordinance till death, part two.

Not one of us can fully face up to all the details of the possibilities.

At the time we make these staggering promises, we make them in faith. Faith that the God who ordained that a man and woman should cleave together for a lifetime is the God who alone can make such faithful cleaving possible.

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