Mike Mason has written one of the most powerful and reflective books on marriage: The Mystery of Marriage — As Iron Sharpens Iron. I love his way with language. He plunges into the depths seeking to give words to what happens when a man and a women marry. He writes that marriage is a crisis.
Is it any wonder if some people will do everything in their power to keep love away from them? For we know instinctively that love is like some violent revolutionary, head stuffed with wild dreams instead of brains, a dangerous idealist who would like nothing better than to grab hold of us and shake us right down to our boots, overthrowing all our old ideas and ambition, drastically renovating our hearts from the ground up, filling us with entirely new motives for living. To give into such a force, for one moment, is to be quite, quite swept away. Give love an inch and it will take our whole lives, and it will all happen like lightning, in the twinkling of an eye.
Mike Mason, The Mystery of Marriage, p. 60-62.
This is what makes marriage such a thrilling enterprise: that it has the power, much more than other more obviously disruptive forces, to change the entire course of a life. Some people go into marriage thinking that they will not have to change much, or perhaps only a little bit along lines that are perfectly foreseeable and within their control. Such people are in for a rough ride. When the terrifying and inexorable process of change sets in, they dig in their heels and refuse to budge, and the ensuing tug-of-war wreaks havoc in every department of their previously comfortable existence.
Marriage, even under the best of circumstances is a crisis–one of the major crisis of life–and it is a dangerous thing not be aware of this. Whether it turns out to be a healthy, challenging, and constructive crisis or a disastrous nightmare depends largely upon how willing the partners are to be changed, how malleable they are. Yet ironically, it is some of the most hardened and crusty and unlikely people in the world who plunge themselves into the arms of marriage and thereby submit in almost total naïveté to the two most transforming powers known to the human heart: the love of another person and the gracious love of God. So be prepared for change! Be prepared for the most sweeping and revolutionary reforms of a lifetime.