It was the first and largest Valentine card I had ever received, but the tears I swallowed after returning with it from the college mail room were not sweet ones. Thoughtful, loving words embellished it with the precise architectural lettering of my suitor, alongside appropriate decorations. But I had feared that its arrival was primarily because I had voiced my disappointment the previous year at his having failed to send me one back then. My roommate’s glad display, on her bed each morning, of the gifts her beau frequently sent, did not help.
“Is this how it would be?” I had worried, vainly comparing my relationship to hers by those trivial but visible tokens.
My father’s words, spoken last year—“What do you really know about him?” —came back to me, as my Valentine’s first visit to Jamaica was imminent.
I had responded that we were both believers and avid followers of Jesus; that was reason sufficient for us both. The words were spoken defensively and had seemed cliché then. But were they? And were they enough?
We had met only once when I traveled abroad one summer, thus our friendship was pursued mostly by letters. But we both eventually became convinced that our unusual long-distance interaction was indeed being guided by God. Unusual occurrences in our individual lives—well-timed sermons, letters and invitations; early-morning encounters with the Scriptures and input from trusted guides—marked our way over the course of two years. And eventually, engagement followed.
A Poem, A Pledge, A Song
The love poem he initiated, and we neglected to title, was inspired by Colossians 1:27. “…Christ in you the hope of glory.” Answered by me, it became our wedding poem; its promise oriented our progress.
I hardly know you,
Yet I know you so well.
How could this be?
Let me see . . .
Christ in you,
Christ in me;
In this I know my love for thee!
***
And I who feared
That seeing thee
Would blind my eyes from seeing He
Who died for me,
Am now aware
That in your care
Tis He who’s there,
With patience strong
Using you to guide me along
to Him.
So it is that now I’m free
To return thy love to thee,
Knowing this is not a phase
When, lost within each other’s gaze,
We fail to listen to our Lord,
Fail to harken to His Word;
But rather,
Hand in hand we race
Towards the beauty of His face
That in each other now we see,
Christ in thee
And He in me;
This is the Hope of Glory!
—Claude and Denise Armstrong, 1990
During the ceremony, the voice of the sage and aged Jamaican church elder, assigned to us for premarital counseling, often cracked like a teenage boy’s, as he sought to emphasize the poetic words and phrases of the traditional vows we chose:
I take thee to be my wedded wife/husband,
To have and to hold from this day forward,
For better, for worse, for richer, for poorer
In sickness and in health, to love and to cherish,
till death us do part, according to God’s holy ordinance;
And thereto I plight thee my troth.[1]
Like “plight,” “plait” finds its root in the Latin term plico! I loved the strength invoked by the ancient words and concluded that nothing could loosen the braid or plait into which the ceremony and vow so earnestly wove us. Scripture assures that a three-fold-cord is not easily broken; joined together in Christ we felt undefeatable, forgetting that even a fortress invites attack from the enemy.
A Jamaican vocalist’s cover of a tender Rambo-McGuire love song came to our attention around the time of our wedding. We had a tape (yes, a cassette tape . . . I know) with this one song. We’ve since lost track of it and the singer, but the power of its truth has endured;
I see Jesus in your eyes
And it makes me love Him;
I feel Jesus in your touch
And I know He cares;
I hear Jesus in your voice
And it makes me listen;
And I trust you with my love
Because you’re His.
I see Him;
I see Him in you![2]
It echoed our poem and reminded us that a higher Authority could help us keep “that which we had committed to Him until that Day” (2 Timothy 1:12 NKJV).
Fallen Apples and Broken Trust
But there comes a future day when vows are tested, when promises made in love’s considered or brash flourishes have to be humbly scooped in pieces off the floor, having collided with human limitations. Our weaknesses unveil kinship with our earliest forebears. One cannot but wonder how Adam and Eve were enabled to go forward after trust’s breach in Eden. By the record of Genesis 3:6, Adam had stood by while Eve was being deceived; then after tasting, she had offered him the poison fruit. When called by God to account for the epic violation, Adam completely threw Eve under the proverbial bus. How long after exiting Eden’s gate were they able to meet each other’s eyes again?
Unsurprisingly, the Heavenly Father deployed a vivid token for their remembrance as they departed—the crimson blood of the first animal that He slew. Beyond covering their nakedness, the animal’s death would deflect and defer the expected penalty of their immediate death, until it would be cancelled by the perfect atoning sacrifice. This emblem and its promise enabled Adam and Eve to not only face each other again, but also to have and to hold each other, in pro-creation; reawakening with each child’s birth, the hope of return to the fellowship they once knew with God—an unbreakable three-fold-cord reunion.
I still recall the first tears I cried after our marriage, when it dawned on me that I would at times need to raise my own emotional defense against my knight in shining armor.
Early into marriage after a significant disappointment, I wept quietly on the bedroom floor so as not to awaken our sleeping babes. But after pouring out my complaint before God and to a Christian girlfriend, who then set her husband (our small group leader) after mine, we soon met across from each other again. Looking into each other’s eyes, we saw Jesus looking back, as at love’s first binding knot, under a bright Jamaican sky.
The scene has been repeated many times, over these almost thirty-five years, with blame rightly placed on both sides— whether in a pastor or prayer counsellor’s office, in a church hallway before taking communion, at a marriage conference, on a date night, get-away, or following an intense session behind a closed or open door. Accepting how easy it is to highlight the faults of the other, while missing our own, is a long lesson in Christian transformation.
With Outstretched Hands
It was not a cynical Christ that the Apostle John described when he wrote, “But Jesus didn’t trust them, because He knew all about people” (John 2:24 NLT). Jesus, despite knowing us as He did, came and dwelt among us, “entrusting Himself to Him who judges justly” (1 Peter 2:23 NIV). Demonstrating this trust by full surrender on the cross, Jesus’ outstretched arms secured the means by which compromised pledges can be restored. He, the Third Cord, provides the “slack” called grace that’s needed to secure the bonds of friendship, loyalty, and conjugal or filial love. And even when they do fray, He can rebraid and heal them.
The apostle Paul, in Acts 17:24–27, explained to Athen’s citizens how God in loving pursuit, keeps redrawing the territorial boundaries of rebellious mankind, assigning them set historical periods and circumstances, with the explicit hope that they may seek Him. He waits in close proximity, the Divine Hands outstretched, ready to retie the cords of trust broken from in the Garden. On the basis of Calvary’s crimson testimony, broken trust can be renewed, and vows truthfully pledged and lived out, by the Spirit. As promised in Eden, the Father’s answer to the Son’s prayer, that we may be one with them again, is secured—“I [Jesus] in them and You [Father] in Me” (John 17:23 NIV).
With visions of my erstwhile roommate’s token-strewn bed in the distant past, I had dreamed of my ideal marital bed chamber: Four-postered, king-sized bed, with white sheer curtains wafting all around and such. But much more satisfying, has been our current bedroom, especially the blanket-tapestry hanging over our queen-sized bed, in lieu of a headboard. Its central image is a large wreath of three-fold braided straw, accentuated with a bouquet of wheat stalks, roses and ribbon. Our eyes, opened to this each new day, reminds us of the One tie that not only binds, but also rebinds our hearts to His and to one another’s.
1. These vows, adapted into English by Thomas Cranmer, the first Protestant Archbishop of England in 1549, for the first Book of Common Prayers, has eleventh–thirteenth century medieval origins.
2. The original song, I See Jesus in You, made famous by Reba and Dony McGuire, was written by Sharalee Sherman in 1986.
The featured image, “Treasure Box,” is courtesy of Julie Jablonski and is used with her kind permission for Cultivating.
Denise Armstrong (née Stair), blogs from a Christian cross-cultural perspective at denisesarmstrong.com. Born Jamaican, she received her Diploma in Education and a BA degree from Shortwood Teacher’s College and the University of the West Indies, Mona, in Jamaica.
She delights to serve in areas of Christian discipleship, alongside her husband Claude. Their marriage of over thirty years which has joyfully produced three ‘Jamerican’ offspring, has also generated much fodder for marriage ministry to young couples. They thoroughly enjoyed serving in this capacity in their recent five-year tour of duty in Germany where they ministered among the US military community there. She also earned an MA in Christian Cultural Apologetics while there.
Denise’s work in playwriting, poetry, and creative-non-fiction essays, has appeared on Jamaican television, in international poetry reading events, and in The Joyful Life and Cultivating, as well as in The Caribbean Writer, a Literary Journal of the Virgin Islands.
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