Union With ChristÀpẹrẹ

A Reality to Grow Into

My grandparents both died in recent years. They were married for seventy years. I called them Dear and Hacko—“Hacko” was my childish mispronunciation of my grandfather’s middle name, and “Dear” because Hacko said that his wife was too pretty to be called anyone’s grandmother. They were so close to one another that I can hardly speak one of their names without the other’s.

Dear and Hacko were deeply in love. After so many decades together, they could finish each other’s sentences. Dear could probably tell you, verbatim, all of Hacko’s many stories. And boy, was he a storyteller! It’s an inherent part of being a Southern man, but Hacko was uniquely gifted in this capacity.

Hacko could no doubt tell by the tone of Dear’s voice or the tilt of her head what she was about to say to him as well. They felt each other’s joys and pains, successes and failures. They always turned to one another, included the other. It would be foreign to one of them to make a plan that didn’t include the other. They had lived life together for so long that they truly became one.

Now, objectively, they were no more married on the last day of their life together than on their wedding day, seventy years before. When the minister first pronounced them “man and wife,” they were fully and completely married. Legally, they became a new entity, a married couple. They shared a family name. Their most significant possessions were no longer “his” or “hers,” but “ours.” They began to be “one.”

But subjectively, their experience of this new identity grew over time. The sentence-finishing, mind-reading, need-anticipating, thinking of the other before themselves—that grew with the years. And just as in a long marriage, your experience of being found in Christ is something that will grow over time.

Christ has wed himself to you. This is not just a declaration to agree with. It is an objective reality to live into. He has fully atoned for you, and he is now with you, assuring you that with him, you have the resources to overcome anything that threatens to overwhelm you. To paraphrase Dietrich Bonhoeffer, this is not an ideal to be achieved, but a reality to be embraced.