More goodness...

I love this book!




"...Marriage challenges us to abandon everything for the sake of love.
For in the first place, love convinces a couple that they are the greatest romance that has ever been, that no two people have ever loved as they do, and that they will sacrifice absolutely anything in order to be together. And then marriage asks them to prove it. Marriage is the down-to-earth dimension of romance, the translation of a romantic blueprint into costly reality. It is the practical working out of people's grandest dreams and ideals and promises in the realm of love. It is one of God's most powerful secret weapons for the revolutionizing of the human heart. It is a heavy, concentrated barrage upon the place of our greatest weakness, which is our relationship with others. We cannot possibly, it is true, in any practical way maintain a commitment to every other person in the world: That is God's business, not ours. But marriage involves us synecdochically in this mystical activity of God's by choosing for us just one person, one total stranger out of all the world's billions, with whom to enter into the highest and deepest and farthest reaches of sacrificial, loving relationship.
It has been said that the secret to building a good fire is simply to rest one log against another. Marriage builds a good hot fire on the simple principle of resting one man and one woman up against each other in a hypostatic union of persons. "As iron sharpens iron," says the proverb, "so one person sharpens another," and the saying is nowhere more apt than in marriage...
The whole world is being sharpened by love, but it is in the special fire of covenant relationships that the keenest and brightest edges are being honed...
Only the Lord could have devised such an awesomely tender and heartwarming means for men and women to be made into swords..."

The Mystery of Marriage
Mike Mason