If At First You Don't Succeed...

Psalm 85

I want to start today's thoughts with a personal note. Today is my wife and my's 14th/17th anniversary. I use both numbers because we actually got married on the same date we met, only 3 years later. It's been a wonderful 17 years (I prefer using the longer version) filled with the usual ups and downs a relationship has.

There have been moments of joy within those years I wouldn't trade for anything in the world. There were also moments of pain I would rather forget. However, I would never trade those moments of pain for anything in the world as well. It's through the pain and the joy that a relationship finds out how strong it can be.

In times of joy the people in a relationship can sometimes take one another for granted. We think everything is good, or good enough, and we stop trying to make it better. We go through our lives without a thought to the relationship until things get bad, sometimes too bad to recover. It's in those times we wish for the better days when everything was good and life was filled with joy.

Today's psalm reminds me of those moments. The Psalmist begins this writing in the past tense, using words like "were", "restored", and "pardoned". The psalmist is recalling a time when God forgave God's people for their transgressions. However, it would seem that's not going on anymore as the writer soon asks God to once again for forgiveness. It would seem that the Psalmist is acknowledging that God has abandoned them.

I have spoken to a few couples who have gone through times like this. I have been with couples as they share the same sense of abandonment. "Why doesn't she love me anymore?" and "Why doesn't he understand me?" are often questions that come from these times. The truth is that the love is not gone, it's just that in order to protect one's self someone in the relationship understands that they just can't go on as partners any longer.

I have also found that as time goes on there is almost always forgiveness. Sometimes the forgiveness takes decades, sometimes it takes months, but usually given enough time the forgiveness happens. I want to say that this kind of forgiveness can only happen because the love never goes away.

God is exactly this kind of a God. The love never goes away even though sometimes it might seem that way, especially as we go through difficult times in our lives. If we take an honest look at the relationship we will see that it is us who have left God, not the other way around. God's love never leaves us.

That's the secret to a good relationship - honesty. When things are good we should ask ourselves why it's good and be honest about how we can keep it good and make it better. Conversely, we should ask ourselves why things are bad then ask ourselves if we did anything to contribute and what we could do to make it better.

God's love is, as our Psalmist reminds us, steadfast. It's when we are faithful and accept without question that kind of love that we can begin to understand the grace of God.