Water, Love and Marriage

This third post on Water, Love and Marriage is a strange but beautiful picture of a bride getting cleaned up for her wedding – and surprisingly, it’s the bridegroom himself, at enormous personal cost and sacrifice, who bathes her and dresses her in dazzling silk.

Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word. . . so she might be unstained, without wrinkle or any other blemish.   Ephesians 5:25-27

My good friend Glenn Smith in Montreal, says that Canadians have a hard time grasping this vibrant water metaphor. Canada has an abundance of water - 7 percent of the world's renewable supply of freshwater and 20 percent of Earth’s frozen freshwater locked in glaciers and the polar ice cap.

But Glenn also visits Haiti frequently.  It’s like a
second home to him.  And in Haiti water is scarce and precious; 70 percent of the population does not have access to clean drinking water. What he takes for granted in one place is a very precious commodity in the other.

That scarcity of water makes Paul’s words in Ephesians leap to life for Glenn: “Look at those verbs,” he says, “Christ loved… gave himself up… cleansed her… to make her holy… to present her to himself….”

"Washing is routine in Canada. We hardly give it a second thought. But in Haiti, where fresh clean water is scarce, washing is a privilege, a costly event – a vivid metaphor of the extravagant love of Jesus.

"Washing is what baptism does for the Church. It makes visible that very costly work God did for us – and continues to do in us – through Jesus, cleansing us from all the muck of life, forgiving and restoring. Jesus also declares his love by his words and by inviting us to participate in his on-going project in human history. What a gift!

Glenn and Sandy Smith

“Then God tells me as a husband to echo this Jesus-modeled love in how I treat my wife Sandy. As I live out my baptism, I become a gift to Sandy and help her deal with the muck of life.

“Words help me to do that. Just as Jesus declared his unconditional love for me, I, too, help to cleanse Sandy by declaring every day, 'I love you!'

“No matter where I live, the beauty of water allows me to see how I am like Jesus in Sandy’s life. And she is like that for me."

Abundance of water illustrates the immeasurable lavish love of God and the generous grace between a husband and wife that washes away the grit and the toxic stuff and that can make marriage feel like heaven on earth. Water scarcity highlights how precious love is in a dry world.

Over the past four years my wife Tiffany has embodied love both lavish and precious to me. The adventure has just begun. 

And I am grateful for friends like Glenn and Sandy for modeling Christ-like love both privately in their marriage and publicly in places as different as Montreal and Haiti.