The two fires of marriage
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We did our part to damage the air quality in Saint Louis yesterday as we burnt carpet and underlay in a massive fire. Carpet burns for a very long time and produces a ferocious heat and plumes of thick black smoke.
It is an entirely different fire to burning wood. It was eerily quiet, the sound of crackling you get when you burn wood was absent. At ten-o-clock last night I finally was able to get the last flames put out by turning over and over the debris. Had I not done so, I think it might have kept burning for a good while longer.
I’ve always thought fire to be a great analogy for both positive and negative lessons. Fire is both useful and destructive. Fire can be used for survival, food, warmth and light, but it can also burn, harm and destroy everything. But whether good or bad, fire always requires two things; something to ignite, and fuel to burn. Without these two things you don’t have fire.
Some call it a spark, but most agree they felt something when they first met their spouse. That initial spark was then fueled with dating and positive experiences that ignited a fire that led to a relationship and then marriage.
The only way to keep a fire burning is to add more fuel, without fuel a fire eventually burns out and dies, every single time. I think inadvertently, sometimes deliberately, we stop putting fuel on the fire of our marriage causing it to cease providing the warmth and light it once did until eventually it dies.
What is the fuel? This is not an exhaustive list but I believe it includes quality time, freedom of expression, emotional, spiritual and physical connection, forgiveness and friendliness; kindness, empathy and encouragement also keep the fire of love burning bright and hot in marriage.
It doesn’t matter how big you build the fire, if we don’t continue to add more fuel eventually it will die. Some of us mistakenly fail to add fuel during the good times, only to discover the fire has gone out when we really needed the warmth and light from it. Let us then be wise in never ceasing to add fuel.
There is also a second fire in marriage, the kind that will destroy. Fire, with enough fuel can destroy entire homes and rip through forests without mercy. Anger, hostility, hurt, hate, selfishness, sarcasm, shame, intolerance and lack of civility and kindness are all fuels that will cause a fire to rage in a relationship and destroy a marriage.
Sadly it seems that so many of us find it easy to fuel such fires and almost feel justified as we stand and watch the whole thing burn to the ground. We are idiots when we stand idly and watch what was once beautiful and took years to build burn to the ground in a very short space of time.
No marriage is easy. There are always going to be fires to put out, but let us run with buckets of water when they ignite, not kindling and the gasoline! A marriage is too precious to simply watch burn. A marriage is always worth saving.
In marriage there will always be these two fires. We just need to decide which one we will fuel and which one we will extinguish.
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Very well put. Stoke the good and extinguish the bad. For sure!