Giving Thanks For Marriage Mentors

Giving Thanks for Marriage Mentors

Is not wisdom found among the aged? Does not long life bring understanding?

Job 12:12, NIV

Chaim Potok’s novel The Chosen tells the story of a young boy born to a Hasidic rabbi. As the boy matures, his father recognizes that his child is especially clever and gifted, if not already a little arrogant and impatient. Knowing that his boy was likely to become the rabbi of his people, the father makes a mysterious and difficult decision not to speak to the boy. He raises the boy in a house without the comfort of a speaking relationship. As the story draws to a close, Potok reveals that the father has chosen this unconventional path of parenthood with the boy because he wanted to create in him the capacity for understanding and compassion. He wanted him to minister from a heart that knows pain and can feel the pain of others. The father feared that his son’s analytic brilliance and arrogance would rob him of the capacity to love.

The father in Potok’s novel intuitively understood how keen analytic abilities, unsoftened by emotional tenderness, lead to manipulation rather than ministry, how they lead to control rather than compassion. You may not agree with this rabbi’s methods, but it is difficult to dispute his insight.

The story of this powerful novel has reminded us as a couple to consider the “wisdom found among the aged.” God’s wisdom often comes from those who have traveled the path before us.

For this reason, we recommend that you take inventory today of the couples in your life who have ministered to your marriage. It doesn’t matter whether they are formal mentoring relationships or informal friendships with seasoned couples. All of us, if we’ve been married long enough, have looked to wiser, more experienced couples who have traveled the marriage road before us and are willing to let us learn from them. Who comes to mind when you think of these kinds of relationships? And what can you do, in practical terms, to thank them? Perhaps you’d want to jot them a little note of appreciation and thanksgiving. It doesn’t take much to let them know you don’t take them for granted.^a

The years teach much which the days never know.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

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