Kidney Saves Marriage

Dear brothers and sisters, I plead with you to give your bodies to God because of all he has done for you. Let them be a living and holy sacrifice—the kind he will find acceptable. This is truly the way to worship him.

Romans 12:1

After ten years of marriage, Cindy and Chip Altemos were in the long process of getting a divorce. The proverbial baggage they had brought from previous marriages seemed too great to overcome, so they separated and even agreed to date other people.

Five years into the painful separation, Chip was in the hospital with kidney failure as a result of juvenile diabetes. With his health deteriorating rapidly, his soon-to-be ex-wife came to his aid—in spite of Chip’s being in another relationship at the time. “He was still my husband. There was no way I could walk around with two kidneys, and he had none,” Cindy told the press. “It was the right thing to do.” Knowing long ago that with his condition he would need a transplant, she had always said she would donate one of hers, and under their current circumstances she added a promise to the donation: she told Chip there were no strings attached, no written agreement concerning a better share in divorce court.

But the transplant took place on February 21, 2007, and a funny thing happened as they both recovered in the hospital. The married and estranged couple fell back in love. As Chip tells it, “I guess just being around each other, we slowly fell back in love again.” The ordeal put an end to Chip’s other relationship and also to the divorce proceedings.^a

This is a dramatic story of sacrificial love, no doubt. It shows the power of love to restore even a troubled marriage such as the Altemoses once had. But no matter what state your marriage is in, their story is a reminder that to keep love alive and well in our relationships we are called to give up a part of ourselves on a daily basis. Maybe not something as dramatic as an organ, as Cindy gave, but just as vital a “transplant”—a living sacrifice. How will you put Romans 12:1 into practice today with your spouse? What will you give of yourself so that he or she might live in Christ more abundantly?

Peace demands the most heroic labor and the most difficult sacrifice. It demands greater heroism than war. It demands greater fidelity to the truth and a much more perfect purity of conscience.

—Thomas Merton

^a 19

From the book