Love And Marriage

Proverbs 5:18-19 

King James Version (KJV)

¹⁸ Let thy fountain be blessed: and rejoice with the wife of thy youth.

¹⁹ Let her be as the loving hind and pleasant roe; let her breasts satisfy thee at all times; and be thou ravished always with her love.

Sylvia had a birthday recently. The universe celebrated it in big style including an eclipse of the sun. I’m afraid I can take no credit for that one. We met in a Christian college back in the early 1960s. Courtship was very limited at the college in those days. A date consisted iof meeting a girl in the lobby of the women’s dormitory before a Saturday evening entertainment in the gym. Otherwise we could see each other in the classroom or library.

Two and a half years after our first date we were married in the college church. About ninety guests showed up to help us celebrate. They looked lost in a church that must have seated 2,000 people. Our guests assured us that the rain we had during the wedding was a token of a fruitful union. We took a tent and summer clothes on a camping trip into the woods of northern Wisconsin. Of course the weather turned cold, and we spent a week shivering in a tent on the shores of a muddy little lake.

Over the next quarter century we became the proud parents of three lovely children. We each went back to school. I earned two graduate degrees and Sylvia her bachelor’s and master’s degrees. We spent two terms as missionaries in Africa. These taught us to that we could survive in each other’s love on a lot of faith and very little money.

The second quarter century is nearing its close. We still rejoice in each other’s love. When I recently reread Solomon’s advice to married couples, I was impressed again by the beauty and wisdom in his words. I looked up this advice in several different versions of scripture.

The CEV misses the thrust of  Solomon’s well earned advice by yielding to the accentuated hypocrisy of a pretended Victorian Christian 21^st century facade. “Be happy with the wife you married when you were young. She is beautiful and graceful, just like a deer; you should be attracted to her and stay deeply in love.” This rendering is truly insipid and offers only generic advice, watered down purely for pecuniary reasons and groveling political correctness.

The Voice translation on the other hand shoots straight from the hip with post-Christian candor. “May your fountain, your sex life, be blessed by God; may you know true joy with the wife of your youth. She who is lovely as a deer and graceful as a doe—as you drink in her love, may her breasts satisfy you at all times.”

Thank You, Lord, for your special, abundant blessing on a faithful union that You have used to symbolize the ideal relationship between You and us.