Love and Home

I really must update my reading list. Below are several quotes from chapter 2 of the Ravi Zacharias book I, Isaac, Take Thee Rebekah, which I am currently reading.

G.K. Chesterton said these powerful words: "They have invented a phrase, a phrase that is a black and white contradiction in two words--'free love'--as if a lover ever had been, or ever could be, free. It is the nature of love to bind itself, and the institution of marriage merely paid the average man the compliment of taking him at his word."
When two lives meet, they are like two distinct walls. Each has to start by dismantling his or her wall one brick at a time, and then those bricks are taken intact and with other materials used to build a structure with a roof that brings them together at the top. That is the new home.
The playwright Thornton Wilder said it well: "I didn't marry you because you were perfect. I didn't even marry you because I loved you. I married you because you gave me a promise. That promise made up for your faults. And the promise I gave you made up for mine. Two imperfect people got married and it was the promise that made the marriage. And when our children were growing up, it wasn't a house that protected them; and it wasn't our love that protected them--it was that promise."

And here is one from the ever-present, yet nearing-completion, Domestic Tranquility, responding to an quote from Hillary Clinton signifying the modern person's inability to find meaning at the "core level". As my life is, hopefully, now changing from one focused on a occupational responsibilities to one centered at home, I am finding need for some small adjustments in the expectations and habits I've developed over 2 years of being consumed by teaching demands. Statements like this bolster my motivation.

That core meaning is readily apparent to Brunnhilde [representing a woman who finds fulfillment in domestic and familial pursuits] all day, every day, as she nurses her baby, rocks it to sleep, reads to her children, and prepares dinner for her family.