There’s no other way to say it except that the Thoma family has been stretched too thinly for several months. With homeowner insurance claims hovering since the beginning of summer and a schedule so robust that not even a nine-day week could accommodate all the demands, speaking only for myself, there’ve been times when all I could do was sit and stare at my mental horizon, wondering what else might appear on its ridge intent on challenging me to a duel.

Of course, there’s always someone or something willing to try.

I’m glad I have Jennifer. I’m thankful for my kids. When I’m slipping, Jennifer’s there. When she’s exhausted, I’m there. When we’re both spent, the kids are there for both of us.

Thankfully, most of our house-related issues were restored in time to receive visiting family and friends for our son Joshua’s wedding this past Friday. We certainly were hopeful that things would come together in time. Had they not, I suppose the only appropriate response would’ve been, “Oh well. What can you say? What can you do?”

Either way, what a joy the event was! And how blessed we are to formally welcome his wife, Lexi, into the Thoma family and name. I say “formally” because Jennifer, Madeline, Harrison, Evelyn, and I have long since considered Lexi as a part of the family, ever so glad that God nudged her toward the necessary “yes” that would forever cement her to our lives. Even before yes or no were choices, setting the dinner table assumed preparing a place for Lexi, too, whether or not she could be there. That’s what a family does.

Joshua and Lexi already know these crucial family dynamics. However, they know them from a more youthful perspective. They’re now learning them from a Genesis 2:24 perspective. Indeed, Joshua remains a son, and Lexi remains a daughter. And yet, they’ve become their own family, the next generation. With this comes the fantastical joys and hum-drum drudgeries of husband and wife, and if God grants it, fatherhood and motherhood. If she didn’t already know it, Lexi was immersed this past Friday in what Heywood Broun meant when she said something about how men can build bridges across impossible chasms and throw railroads across barren landscapes and yet have the needs of a child when attempting to sew on a button. Joshua’s learning trajectory is similar. He just walked into an entirely new sphere of existence, one permanently and intimately familiar with Nietzsche’s tongue-in-cheek comment that when God created Eve, boredom was officially ended.

Suppose things go as they typically do in this life. If so, Joshua and Lexi are about to experience the kinds of things their parents have experienced. They’re about to endure insurance claims, emotional overextensions born from bursting schedules, and all the demands that can make life both exhilarating and acidic simultaneously. But here’s the good part. Like Jennifer and me, they’re in it together, yoked sturdily by Christ.

During the father-of-the-bride speech at the wedding, Mike, Lexi’s dad, shared a unique exchange between them not long after she and Josh began dating. I figure this gives me a moment’s license. I remember a conversation with Joshua in our kitchen a couple of weeks before he asked Lexi to marry him. It wasn’t necessarily a crossroads moment. It was a father and his adult son talking about married life, something that was clearly on Joshua’s mind. I remember Joshua was sitting on the counter near the sink. I was sitting on a stool near the island. Along the way, I commended him and Lexi for doing things rightly; that is, they were resisting the world’s temptation to live together outside of marriage. I know I said more than a few times how proud I was of them. I encouraged him to keep resisting, to continue in faithfulness to Christ. Faithfulness to Christ, no matter how out of pace with the world it might be, is always the better way (Luke 5:1-11). I encouraged him to continue rebelling against the culture’s marital preferences, especially those that, again, often seem so sensible.

I remember him being somewhat surprised by the core of the conversation, especially if his goal at that moment was to get a sense of how I might respond if he told me he would soon ask Lexi to marry him. I told him that when it comes to marriage, our society is backward. Unfortunately, lots of Christians have bought into the backwardness. Not only does the world think it makes sense for a couple to test-drive one another sexually before committing, but it insists that before marrying, each should get a few years of solo life under their belts, too. Moreover, before ever even thinking about proposing to a special someone, each should secure careers promising financial stability and multiplying assets, be free of student debt, maybe even own a home, and so many other ridiculously mammonous things that have nothing to do with the promises God weaves into holy marriage.

And so, I took a chance.

“You’re both pretty much on your way in life, right?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he replied.

“It’s not like you don’t know where you’re going or what you’re hoping to do, right?”

“Yes.”

“So, how about this instead?” I continued, “Is Lexi the one God chose for you, and are you certain you’re the one God chose for her?”

“Absolutely. I have no doubt.”

“Is she a prize you’d give anything and everything to win over and over again through good times and bad for the rest of your life?”

“Absolutely.”

“Is Christ at the very heart and soul of who you want to be as a husband and father? Do you want Christ at the center of your marriage, and does Lexi want to be and do the same?”

“Absolutely.”

“Then, what are you waiting for?”

“Well, of course, we’ve talked about marriage, but we need to finish coll—”

“—Why not finish college together?”

“And we should probably make sure—”

“—Whatever comes your way, why not steer into it together? Whatever you need to get in place, why not build it together?”

I kept going, reminding him that Christians use the term “yoke” relative to marriage for a reason. Sure, we use it because the Bible uses it. But again, that’s because the Bible uses it for very good reasons. Each of the reasons understands Christ Himself as the yoke. Beyond this, the image becomes quite practical. To be yoked is to be paired—bound by something to someone in a way that keeps two individuals laboring together. This is true not only so that the pair holds the same pace, both pulling in the same direction, neither getting too far ahead nor behind the other. The yoke is there for the harder moments, too. When the day is at its darkest, and the task is most challenging—when the ground is uneven and bemired, when the job requires so much more than what an individual can muster alone, when a person becomes exhausted, eventually stumbling and falling—marriage’s yoking means someone will be there to lend strength and help lift you to your feet. And not just anyone, but someone the Lord, as the very yoke, is actively binding to you.

This is not the world’s understanding of the marital yoke. The world’s view is a self-invested and often quite cynical one. It chimes with Montaigne that wedlock “is a cage: the birds outside despair to get in and those within despair to get out.” As such, it insists on absolute individualism unrestricted by any yoke whatsoever. And if an individual happens to fall prey to marriage, according to its confused mentality, you don’t even have to marry a human. Some guy married his laptop a few years ago. Another woman married her cat. Some guy in Japan married a robot. The world’s view of marriage is incredibly skewed. It’s more about what someone or something else can do for me to make me happy.

Now, don’t get me wrong. Marriage is designed to bring delight. The Lutheran Rite for Holy Matrimony affirms that God ordained marriage “so that man and woman may find delight in one another.” But again, by delight, the world means the taking kind, not the giving kind. When one can no longer provide what the other considers valuable for taking, the relationship’s so-called “love” grows cold, and the marriage comes undone.

A marriage built on self-sacrifice, of being outwardly invested in and for another person—as seeing him or her as a prize you’d give anything and everything to win over and over again through good times and bad for the rest of your life, just as the Lord looked on His fallen creation in an utterly selfless way—such a marriage has something others do not.

It has muscle for the long game.

By muscle, I mean it has Godly devotion, humility, and forgiveness. By long game, I mean the marriage will have everything it needs to make it through the impossible moments and, ultimately, find itself fulfilling the vow “until death us do part.” It’ll do this, landing at heaven’s doorstep unscathed. Well, maybe not unscathed. It’ll have its scars. But only the soldiers who’ve endured the battles have scars.

If this is the divinely mature framework already in place between two young people in love—real, Godly love—what’s the point in waiting? They’re already a million miles past the world’s marital intellect or capability. More than that, they have what it takes to be a bright-beaming and resilient example of what marriage can and should be.

Joshua and Lexi are young. So what? I’m not the least bit worried about them. Honestly, and as I shared in the wedding sermon, my only real concern is what the eventual grandkids (if God so allows) will call me. I can imagine Jennifer being okay with the classical title “Grandma.” I had something else in mind for me. Imagine if you can…

“Good morning, Billy,” the first-grade teacher might say to the little one flanked by and holding hands with Jennifer and me on Grandparents Day at his school. “Who are these two you brought with you today?”

“This is my Grandma and Sensei!”