What the World Needs Now is Better Wine

Something has always baffled me about Jesus’ first recorded miracle. It seemed so pedestrian, really. He’s at a local wedding and Jesus’ mother learns they’ve run out of wine.

This seemed unfortunate but not really a devastating circumstance. Surely not something I would imagine requiring divine intervention. It is kind that Jesus has compassion on the host and turns the water in six stone jars into wine but was His first miracle truly inspired by a desire to spare a family from social embarrassment?

For years, I’ve mulled it over, considered it, prayed about it, meditated on it, and frankly, trusted there must be more to the story.

Now, I realize, you must stick with a marriage for many years, through trial, through sorrow, through frustration, through failure, through sickness, through hard times, and through boredom to truly appreciate the miracle at Cana.

My husband and I just celebrated our 28^th wedding anniversary and around the same time, dear friends celebrated their 30^th. When my friend, Jim, announced their thirtieth on Facebook, dozens of people commented on the joy of a long marriage, even proclaiming that love gets even better after forty years! The sheer number of friends extolling the benefits of long marriages and expressing appreciation for their spouses after decades of life together inspired me. There were plenty of references to hard times, but the general message was that love improves with the years.

It seemed almost revolutionary to witness this testimony in a culture that celebrates youth and young love. We don’t talk about this subject often for some good reasons, I suppose. In my experience, the modern church works hard to be sensitive to those who have felt shut out and marginalized in the past. We want to care gently for those who have experienced the devastating pain of divorce and never lead them to feel lesser than for in truth, they are not. We all have brokenness in our lives and there’s no place for judging one type of brokenness as worse than another. Because of this sensitivity, we try to be careful with our celebration of long marriages.

But, in a society that is ever enamored with youth, with newness, and with the intense passion of young love, those of us who have been married for a long time have a responsibility to those coming after us to speak up and say, “It gets even better!”

It was in thinking about this that I suddenly understood the significance of the miracle of Cana.

Our marriage has been like many others. We’ve had some wonderfully joyous times and we’ve had times when I’d just have soon walked away from the whole sorry mess. Of course, we began with intensity, with passion, and with a joyful newness of love but somewhere along the line, we both ran out of love for one another. At some point, we couldn’t remember the point. Our jars were completely empty and suddenly it seemed what was once a celebration of true love teetered on the verge of disaster.

That’s when I learned, however, there is a better love than the one I originally offered my spouse. I am now eternally grateful that I ran out of my own watered-down version of love because when I did, I turned to Jesus for a miracle. He showed up, just as He did at Cana, and transformed the watery love in my stone-cold jar of a heart into a love that was better than the first, so that my husband and I can truly say, “Amazing, Lord, you’ve saved the best for last! Our marriage is better, richer, sweeter, and deeper than it was when we began.” And it’s all because when we ran out of love, we went to Jesus and received our own miracle.

Marriage is such a pedestrian affair we take the miracle of it for granted. While movies are filmed about young love, novels are penned about forbidden love, and songs are composed about heart-breaking love, millions of marriages quietly testify to the steadfast, enduring, rock-solid persistence of God’s love for His church.

Many of us have reached that empty-hearted place and faced the temptation to abandon what seemed like a dry, cold jar of what was once a promising elixir of love. When we run out of love, the world says it’s time to move on. Don’t be fooled by those of us who have been married for decades. It hasn’t all been wine and roses. Sometimes it was wine glasses hurled at bedroom walls and fingers dripping blood from thorns.

We know from the wedding at Cana, though, that when the wine runs dry, there is a source for better wine. Running out of love becomes, then, a gift, a nexus between us and the love that excels above all others.

The world truly does need love now, right now, but we need a better love than what we can muster of our own making. Can you get love from a stone? The answer is yes. If that stone is in the hands of Jesus, you can get a better love than you even imagined at first, a love that will fill you with such joy that all of life becomes an eternal celebration.

What the world needs now is better wine https://t.co/lSfqEaV9SE a higher love is available #whattheworldneedsnow#amwriting#FaithOverFear

— Lori Roeleveld (@lorisroeleveld) June 21, 2016

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