Cathy and Doug Tilley are going to be my first featured couple on this Covenant Series of blogs. I plan to video couples throughout the year and have them share their experience of covenant marriage. Each couple I choose will present a different angle on marriage.
Last week, we were going to record their story (virtually), until their caregiver couldn’t come, so we rescheduled for this Sunday. In the meantime, they sent me this book in the mail.
Once you hear their story, you will see why this story means so much to them also.
Robertson McQuilken wrote this book to tell the story of how his wife, Muriel, was diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s at the age of 55.
He was working as a president of a university and chose to lay down his job to care for his wife.
Listen here to his resignation speech.
“It’s not only that I promised in sickness and in health, (as his voice cracks) ’til death do us part, and I’m a man of my word.”
“She sacrifice for me for 40 years to make my life possible, if I cared for her for 40 years, I’d still be in debt.”
“It’s not that I have to, it’s that I get to.”
“It’s a great honor to care for such a wonderful person.”
His ministry changed from less public to more private.
In the book, Robertson says “My imprisonment (caring for his wife at home) turned out to be a delightful liberation to love more fully that I had ever known. We found the chains of confining circumstances to be, not instruments of torture, but bonds to hold us closer.“
“That was the first discovery- the power of love to liberate in the very bondage imposed by unwanted circumstances.”
Then he goes on to say:
But I made another discovery as well, quite the opposite: broken shackles can turn out to be imprisonment. I’ve received dozens of visits and agonizing letters from women whose husbands have broken the shackles of marriage, from men whose wives have broken free and left both lives in shambles.
Ours is the day of passionate pursuit of self-fulfillment. And the folk wisdom of the 20th Century America holds that fulfillment can only be found in freedom. So, if some responsibility or commitment, some relationship of value shackles, you have a moral obligation to yourself to break free.
But that is a fantasy. That doorway to freedom and fulfillment may turn out to be the doorway to stronger imprisonment.
The new bondage may be subterranean, below the level of consciousness even. But such a a person has broken one set of shackles only to shut herself or himself off from the soaring freedom of experiencing God’s highest and best.
He who preserves his life, affirming himself, will lose it all Jesus said.
Only the one who says no to self interest for Christ and the gospel cause can ever find treasure on true life-freedom and fulfillment in Christ.
But we don’t seem to get it.
He’s right. We don’t get that kind of love.
But a few do. And he lived it.
And so do Doug and Cathy Tilley.
