Its late Friday afternoon. My wife is home and the workweek is over, and the weekend has begun for the multitude of people who measure their work week from Monday morning to Friday afternoon. When I talk to my wife at work on Friday afternoons she invariably says, Its Friday!
I touched on this subject two days ago in an earlier Lenten meditation. Today I have to face all of the things I expected to get done but for one reason or another did not accomplish. Some are unimportant, but others are significant, not for the least of reasons that my wife had asked me to do them and I had told her I would.
When you tell someone you are going to do something, and then you dont get it done, there is a sense of betrayal. Saying you will do something creates an implied covenant and not doing it breaks it. This goes back to what I said yesterday about being faithful in little things. It also goes to the heart of our relationships, which are actually built on the accumulation of small events in our lives (see my post on Small Things). Failing to accomplish those small promises (implied covenants) erodes the trust in our relationships.
While it is true that we constantly fail in this regard; it seems to be a universal part of our falleness, there are times that not following through on what we said we would do is significant. Those times are different in every relationship, but usually revolve around something significant to the one asking, while it may be wholly insignificant to one being asked. In marriages discerning these important requests and making sure you get them done can be the difference between marital wonderment and marital trial and tribulation.
For any relationship, especially marriage, to grow and mature, trust must be maintained and when you let a person down on something important to them, trust erodes. Without a strong bond of trust, relationships founder and die and this is one area where we can control the outcome by just being dependable.
So I have fence mending to do. One starts the process by doing what you said you would do, even though you get it done late, because saying you are sorry without the actions to back it up is just so many words, and cheaply spoken words at that.
God, give me the grace to be a dependable husband, who considers the promises and implied covenants that I make to my wife significant things, thereby showing her that she is special and significant to me.
May God give you grace and peace and dependability in all your significant relationships.
