Orders from home

Today is the wedding anniversary of a dear married couple, Eddie Mae and Eugene, who I’ve come to love since I helped them relocate here to the elderly house two years ago from a very bad living situation (where they were on the brink of homelessness).

The two met in their mid-30s in Texas, Eugene’s native state. Eddie Mae is from Montgomery, Ala. They both are lifelong Baptists and study their King James Bible every single day. The fact they’ve lived a biblically-prescribed marriage is readily apparent whenever you see them together. Like my boss once observed, “If they could breathe for each other they would.”

In honor of their day, here’s an old study passage from Jordan on the love between a man and a woman as God would have it:

“For a man to really understand a woman is pretty near an impossibility. The reason for that is God took Eve out of Adam, so there’s something missing in us and there’s a part of us that isn’t there anymore. And you just don’t understand something that isn’t a part of you.

“For you ladies, that’s not a bad thing; it’s a good thing because the man is always looking, always pursuing. You’re the one creature in the whole earth he never really fully figures out. And that’s good for you because he’s naturally going to be interested in you if he’s normal.

“That term ‘to know’ first occurs in Genesis 4. ‘And Adam knew Eve his wife; and she conceived and bare Cain. . . ’ That’s a term talking about having sexual relationships in marriage. It’s interesting that God gave to Adam this fantastic way to say to Eve he loved her. And the word He uses is ‘knew.’

“To love somebody, in other words, is to ‘know’ them and part of what you’re doing in marriage, when you communicate to your spouse that you know them and you develop in your understanding a knowledge of them, you’re building up in them a tremendous deposit of love and you’re balance goes way up like that.

“A love map is that part of your thinking, your mind, where you store all of the relevant information about your partner’s life. The reason I call it a map is it’s a detailed description you’ve plotted out—you know some things about your spouse. Again, our mind, our will, our emotions.

“If I’m knowing some things about my partner, then my mind is programmed with that, and my will is going to make some decisions based on that and my emotions are going to support that and reflect that.

“I hear people refer to being ‘emotionally intelligent’ and I think, what does that mean? If your emotions don’t have independent intelligence, for you to be emotionally intelligent would mean for you to have some intelligence in your mind that your emotions then look to and draw upon. Emotionally intelligent couples are going to be familiar with one another. They’ll know each other’s joys, likes, dislikes, fears, stresses, goals, hopes, longings, beliefs . . .”

******

An old Oprah interview had a very moving interview with a woman who was held hostage in Columbia for six-plus years. She said one of the biggest lessons learned from the ordeal was, ‘Whoever the person you ultimately want to be, that one you always dream about one day becoming, just be that person right now. You don’t have to wait.”

Here’s a great passage from Jordan: “What I represent, what I do, all of it is to come from orders from home. And I’m just a little colony of home down here. Can you imagine that? Look around you this morning; we’re an outpost of heaven.

“You send dudes up into space and put them in the spaceship up there, whatever you see in the movies. Well, we’re just that from heaven. God reached out in the world and took a bunch of old dirt bags like us, made of dust, put a little spit in it, molded a man and then He put His life in you and made you part of heaven. That’s who we really are.

“Our conversation . . . our sense of our identity is in heaven. It’s that nobler affinity, that grander purpose, that protection and security that comes from really knowing who you are.

“You know why I can press toward the mark for the prize? It’s because I really know what’s going on. I really know what I’m a part of. He didn’t just save me to keep me out of hell. He saved me to make me a citizen and a part of the commonwealth of His kingdom. And He didn’t just give me a citizen card to put my little nametag on that says, ‘Oh, I’m in!’ He said, ‘You know, I want to associate you with a lifestyle that I’ve established. And I want to demonstrate that in your life.’

“It isn’t just that we’re representing heaven but I’m also looking for this thing to get completed. Aren’t you glad of that? ‘From whence also we look for the Savior.’ When He says we’re looking for Christ the Savior we’re looking for Him. I’m not looking for the undertaker, I’m not looking to get rich, I’m not looking for an overthrow of the government, I’m not looking for the cure of AIDS, I’m looking for Christ. He’s the hope.

“When Paul says, ‘We look,’ we have that earnest expectation; that eager anticipation for Him to appear. Now that’s a dispensational issue as well as a practical issue.

“One of the hard things to do when you teach people is to help folks move out of the sentimental-based thinking into good hard doctrinal reality that gives substance to their hope. Their hope will then give the sentimental attachment.

“People say, ‘Why don’t I just start with the sentimental attachment and forget how I got there?’ Because as soon as the wind blows you get off that sentimental attachment. If it’s all based in your sentiment, when the wind blows the other way your sentiment turns around and you’re mad sentimentally in your emotions. You know that.

“You’ve talked to somebody and one moment you’ve loved them and the next minute you’ve hated them. You went out and bought that new car and you couldn’t do without that thing; you had to have it! That shiny, little red job with all the gadgets. You couldn’t stand to be deprived of having that thing.