I can still recall every detail of the moment I stood with my son and watched my soon-to-be daughter-in-law walk down the aisle in all of her wedding-day splendor. I turned my head slightly to make sure I didn’t miss the look on his face when she stepped into the sanctuary doorway on her father’s arm. His look is fixed in my mind. It was a look filled with a lifetime of love captured in a single moment. I was immediately transported back to that very same moment when I saw his mother step through another sanctuary doorway.?After 26 years of marriage and three children, she still takes my breath away.
Tony BeamAmong all the joys that come to a minister of the gospel, perhaps there are two that eclipse all others.?I have had the honor of baptizing all three of my children, and I have now had the honor of standing before my son and his bride as they repeated after me a promise they were making to God.
The old TV commercials just never quite captured the right moment when they used to trumpet “it doesn’t get any better than this” after a day of fishing or a sunset, or a barbecue.?Trust me – it truly doesn’t get any better than hearing your son pledge his love to a young woman?you would have handpicked to be his wife.?
Why do we consider marriage to be so important? Because the Christian worldview understands that it is an institution ordained by God and its health is critical to the survival of our culture. Just as Jesus Christ is the cornerstone of our faith, marriage is the cornerstone of our society. The home is where the values that hold us together are passed from one generation to the next. It is critical that the scriptural standard of one man and one woman for life be preached in the pews by God’s messengers and protected in the culture by law.
On Tuesday, Nov. 7, we have both a moral responsibility and a divine call to participate in this great constitutional republic by going to the polls and voting “yes” for the state marriage amendment. Its passage will make South Carolina one of the strongest states in the nation concerning marriage. This means we will remain one of the best places in America to live and raise a family.
On the one-year anniversary of our marriage, my wife went to the freezer and retrieved the frozen top of our wedding cake.?She told me it was traditional for a husband and wife to share the top portion of the cake on their first anniversary. The cake was stale and freezer-burned but the sight of my beautiful bride sitting there in the soft candlelight of our rented house made it one of the most wonderful moments of my life.?
Marriage, like that cake, has been locked away in the cold by the culture,?battered by the effects of relativism and beaten by the constant pounding of anti-traditionalists who would grind it into?powder. But on Nov. 7, we have another opportunity to bring marriage in out of the cold – to see it bask in the warm glow of the light of God’s glory.
This is the first of four articles on the marriage amendment from the SCBC office of public policy.