Commitment

By Adia Ukoyen

It is a fact that life revolves around love and that it is the most important aspect of our lives here on earth.

Love is not an easy task; it runs counter to our self centered nature. For this reason, relationships are complex. Relationships are characterized by strong emotions and powerful cross-currents of needs and desires that can bring exhilaration or depression, sunshine or rain, delight or disappointment.

Love requires adjustments that are not easy to make, particularly when it calls for commitment.

The purpose of love is to offer stability in a world full of chaos, security in an insecure place and a means to totally extinguish every iota of fear.

Committing yourself to another person can be an incredibly powerful and gratifying experience. You’re melding your life with someone else’s, for better or worse. There are few greater gifts in life that you can give the person you love.

But commitment is nevertheless a risk you take, no matter how crazy you are about the person you want to marry. Every big decision in life isn’t made without anxiety, doubt and fear, especially one that implies such finality. It’s what makes the decision real and there’s nothing more real than committing yourself to someone for life. So how do you really know when your fear of commitment is valid or when it’s just masking unreasonable fears?

There is no doubt that the selfish and non committal mentality of replacing the artificial for the real in our lives is the cause of the major breakdowns in our marriages, families and relationships. Our unwillingness to keep promises and do what we ought to do takes us away from God and destroys our bond with the people we say we love and need. This brings on broken hearts and empty dreams. Simply put, sincerity and faithfulness lie at the centre of true godliness and love, without which we are living and loving in vain.

Making a commitment to another person is serious business. This is so because it carries with it many responsibilities and brings on enormous demands. It is a test for our patience and integrity and challenges us to be as good as our words each time we open our mouths to speak. However, commitment, for all its difficulties, offers tremendous rewards. Men and women who are committed to their partners and give themselves fully to their relationships put themselves in a very advantageous position.

They experience not only the passion of love, but also its patience. They not only know the pleasure of fulfilled desire but also the deep joys of companionship, loyalty and trustworthiness.

There will always be someone more beautiful, attractive, sexier, intelligent and all that. But that is not the point. If we want our romantic relationships to grow and flourish, our families to experience great joy, and our marriages to be satisfying and secure, then the toxins of comparison and selfishness must be totally neutralized and deleted from our systems. The surest way to achieving this is by a conscious, earnest acceptance of our obligations to each other and us.

The only way to have a healthy relationship is for both partners to be equally committed; sounds obvious, right? But it’s not always so simple. That is the bottom line: the capacity for commitment to love. Once we have that, we have the world and its real wealth in our hands and hearts.
Happy Sunday.

Food for thought

Success in marriage consists not only in finding the right mate but being the right mate.- D.L.Moody