Overheard at the Ballgame

We took my mother to a Rockies baseball game last night, her first major league game in over 50 years. She liked it so much she wants to go again this season! The Rockies beat St. Louis, 7-0, in a near perfect game, but that isn't what I want to write about.

We were seated in front of a group of five twenty-something kids (two girls and three guys), all Cardinal fans with ties to St. Louis. Their loud conversations volleyed back and forth between their narcissistic prattlings and the superiority of the Cardinals.

One of the two girls is engaged to be married this fall. (I can tell you all about their first date, how he proposed, where they're having their wedding photos taken, and the reception...she never stopped talking). But, before her monologue, one of the guys asked, "Why do people ever bother to get married anyway?" Another guy sagely replied, "In my tax bracket, you can save money if you're married!"

My husband and I both remarked on the drive home what a sad commentary on our society that marriage would be so trivialized and degraded. Given the state of American culture today, it's not surprising, but it's troubling nonetheless. Troubling, too, was that in Miss Bride-to-Be's conversation, nary a word was spoken about how much she loved her intended. In fact, the only opinions she expressed of the guy were how she thought it was past time they have a joint bank account, and how she was disappointed by his uninspired marriage proposal. The rest of the one-sided conversation between her and the other female companion consisted primarily of particulars surrounding the wedding day.

I think back to my grandparents and their very simple wedding, or to the simple wedding of Laura Ingalls and Almanzo Wilder written about in her Little House books, and of the lifelong devotion of each of these couples to one another. Many of the weddings of today (mostly in non-Christian circles) seem to be spectacles of opulence, without enough thought given to the vows or the days and years that follow the ceremony. Oh, that our culture would recapture the awe, reverence, and sacredness towards marriage.