Perhaps you recall some weeks back the story about the young man who pulled up to the drive-through window of a Ft. Worth Taco Bell on his bicycle.  He ordered all the money in the cash register and a chalupa.  Police captured him a short time later because, after he got the money, he waited on the chalupa.  When I first heard that story I laughed.  How could someone be so slow, I wondered, to actually order fast food when he needed to worry about a quick getaway?  I told the story around.  We all had a good laugh.  Until I heard the really sad ending of the story.

Just this past week a Ft. Worth mother and her two little girls were brutally stabbed by a young man, the woman’s son and brother of the girls.  He didn’t even attempt to get away; he just waited on the police.  When they arrived, they discovered that he was the same Taco Bell chalupa boy.  His mother had moved here from Georgia without a husband and, living in an apartment, was trying to raise these three children while working four jobs.  When the pieces of the story’s puzzle began falling in place, my heart was broken.  How could I have ever laughed?  This is not a dumb criminal story.  This young man has no father, not much of a life and probably no hope of one.  This is the story of a young man crying out for help in a world where apparently no one is listening.  Who knows?  He might have even been hungry enough to steal, of all things, a chalupa, knowing all the while he’d get caught when he asked for the money, too.  So, he got on his bicycle and the rest is already and forever a part of his history.  Who knows?  Maybe he demanded something at the window he had no right to expect because he wanted to get caught.  Getting caught was almost certainly more thrilling than being stuck in the life he had.

You might be wondering about the title of the sermon.  Especially when I promised to talk about marriage this morning.  Last Sunday I said something about how marriages can’t be sustained even if two people are highly committed to the ideal of “until death us do part” but aren’t willing to meet each others needs along the way.  More than one person later asked, “Now that you’ve identified the problem are you going to offer any solutions?”  So, you’re probably wondering about the title.  But, the preacher doesn’t want you to forget this young man’s story.  Hopefully, his reasons will be clear in just a moment.

You see, I want to offer people help with their marriages, to talk about things we can all do to meet each other’s needs.  That is why we read from 1 Corinthians 13, the love chapter.  It tells us what love looks like in action.  “Love is patient, love is kind.  It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud.  It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.  Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth.  It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.”  There you have it.  Do those things and you’ll be happy in your marriage, right? 

When I first got married, a friend gave me a toolbox, one of those aluminum Sears specials.  The kind of thing one man would give another for a wedding present in hopes that, now that he has tools, he has everything he needs to be a happily married man.  Makes sense.  Every man needs his tools, right?  And, it was loaded.  It had tools that, to this day, I can’t even name much less figure out what to do with.  Now days, most of them are scattered between here and every house I ever lived in.  Only a few wrenches, a couple of screwdrivers, that’s all that’s left.  I never did figure out what to do with those tools.  And, what my friend couldn’t have known, what I didn’t know, was that those tools weren’t the ones I really needed.  Whenever I did use them we ended up having to call a skilled repairman to undo the damage anyway.  But, the kind of tools I needed then and still need aren’t the kind you can pack in an aluminum box and carry around.  They’re tools of the heart that have something to do with the work of God in our hearts.

Tools like patience.  A willingness to live extending to others the same grace of God you’ve been granted.  A willingness not to measure others in terms of your expectations but always allowing for the fact that they are only human and being married to you didn’t change that.  To be “patient” means learning to live for the long haul in the relationship.  Patience means being slow on the draw to “anger” because you are more interested in loving than getting even.  People who love are patient people. 

Tools like kindness.  A willingness to guard your tongue against words of sharpness, sarcasm and rudeness that always leave your mate feeling worthless and as though they’ll never measure up to your expectations.  Kind people never use humor that degrades; they never embarrass their mate in front of others as a passive-aggressive way of dealing with anger instead of having the courage to deal with it privately where dignity can be protected.  To be “kind” means to look for little things you can say and do to ease the burden of the one who chose, among other things, to take on the burden of living with you.  People who love are kind.

Nancy and I like to write each other notes.  I’ll buy a special card and leave it somewhere she’ll find it when she least expects it.  I really like to put a note in her lunch she carries to work where she’ll find it when she’s sitting with all the other nurses.  I love writing things that that make her blush and leave them wanting to read it, too.  Little words of kindness go a long way in any marriage.

Tools like humility.  A willingness to worry more about serving than getting served.  And, being more concerned about meeting each other’s needs than who is filling what “role” in the relationship.  To not be “proud” means to never measure your mate in terms of what they fail to bring to you in the marriage, to not be “self-seeking,” but always seeking ways to meet the needs of the one you promised to love.  Humble people don’t argue over who should submit to whom and commit themselves to mutual submissiveness, as the scripture commands (Ephesians 5:21).

Tools like forgiveness.  People who find joy in marriage “keep no record of wrongs.”  Partly because they’re not looking for someone to blame for every thing that goes wrong in their life.  Partly because they don’t recall every last little thing their mate did to hurt their feelings and then bring them back up like a police record every time they argue.  It’s only normal to get angry when someone fails to meet your expectations and every marriage brings some disappointment and disillusionment with it.  The problem is that very few people even know what they really expect of their mate and in their haste to get to the marriage bed rarely stop to think about that until anger reveals it.  Everyone gets angry over unmet expectations in every marriage.  People who find joy in their marriage, however, are people who practice forgiveness until they get good at it. 

Every now and then, when I was growing up, just for fun we’d have a clod fight in the neighborhood.  If you never had a clod fight, you haven’t lived.  We’d pick two teams and climb down into some construction pits on this vacant lot behind our house over on Reppto street.  All kinds of clods in there, about the size of baseballs.  We’d lob those dirt hand grenades back and forth arching them the thirty or forty feet to the other pit not caring who we hit as long as we hit someone.  Great fun!  Until someone got clobbered too hard and ran home to momma.  You see, now and then a dirt clod would have a chunk of caliche hidden in the middle – a hollow point dirt clod of sorts, it hit harder than your average clod and always left a mark.  When someone got nailed with one of those, it was time to scatter before we all got caught.

Some people live like they didn’t learn that clod fights are great fun when you’re a kid but, in marriage, clod fighting will get you more than clobbered.  Always lobbing your verbal hand grenades with buried chunks of unresolved anger, you’ll eventually hit something that really hurts.  Maybe leaving a permanent mark.  People who love don’t live down in the pits of unresolved anger where there’s always plenty of ammunition close at hand.  They live on the high ground of forgiveness.

Love is a commitment to grow up.  It is a willful choice to stop talking, thinking and reasoning “like a child,” to stop speaking in condescending ways, and to relate adult to adult to the one you promised to love not to finish raising.  To look at your mate more in terms of what they need than what they have to give.  Rejoicing “with the truth,” people who love learn to celebrate what is good more than always enumerate what is wrong in their mate.  People who love keep fumbling with the tools of the Spirit (capital “S”) of love, “patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control (Galatians 5:22-23)” until they aren’t just apprentices anymore. 

The greatest gift my marriage has given me is not the gift of my wife’s acceptance, as wonderful as it is.  Here is this woman who knows more about me than any human being alive and she loves me anyway.  I cannot explain that.  Honestly, just thinking about it overwhelms me.  But, that is not the greatest gift my marriage has given me.  The greatest gift my marriage has given me is the opportunity to do the kind of growing up that comes with offering that gift of acceptance to one other person before I die.  The opportunity to take love’s tools and use them to build a relationship that will live and flourish until one of us dies. 

Those are all wonderful tools.  And, I wish I could put them in a beautiful strong box for you to carry with you every day.  But, even if someone gave you all those tools the day you first got married, they’d be useless in your hands unless you have the heart it takes to use them.  A heart for loving.  And, that brings us full-circle back to the Taco Bell chalupa boy and also what we did at this Table of Communion just a moment ago.  The boy was demanding something at the window he had no right to expect.  And, though not one of us may have pulled up to a fast-food window and ordered the cash register with our food, more of us than not have pulled up to marriage and demanded something we had no right to expect and it had no ability to deliver.  No marriage will make you happy.  And, you cannot give to your marriage what you do not have. 

Happy marriages happen to happy people.  I first heard that over twenty-five years ago when I was in college.  I didn’t learn what it meant until I was unhappily married and looking for someone to blame for all my misery.  Happy marriages happen to happy people, the man said.  You can take it further.  Happy jobs happen to happy people.  Happy churches happen to happy people.  Happy lives happen to happy people.  Happy marriages happen to happy people, Doug Manning said to a bunch of us Bible students who still thought our idealism and passion would see us through.  What he was trying to say, in part, was that being happily married isn’t a matter of winning the marital lottery and picking the right person who will make you happy.  Being happily married means being the right person.  It means having a heart so full of mature and genuine love that you get married out of the joy of having someone with whom you can share it.  Being happily married starts with not getting married simply because you need someone to rescue you from your boredom and isolation. 

When I was fifteen or sixteen or seventeen, I’d drive my mother crazy because, as soon as dinner was over, I’d get up from the table and go to the refrigerator for something more to eat.  What is it that makes an adolescent boy a bottomless pit?  Other than growing an inch or two every other month, I can’t imagine why a kid would get up from a scrumptious dinner and graze for more.  What I really don’t understand is what makes a middle-aged man still do it.  What is that hunger that won’t go away no matter how much we feed it?  No matter how much eat or how hard we work or high we climb or how much love we make or even how much church we do?  Jesus made a promise that keeps bringing us back to his Table of Communion, “‘Do not work for food that spoils, but for food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you.  I am the bread of life.  He who comes to me will never go hungry, and he who believes in me will never be thirsty.’”

I’ll be the rest of my life trying to figure out what that means completely.  But, I know it means at least this much.  We are, before we are anything else, spiritual beings with hearts that only God can fill.  Bottomless pits.  Like the black holes of outer space that suck everything within reach into themselves never to be seen again, we are spiritual vacuums on two legs walking around seeking whom and what we may devour to satisfy a hunger that won’t go away and something, some unidentifiable something, that just won’t quit hurting.  We pull up to every relationship, every marriage, every job and every church demanding and expecting what none of those can ever deliver.  Empty hearts always equal empty lives.  All the tools for making a good marriage are worthless in the hands of someone whose heart is empty.

So, if you want tools, you’ve gotten some this morning.  And, they’re everywhere else to be found, too.  Books, seminars, tapes and professional counselors by the score.  All good enough for sure.  Read, attend, listen and confess we should.  We never have enough good tools for a job that will take a lifetime.  But, it is our empty hearts that only Christ can fill.  He comes to us, even today, in our loneliness and misery offering himself as the very “‘bread of heaven.’”  Are you hungry? 

Won’t you come and eat?