The Goober Who Keeps Getting Up
What I told a young man over lunch about marriage, the Church, and the only thing that outlasts your zeal.
He calls himself a goober.
We have a joke between us, the kind that only works because it is true. We are evil and retarded, and we go to confession all the time. Glory to God. You laugh, and then you realize you have just confessed the whole human condition in a few words. A man who knows he is a wreck and keeps walking back to the only place that washes him clean without despair. This is the beginning of everything.
We were at lunch. A young man, a dear brother in Christ, new like me to the ancient faith and burning with it. And somewhere during the meal, he asked me a question most men are too proud to ask out loud.
What do you see in me?
I teased him first. A goober who keeps getting back up.
He smiled. But I meant it, and I needed him to hear that I meant it, so I told him the rest.
The Zeal Will Fade. The Falling and Rising Will Not.
I told him what I believe about the Church in this country. That the Orthodox faith is going to keep growing in America for decades.
Men are waking up.
People are tired of a religion that asks nothing and a culture that asks everything and gives back a hollow emptiness. They are going to come looking for something older than their grandfathers, something with weight, and they are going to find it.
And when they come, the generation that gets there first will have an unimpressive job: To still be standing.
So I told him the truth about his zeal. It will lessen. The fire he feels right now, the one that gets him to every vigil and every fast and every page of the Fathers, that particular heat is not going to last at this temperature. It is not supposed to. No man stays at a sprint. The new convert glow burns hot and burns out, and a lot of men panic when it cools, and they mistake the cooling for the end.
Yet, it is the beginning of the part that matters.
Because what the next generation will need from this young man is not his enthusiasm. Enthusiasm is cheap and it is everywhere and it evaporates the first hard winter. What they will need is the goober who never quit the fight. The one who kept getting back up. The one who was still in the pew, still in the line for confession, still there, twenty years after the glow wore off, when some other young man burning with his own first fire looks around for proof that this thing can actually be carried for a lifetime.
That young man will not need a sermon. He will need to see you still standing. This is the whole witness.
Then I Told Him About My Wife
He was not expecting me to turn the conversation to marriage. But it is the same conversation. It has always been the same conversation.
The honeymoon ends. Every married man finds this out, usually around the time he stops being surprised by it and starts being disappointed by it. The zeal of the early love, the heat of it, fades the same way the convert’s fire fades. And a lot of men do the same panicked thing with their marriage that they do with their faith. They feel the cooling, they mistake it for the dying, and they go looking for the heat somewhere else.
What they never learned is that the cooling was making room for something the heat could never build.
Because here is what I told him, and I told him plainly. Today my wife is more beautiful to me than she has ever been. Not because of youthful zeal. Not because of the way the early love felt. Because of long-practiced faithfulness. Because of the hours nobody saw. The arguments we worked through instead of around. The patience that did not feel like patience at the time, it felt like grinding, and only later did I see it was being made into something.
A new husband loves his wife the way a new convert loves the Church. Hot, certain, easy. A faithful husband loves his wife the way an old monk loves the Church. Through the dryness. Through the silence. Through the seasons when the feeling is gone and only the vow remains, and he keeps the vow anyway, and discovers on the far side of keeping it that the love is deeper than the feeling ever was.
Saint John Chrysostom told husbands to say to their wives: “I have taken you in my arms, and I love you, and I prefer you to my life itself.” He did not say that to men in the first flush of romance. He said it to men who had to choose it, daily, for decades, long after the romance had been replaced by something heavier and better.
The Church Trains You for the Marriage.
The Marriage Trains You for the Church.
This is the part that took him back. I watched it land.
The Church of Christ, the ancient faith, needs from this young man exactly what a good marriage will require of him. The same muscle. The same man.
Faithfulness when the feeling is gone. Showing up when showing up is the only thing left to give. Staying in the fight long after the part that felt like victory has worn down into the part that just feels like duty, and then discovering, years in, that the duty was the love all along, deepened past anything the feeling could have reached.
The Church is teaching him how to be a husband. The discipline of the fasts, the rhythm of the prayers, the humility of the confession line, the showing up when you do not feel it, that is the training ground. A man who can stay faithful to Christ through the dry seasons is being built into a man who can stay faithful to a wife through hers.
And it runs the other direction too. The marriage will teach him how to belong to the Body of Christ. The patience he learns at his own kitchen table, the dying to self he learns in the small daily friction of loving one specific imperfect person, that is the same dying that makes a man useful to a parish, to a brotherhood, to the long slow work of carrying a faith across a generation.
He hopes to marry one day. He said so. And I think in that moment he understood something most men never connect: that the way he loves Christ now is the rehearsal for the way he will love his wife later, and the way he loves his wife later will be the proof of how he loves Christ. They are one.
What I Want the Goober to Know
The world will tell you the goal is to keep the fire hot. To chase the feeling. To be impressive, in your faith and in your marriage both. That is the cult of self talking, the lie that your life is about your experience of it, your zeal, your glow, your highlight reel.
It is not. Your life is about what you build that outlasts the feeling.
A marriage that gets more beautiful as it gets older. A faith that gets deeper as it gets quieter. A name your children say with weight after you are gone. None of that is built by zeal. All of it is built by the goober who kept getting back up, on his knees in the confession line, at the table with his wife, in the pew when the glow was long gone, still there, still faithful, still in the fight.
So here is what I see in you, brother.
I see a man being trained, by the Church and for a wife, in the only thing that has ever mattered. I see a man who is going to stop sprinting and learn to walk, and walk a long way. I see the man some young convert thirty years from now is going to look at and finally believe it can be done.
Keep getting up. That is the whole thing. That was always the whole thing.
Build a legacy death cannot take.
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Good, Chris!