NEW YORK — As a top prospect for the Oakland Athletics, outfielder Grant Desme might’ve gotten the call every minor leaguer wants this spring. Instead, he believed he had another, higher calling. Desme announced Friday that he was leaving baseball to enter the priesthood, walking away after a breakout season in which he became MVP of the Arizona Fall League.
Good for him.
We picture the ‘authoritative’ husband as a domineering figure who makes all the decisions himself, issues commands and expects obedience, inhibits and suppresses his wife, and so prevents her from growing into a mature or fulfilled person. But this is not at all the kind of ‘headship’ which the apostle Paul describes [in Ephesians 5:21-33], whose model is Jesus Christ. Certainly, ‘headship’ implies a degree of leadership and initiative, as when Christ came to woo and to win his bride. But more specifically it implies sacrifice, self-giving for the sake of the beloved, as when Christ gave himself for his bride. If ‘headship’ means ‘power’ in any sense, then it is power to care not to crush, power to serve not to dominate, power to facilitate self-fulfillment, not to frustrate or destroy it. And in all this the standard of the husband’s love is to be the cross of Christ, on which he surrendered himself even to death in his selfless love for his bride.
—John Stott, The Message of Ephesians, 232
Husbands, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest these words from Dr. Stott. Your marriage will profit by them if you do.
O God, the enlightener of all nations, grant your people to enjoy perpetual peace; and pour into our hearts that radiant light which you did shed into the minds of the wise men; through Jesus Christ our Lord.
—Trium Magorum, Gelasian
According to Isaiah, the people who sinned sat in the shadow of death. For these a light arose, not by the merits of their virtues but by the grace of God. There is, therefore, no distinction between the breath of God and the food of the tree of life.
—Ambrose, On Paradise 5.29