Vows Part IV: For Poorer & In Sickness

At the altar, couples speak words meant for a vast, unknown future: for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health. On a sunlit wedding day, those phrases feel beautiful and abstract. But eventually, life asks you to live them.

For Tammy and me, these vows became reality early on. We learned “for poorer” as young parents scraping by with three kids. We were tested by “in sickness” when I lost a year to severe illness. More recently, Tammy spent months battling unexplained, severe nosebleeds and late-night ER visits, leaving us terrified it might be cancer.

Then there are the less dramatic, but equally exhausting trials, like a “routine” root canal that turned into a severe infection. For two weeks, I became Tammy’s full-time nurse, managing a strict 2:00 AM chart of painkillers and antibiotics to avoid sepsis.

Those weeks changed us. In the quiet of those long days, we went to a deeper place with God and each other. Coming out of that trial, she knew I could handle the weight of her vulnerability, and so did I.

Why Name the Hard Things?

Why did the forebearers who drafted our traditional marriage vows intentionally include "for poorer" and "in sickness"? Why force couples to speak of poverty and disease on the happiest day of their lives?

Because they understood human nature perfectly. They knew it is easy to love someone when they are healthy, beautiful, and financially secure. But our natural instinct is to flee from pain, burden, and hardship.

By making couples explicitly say "in sickness" and "for poorer" out loud, they were forcing the bride and groom to look the worst-case scenarios in the eye. They deliberately named the absolute lowest points of the human experience to strip away all conditional escape clauses. They were establishing, from the very first day, that marriage is a covenant based on a promise, not a contract based on ideal circumstances.

The Real Tension of the Vows

But let’s be honest about the tension of these moments. It’s one thing to care for someone you love; it’s another to do it while running on empty.

When prolonged illness or financial strain forces you to put your own life on hold, the vows suddenly feel less like a promise and more like a heavy weight. The temptation to retreat or build walls of resentment is immense. How do you survive the “poorer” and the “sickness” without losing your connection?

We survived because we underwent a fundamental shift in how we viewed our relationship: moving from that contract to a covenant.

In a contract, you stay as long as you get a good return on your investment. But a covenant says, "My commitment isn't based on your current capacity to perform or be healthy; it is based on the promise I made." When you’re staring at a depleted bank account or keeping a 2:00 AM medication chart, romance won't sustain you. The bedrock of the covenant does: I gave you my word.

You Don't Carry It Alone

You also survive by realizing you were never meant to carry it alone. It’s why you have guests at your wedding. When a caregiver's willpower runs out, the community steps in. We need friends, family, and faith to surround us, drop off meals, and gently remind us of the vows we made when we are simply too exhausted to remember them.

Who You Become in the Fire

There is a beautiful mystery to these dark valleys: they forge you. The crucible of suffering burns away selfishness. You stop looking for what you can get from the marriage and discover a profound capacity to lay down your life for another. You develop resilience and become a safe harbor. Ironically, the love on the other side of that exhaustion is vastly more unbreakable than the naive romance you felt on your wedding day.

The Weight of Walking Away

But what happens if we don’t stay? Excluding tragic extremes like abuse, where leaving is necessary for safety, walking away simply because the burden became too heavy fractures something inside us.

When you drop the hand of the person you promised to hold in the fire, you trade the holy work of transformation for a temporary exit strategy. We risk becoming people who run when it gets hard, forever chasing ideal conditions that don't exist.

The True Purpose of the Altar

Recently, Jay Leno was asked if he would ever consider getting a girlfriend following his wife's dementia diagnosis. He answered immediately: "Why would I do that? She's my wife. That's what I signed up for."

That is the essence of the altar. You are signing up for the whole story.

At The Renavelle, we host beautiful beginnings, but our true passion is your continuation. The wedding day is the perfect time to anchor yourselves in a covenant, surrounded by the community that will help you keep it. A beautiful wedding is a wonderful gift, but a resilient marriage, one forged in the fires of real life, is a legacy.