As a child my brother had a multi-band radio set capable of tuning into an immense range of wavelengths. This radio offered people ‘auditory armchair travel’, opening up very different cultures and global broadcasters. Married couples need to keep attuned to the variety of wavelengths through which God chooses to communicate with them in their everyday interactions. These bands of God-communication include: work, prayer, family life, joy and also the discordant wavelengths. God, as we soon discover, does not speak on one ‘marriage channel’ but across them all.
Just as the radio listener recognises the quality of the signal, we need to recognise which bands strengthen our relationship, what distorts and distracts, and importantly learning to adjust the dials together. From this we discover the frequencies that lead to a deeper communication. Married life is a multi‑band radio, through which two people learn to tune together to hear God’s voice through the whole spectrum of ordinary experiences.
Some days the frequencies are clear. Some days the airwaves are full of static. Yet every wavelength is a place where God can be found. In addition, we may have noticed how married life, like the multi-band radio, opens up new wavelengths of grace, ones that we could never receive alone. Marriage is not an abstract but a lived reality, which is sometimes messy and out of tune. The strongest frequency comes from realising that we were created to praise, serve and love God as a couple. It is this that stabilises all the frequencies and sounds of the radio of married love.
Choosing the frequencies that lead to deeper communication, listening and understanding, are what matters. This includes resetting those wave bands of the early relationship that were tuneful in the past, which no longer have the same clarity. In marriage tuning is a shared endeavour, discovering the wavelengths that lead to deeper communion.
Marriage is not defined by the wavelengths that sound pleasant, but by those that strengthen the signal of love. Marriage, like the radio, both receives and transmits. When we forgive, we transmit God. When we encourage each other, we transmit hope. When we carry each other’s burdens, we transmit grace.
We are not asked to transmit an idealised spirituality, but one refined by to tune into God through our shared rhythms: work, parenting, aging, conflict, joy and the thousand small soundbites of love that make marriage real.
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