My grandparents told me about hitching up the team of horses to the buggy or sleigh in the winter to go to church on Sundays. They made a full day of it. It was a long buggy ride to church and back. But Sundays were "visiting days" and so they often stopped at my great grandparents' farm to have dinner, to play games, and to have a good visit with their large family on their way home from church. However, apart from Sundays they saw very little of their family, although they lived in the same rural township. There was too much work to do on their own farmsteads. Their little family, into which my mother was born, was its own little enclave filled with law and gospel, trouble and joy, darkness and light. The family created by her father and mother, my grandparents, was a great blessing for my mother, which gave her many gifts, despite all the difficulties that surrounded this little community created by God. Children are blessed by holy marriage.

On account of its original blessings and God's gracious care for the world, marriage has been preserved for the world by Him. If not for the way God ordered the world, marriage would long ago have been given up in favor of arrangements less helpful to children. Without any doubt, the best context in which children grow up is in the one man and one woman relationship of marriage that God created into the world at its foundation. Certainly, there may be exceptions to this rule when human sin and wickedness intervene into God's gracious institution of marriage, but the rule remains the ideal form of human community.

God commanded that "a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife" before the fall. Sometimes, we look upon this advice as if it separates a man from his mother, so that his wife doesn't have so many problems with her mother-in-law. That is a fallen view of this command; a command given before we were fallen. Perhaps in the fallen world every woman is susceptible to thinking that her male children are messianic, just as Eve, the mother of all the living, did according to the Hebrew text of Genesis 4, which says: "I have gotten a man the Lord" (Gn 4:1; Heb). Yet she bore not the Messiah, but the first fratricide, Cain. Oh, sin, how horribly you infect humanity that our first parents so suffered! The messianic hope has been bred into every mother and this is why a boy and his mother might develop a relationship that will endanger a marriage. Daniel refers to this messianic hope in the Old Testament as "the desire of women" (Dan 11:37), that is, that women who knew of the promise to Eve had hoped to be the mother of the promised Seed (Gn 3:15). But this messianic hope can become perverted when a mother puts too much stock in her son's life and begins to separate him from his wife, to whom he must hold fast.

Martin Luther