The Tie That Binds – Sunday, May 20, 1984
As we look at society we see not merely individuals, but groups—couples, families, towns, cities, governments, Wherever we find a society, we find people bound together by caring, sacrifice and hope.
It is this ritual of love by which societies survive. There may be sociologists who will argue for more complex motives of mutual need, of social Darwinism. But mere survival cannot ultimately explain our devotion, our cleaving to one another as families—families in which sacrifice, not survival, is the defining element of our love.
Recently in a remote area of southern Utah, an elderly couple was caught in a late winter snowstorm. Their car went off the road and they were stranded many miles from the nearest town. After waiting for a time in the refuge of their car, the couple decided to walk on to the next town or farmhouse. They walked all night, the 85-year-old man leading his 82-year-old wife through the snow that had begun to drift over the road. And in the morning, all they could see were miles of mountains and rolling, empty hills.
For three nights they slept in the melting snow. For three days they scouted the muddy countryside, searching for help, and helping one another. And on the morning of the fourth day, the old man died. His wife now remembers the moment when she realized he was not merely sleeping: “The dying took ten years off his face,” she says, “and as much as I wanted and needed to be with him, I wouldn’t have wished him back. What I wanted more than anything,” she says, “was to lie down beside him and just let the world go.”
But she didn’t. It would have been the easy thing to do, but instead, she survived several days longer until rescued by a search party. She survived the cold, survived the amputation of her left leg and right foot; survived even that amputation more painful to her—separation from the husband she had lived with and loved for more than half a century.
Why? She gives a single reason: “One of us,” she now says, “had to live to tell our children, and our grandchildren, and our great grandchildren; one of us had to live to tell them what happened.”
Here is a story of survival. But not “survival of the fittest”—survival because of sacrifice.
She survived not out of any personal desire, but out of love—a love for others, a love to give.
It is that tie of love that sustains us, that rescues us from solitude. It is that tie of love that binds us to one another and brings us home to tell the story of our sacrifice, and our love.
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May 20, 1984
Broadcast Number 2,857