Marriage as God Ordained for our Good and Your Glory

RantWoman notes morning tidings of yesterday's opening of the WA State Senate. The WA State Senate needs the prayers of all Washingtonians. RantWoman finds perhaps unintended resonance between previous statements of North Pacific Yearly Meeting about marriage and the opening blessing offered by Jon Sanne, pastor of the Calvary Chapel in Olympia

http://seattletimes.com/html/localnews/2020134150_legiprayer15m.html

Pastor Sanne spoke of "marriage as You ordained for our Good and your Glory."

RantWoman does not want to speculate as to Pastor Sanne's understandings of marriage. RantWoman personally is very glad that WA law has caught up to North Pacific Yearly Meeting Friends' understandings of what God has ordained.

RantWoman calls Friends attention to the following previous statements of Friends about Marriage Equality
1997 Letter from North Pacific Yearly Meeting to the Governor of WA:
Our faith community has spent many years in prayer and dialogue regarding issues of marriage and family. One result of our faithful work has been that we approve wholly of the married union of same gendered couples. This position was taken as a result of listening for Divine guidance and seeking the Truth as best we could. Thus we do believe that God desires and accepts fully those couples, heterosexual or homosexual, who make loving commitments towards each other. We take this stand for marriage as a spiritual and personal commitment within a faith community.

As a result of this stand, it is our practice to approve and perform marriage and ceremonies of commitment (equally) for same-gendered and opposite-gendered couples. ...

Marriage and Commitment
from North Pacific Yearly Meeting1993 Faith and Practice http://www.npym.org/fnp/index.html
THE SPIRITUAL JOURNEY of an individual can be enhanced and strengthened in a loving, committed relationship. ... Friends have long recognized that some couples are called into a covenant relationship, a ministry of caring, which with Divine assistance may open the door to deep and unreserved love, to forgiveness, to sharing strengths, to trust and to the nurture of each other’s growth.


Early Friends recognized that the joining of two people in such a covenant relationship “is the work of the Lord only, and not the priests’ or magistrates; for it is God’s ordinance and not man’s; and therefore Friends cannot consent that they should join them together: for we marry none; it is the Lord’s work, and we are but witnesses.” (George Fox, 1669)


from
http://rantwomanrsof.blogspot.com/2012/05/marriage-equality-testimony.html

RantWoman acknowledges that the above blog post is full of Quakerese which may or may not be of interest to people of other faiths.