Daily Verse
Monday, May 4, 2026
Christlike Love in the Home
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Monday's Reflection
Ephesians 5:28 — So ought men to love their wives as their own bodies. He that loveth his wife loveth himself.
Robertson McQuilkin had been president of Columbia Bible College in South Carolina for twenty-two years. Under his leadership, enrollment had doubled and the school had flourished. He was at the peak of his career. Then his wife Muriel began to show signs of Alzheimer's disease. As the illness advanced, Muriel became terrified to be without him. While Robertson was at work, she would walk the mile to campus and back — sometimes ten times a day — just trying to find him. The school arranged a companion to stay with her, but Muriel was only content when Robertson was near.
In 1990, Robertson called the faculty and students together and announced his resignation. He was fifty-seven years old, eight years short of retirement, still at the height of his influence. His explanation was simple and stunning: "I promised, forty-two years ago, 'in sickness and in health, till death do us part.' And I'm a man of my word." He went on to say that caring for Muriel was not something he had to do. "It's that I get to. She sacrificed for me for forty years to make my life possible. If I cared for her for forty years I would never be out of her debt." He spent the next thirteen years as her full-time caregiver, walking with her, feeding her, sitting beside her as her speech faded to almost nothing. Near the end, one of the only phrases she could still say was "I love you." Muriel died in 2003. Robertson later wrote a book about those years called A Promise Kept. He said he never once felt he had given anything up.
Paul's command to husbands is not about feeling romantic. It is about
recognising that your wife's wellbeing is not separate from your own — it
is bound up with it. Robertson McQuilkin understood that instinctively.
Muriel's suffering was not something happening to her while he watched from
a distance. It was happening to both of them. He did not resign out of duty.
He resigned because leaving her would have cost him something he could not
afford to lose. That is what it means to love your wife as your own body.
Not a transaction. A union.
Prayer: Lord, give us the kind of love that costs something real. Not love that performs well in public but disappears under pressure. The kind that keeps its promises when keeping them is hard. Amen.