Marriage: a snapshot

I came home from Arizona determined to never marry. It was a new feeling for me, as one who can still remember telling my mom that I wanted to grow up and be a housewife just like her at the age of 4.

I had just spent a week staying with a college friend and her husband, and I saw their marriage up close and personal - or as much of it as they allowed me to see. And what I saw was a horrid, ugly marriage. It turned me off from marriage completely. I went from telling a co-worker how blessed I felt to be surrounded by wonderful, Godly marriages to telling that same co-worker that I was bound and determined to never subject myself (and those around me) to what my friend had conciously subjected herself to. The selfishness and pettyness and childishness on both sides made me sick, and my goal of promoting Christ through my life doesn't at all correspond to what they had created.

Somehow I went from seeing that marriage as the exception in the realm of Christian marriages to it being the rule, and it scared me. I wanted no part of something like that. I felt God telling me "Let that be a warning to you, girl." What kind of warning? A warning against marriage.

But I chose to listen to a sermon series by Alistair Begg entitled "God of the Ordinary" this week, and it wasn't quite what I thought it would be. It is a series based on the Book of Ruth, and that naturally leads to some preaching on the subject of marriage.

And, thank God, I have been brought to see clearly once again. The issue isn't marriage. The issue is allowing your own fears, and misguided beliefs, and sins into marriage, and neglecting to allow God to redeem it. Or neglecting to allow God a place at all. I don't want a marriage like my friends'. I want a marriage that will seem radical to the world, but is infinitely logical when reduced to how God sees the world. That's what I want. And that kind of marriage requires that I hold out for the man God has for me. How else could you have the marriage God wants for you, but than with the man God wants for you?

And though my heart and soul cry out for a relationship now, my head squashes them both and demands that I be patient and wait.