- Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their toil. -
I’ve had the pleasure of people over the years coming to me for relationship advice. It’s left me scratching my head as I met my wife when I was fifteen.
What in the world do I know about dating? I’ve been lucky more than I’ve been right.
The strange part? Apparently, what I have to say helps because people keep coming back.
In my conversations with others, I’ve come across a lie all of us believe at some point in our lives. It’s born of a sense of entitlement and misplaced destiny.
God knows the one for me.
The one? That’s the person you are supposed to marry. Your job, of course, is to go out there and find them, so stop being lazy and make it happen!
So, we pray, compose list of the qualities we want in a spouse, and refuse to compromise when potential dates ask us to dinner if we aren’t fans of their haircuts.
Does God know who you are going to marry? Absolutely. Does God intend for that marriage to be like the ending to a Disney movie?
Most people haven’t read the book of Hosea. He’s a minor prophet who God told to marry a prostitute as a metaphor for His love for Israel.
I did NOT just tell you to marry a prostitute. I told you that what God wants from your marriage is not what you want from your marriage.
The language of the lie we believe isn’t necessarily wrong. What we mean when we say it is wrong.
What we mean is if we try hard enough and look long enough, all the joys of a perfect Christian marriage will one day be ours.
Maybe. There is no guarantee for that. Quite honestly, it’s not the point.
It took me a long time to realize this, but the thing that made me and Katie’s relationship work wasn’t that we were each other’s “one.”
What were we? Two very broken people, with idiosyncrasies that drove the other person crazy, who had personally hurt each other beyond belief, and the terrors of our future.
Yet, we loved the other more than our own comfort. That love was born out of a strange, unknowable concoction of time, character, and shortcomings.
In both of us was the heart to change. A desire to become a better spouse, not by our definition, but by the one we found within Scripture.
We grew in that vision and our understanding of one another, willingly accepting each other’s pain, communicating how the other hurt us (specifically), and finding new paths forward.
When you learn this truth, you learn quickly that the focus on “the one” has nothing to do with love. No one can complete that which is broken; no sinner can save another.
If you are to marry, God demands you do it according to his measures. You must follow all the commands given and not shirk responsibility when the other fails.
If there is a right person for you to marry, it’s the person you can find within yourself to love in this manner.
Better, there is no right person; marriage is for molding you into the right person.
You could say that is a good reward for your toil.
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