Thoughts on Marriage

John and I are going to this Newly Weds Class at our church (www.visiodei.org) and it's really been insightful. We're going through a book right now titled "Sacred Marriage," and this past Sunday it really went well with Jeff's message. I'm really interested in the historical aspects of stories and points in the Bible, so this message really stood out to me, but more importantly, it really reflected how our culture views things in much the same way as it happened years and years before. One of the points was, people were coming up to Jesus and posing him with questions on how to get out of marriage. When really, it sounds like they were asking the wrong question. It shouldn't be how do you get out marriage and get a divorce, it should be, How do I honor God with my marriage, and show love to the other person, like God shows it to us. Jeff made a point about how many children of divorce grow up with a distorted view of God's love, because if the ultimate point of marriage is to show that agape love to one person as God shows it us, and growing up you only see that Godly view of love (marriage) fall apart, it's not really showing God's love. I didn't grow up with divorced parents, but Jeff painted a picture of what it was like in his household before his parents got a divorce.

Everyone has an idea of marriage that I think we set up on this pedestal that it is so easy, and carefree and that it just happens to be this way forever. You hear "Marriage is hard" from everyone, and you think when you're engaged, oh that's not us - we're different. And that's just it.....We are different! We are two completely different people with different views on life, different goals, different pasts, different ways to express things, different...everything! Our main principles are the same, we love God, our families and our friends, and we love each other. But God's plan for marriage is to love out his view of love, that agape love, to our spouse, the one person on this earth we get the liberty to CHOOSE to love. We choose the easiest person to love; We pick out a person who seems enough like us to compliment us, but still different enough to challenge us to be holier people; we choose the person that respects us, and listens to us. What about those people that God challenges us to love that are nowhere near that in our eyes? That person that wronged us years ago? That person that we don't even know, on the street, or next door, or at work? We're called to love them too, but in marriage we get the easy way out; we get to pick!
So, by being a Christ follower and showing God's love to everyone, it should start with the most important living being in your life, the one that God ordained as your spouse. That is where we need to show it most. And yeah, while I grew up with a distorted view of marriage, you can't focus on that, because as this class has taught me, if you focus on the one thing that you don't want to be, you lose sight of what you DO want to be, and by default you end up being the inevitable. So while I still feel knots in my stomach sometimes that that could end up being us, we're taking the steps now, to focus on what God sees marriage as: The replica of God's love to us, lived out through a marriage relationship. A never ending, constantly loving (no matter how difficult) relationship where you accept your spouse for who they are, and challenge them to become holier and more Christ like.

After that isn't loving someone you see occasionally (the homeless, the neighbor, the co-worker) seem so much easier?