On about the third day after we first met, Seth and I were on our way to a little Italian restaurant in Memphis when he asked me, out of the blue: “So, Julie, if we got married, and God called me to live in a mud hut, would that be okay with you?”

For a few frenzied seconds, my poor teenage-girl brain was very confused.  Seth had been very clear that he didn’t feel called to a foreign mission field, and so part of me was trying to figure out why God would call him to live in a mud hut in North America, and another part was thinking mud hut?  Does he feel called to live in a mud hut?  Why a mud hut?  What would we do for a bathroom?  I think I missed something here.  But then I realized what he was really asking: are you the type of person who wants to live a good moral life, live in a house, have a family, try to live a righteous life, and be actively involved in a local church–or are you the kind of person who is happy to drop everything and lose everything for no reason beyond the fact that it’s the way God is leading us?  And also: are you the type of person who would willfully give up the usefulness of a kitchen, a bathroom, and a floor, simply because your husband asks you?

So I answered.  And I realized that his question was no less insightful into his character than my answer was to mine.

In the past six months or so, I’ve realized that a very large number of the people I knew in high school and college are starting to get married.  Still lots of singles in the group, but a growing number of people who are “together,” engaged, or married.  And–having been married for going on four years–I’m really terrified for the souls of many of these old friends of mine.  Some of their prospective spouses’ salvation is in serious question, others are marrying into heretical denominations, and countless more seem to be spending their lives in pursuit of the American dream, Christian-style, which says let’s get married, have two kids, volunteer in VBS, go to the local MOPS, and tithe; we won’t cheat on our taxes and we’ll give to charity.

I hear phrases like “I’m so excited–I know God just made us for each other, we have so many interests in common and we just understand each other so much!”  Because, you know, God’s main concern is that you can find a board game you both like to play.  Or “he’s such a great guy; he has a really great job and our careers work together so perfectly, and he’s so sweet and sensitive–he makes great cappuccinos!”  Personality equals greatness.  And, my favorite of all: “we even want the same number of kids!”  Since the whole kid thing is governed by wishes and not by, I don’t know, the multitude of Bible verses on the subject.  Just once, I want one of my friends to pull me aside and tell me that they’re deliriously in love with their boyfriend/fiancé/husband because he makes it clear everyday that his top adoration is Christ, and constantly points her toward the truth of the Gospel, enough that it makes her uncomfortable, embarrassed, and aware of her own insufficiency.

One thing I’ve learned in the past four years is that it’s very easy for a husband and a wife to become alike spiritually.  We can drag each other down, we can build each other up, and the effect is effortless.  We have a huge impact on each other, even when we don’t want to.  It’s hard for one of us to be in close fellowship with God when the other is spiritually depressed, and conversely easy for us to be lifted out of spiritual dimness when the other is passionate and fiery.  Solomon is a prime example of this; 1 Kings 11:4 says that ” when Solomon was old his wives turned away his heart after other gods, and his heart was not wholly true to the Lord his God” (ESV).  Even with all his wisdom–and verbal communication with the Most High–Solomon still succumbed to his wives’ spiritual state.

Even more than our relationship with each other impacting our relationship with God, though, our relationship with God impacts our relationship with each other.  Nothing brings us together like the feeling of catching Seth’s hand in mine in silent support during an intense theological discussion that’s going on, and nothing is quite as satisfying as curling up to each other to sleep after a spiritually harrowing night.  Sometimes there’s no words, just togetherness: nothing can give one-ness on the same scale as pursing the Gospel together.  There’s no comparison.  Scripture doesn’t give us very many examples of couples where both are clearly strong believers, but it’s worth noticing that the couples who seem to have the most secure marriages–Abraham and Sarah, Boaz and Ruth, Joseph and Mary, Zechariah and Elizabeth–are the same couples where we can read both parties praising and praying to God.  And I’d wager that Priscilla and Aquila were among the happiest people in the whole New Testament; they certainly seem to have been inseparable!

Nothing can make a marriage a success the way that a shared commitment to Christ will.  Our love for each other–our capacity to love each other–increases as we draw nearer to God.  Nonbelievers can never experience the most ultimate pleasure of marriage, and weaker believers cannot experience it as fully.  There’s no earthly delight more agreeable than a godly spouse–and, I suspect, no earthly torment more horrible than a wayward or apathetic one.  And on the other side of the coin, apart from the Gospel itself, I don’t think there’s anything that can change us, for better or for worse, than the person we live with day in and day out.

2 Corinthians 6:14-15 are the famous verses used to point out how wrong it is to marry a nonbeliever, but I think it’s useful to note the reasons Paul gives: “what partnership has righteousness with lawlessness? Or what fellowship has light with darkness? What accord has Christ with Belial? Or what portion does a believer share with an unbeliever?” [ESV]  No matter how many common interests two people may have, if one is righteous and one is lawless, they have nothing in common.  No partnership, no fellowship, no accord; no shared portion.

And so, common interests, pleasant personalities, good jobs, even going to the same church or writing identical doctrinal statements: these things are not what we should be looking for.  You can marry a seminary graduate with all the right words and excellent references, and still find out that he falls apart when his world falls down around him.  Or you can marry somebody who obsesses over the proper method of courtship and reads every book Douglas Wilson, James Dobson, and Gary Smalley ever published, and learn what happens when he’s more concerned with his relationship with you than your relationship to God.  It takes a lot more character to confront someone with their sin than to be a sensitive shoulder to cry on.  It takes far greater maturity to look you in the eye and say, “if God takes you away from me then I will praise Him; He is all I need,” than to say, “darling, you’re my world and I couldn’t survive without you.”

That’s where the mud hut questions come in: Would you really abandon everything?  Can you really smile when humanly everything is sorrow?  Do you put your relationship with God above all, and regard your relationship with your wife/husband as only a tangent to that all-encompassing passion for Christ?  Is your house going to stand strong when the rain starts to fall and all the sand washes away?

I pray that the marrying people of my generation would have greater vision, and that we all would be bold in confronting the horror of unequally yoked.

Tags: marriage married happiness singleness spouse criteria women

Jessica’s post and its accompanying comments (sorry, it’s a protected entry) made me think, and my thoughts are too tangential to make as a simple comment on her entry. Discovery first: I think differently than most of these people. Which means that the following random thoughts aren’t in disagreement with the above link; they’re about me, and mostly, only me.

I’ve mentioned my philosophy about accepting marriage proposals elsewhere. (And more Elsewheres, I know.) And I’ve only ever met maybe three or four guys in my entire life who posess the depth of spiritual character I’m looking for, and I’m not settling for less — I’d be much, much happier to be single for the rest of my life than to marry someone who isn’t completely consumed with glorifying God. I mean, people mess up and aren’t perfect, and I’m not looking for perfection. That’s God’s business, not mine. I just want to marry somebody who’s a true servant of the King — it’s an are/aren’t thing; there is no matter of degrees. And men who truly are completely His are rare, and they have an alarming tendency to be married/engaged/girlfriended already.

My “best friend” and I have very little in common. I’m an English freak (i.e., major); she isn’t. I’m a history buff; she isn’t. I’m somewhat into computers and geekishness; she isn’t. She’s into biology stuff; I’m not. She’s a lot of (good!) things I’m not. We’re two very different creatures. Our personalities could hardly be more different, and I can’t think of a single interest or hobby we share. But we relish our time together, limited though it is because of the very different lives we lead. We have that strange kind of friendship that belongs in books written centuries ago. I don’t tell her everything, but I could, and I do when I need to, which is a strange confession coming from a person well-accustomed to keeping as many of her own secrets as possible. I trust her completely. Not that she’s perfect. Would she ever betray my interests? Possibly, although I doubt it. I don’t think that she’ll never make mistakes; that’d be expecting too much from any human. “Complete trust” doesn’t mean that someone expects perfection from someone else; it means that they’re willing to overlook imperfection because they know there’s something larger and more important at stake. I know she isn’t perfect, but I know that she is devoted to serving my King, and so He becomes the only Foundation for our relationship. As long as we’re both striving for Him and Him alone, we’ll always be in perfect harmony with one another; sister “partakers of grace”. We have yet, to my knowledge, to have a single disagreement, but even if we do, I have confidence that He will draw us back to Himself and thus back to each other.

Okay, that was a very-much related tangent. I’ve learned so much from her, but I think maybe the most important thing I’ve learned is that a relationship like ours automatically (and, I might add, helplessly) exists between two people who are committed to God’s glory. So few people seem to experience a friendship of our depth, and it’s a shame, because the unavoidable realization that flows from such a relationship is that Christ is the only basis for any true friendship (or, more pointedly, any marriage). And I don’t mean that both bride and groom have to be “Christians” and go to the same denomination church; that doesn’t come anything near to cutting it. It’s deeper than that, and higher. It’s not about what we believe or how much we believe it or live it — any more than Christianity itself can be summed by those trite phrases. It’s about grace, and it’s about God, and it’s about people whose only identity is that they’ve received God’s grace and are bound to Him forever.

My “best friend” and I wouldn’t be friends if we didn’t know each other. But once we did know each other, the more we learned about each other, the deeper our friendship grew. We really had no choice in the matter, either; neither of us was looking for a friend, and neither of us expected to find a friend in the other. But it wasn’t about us. We’re two sisters in Christ; that’s all and that’s everything.

Obviously friendship is an essential component of marriage, but they aren’t the same thing. The relationship I have with my friend is not the same as the relationship I expect to have with my husband. But the standard, the foundation, is the same. And so, I think, is the inevitability. My youth pastor in high school compared his then-future marriage to two travelers with the same destination. No matter where the two travelers begin, ultimately they’ll find that they’re both moving in the same direction. And the nearer they come toward their mark, they’ll find that they can’t help moving closer to each other, because they both have eyes only for their destination.

So, the idea of “clicking.” I’m not worried. The beauty of the destination idea is that it never stops. If the focus of a relationship is on the people in it, then it’ll waver and be uncertain. But if two people truly share a joint and all-encompassing devotion to delight in the glory of God, then they can only grow closer. The more I learn about God, and the more I understand and grow in His grace, the nearer I’ll inevitably become to anyone else who shares that delight.

I know a few guys who seem absolutely “perfect” — common interests, philosophical, weird, sweet, etcetera — seemingly hand-crafted, except for the not-so-little thing that they think about Christianity as their philosophy, instead of Someone Who’s extended grace to them unearned. And I know a few guys who seem to be the opposite of all the “little things” I like in men, but they actually honestly care about glorifying God. And the latter group, in spite of their utter un-Prince-Charming-esqueness, are far more attractive than the first group. I don’t mean just rationally, either; I’m talking about an instinctual gut-reaction that says I like this. And the first group, despite their adherence to my mental picture of the perfect husband, hasn’t got a chance. It kind of makes sense, anyway; there’s not really any other scriptural “husband requirements” I could add, and it makes sense that God could curb our instincts to allow us to be “in love” — in the gooey sense — with anyone He chooses.

So, somewhat conclusively, I know that deep friendship is based on mutual servanthood in Christ, and really nothing else. And I can’t imagine anything more enjoyable than spending the rest of my life with someone whose delight is serving the one Person that is also my delight to serve. How much more “common interest” can we get than that? If everything I do is for His glory, and everything he does is for His glory, then don’t we get to spend every minute of the rest of our lives doing what we love to do best, and doing it together? What’s more, we get to serve Him in a way we couldn’t have alone, and share in the constant joy of watching a fellow believer draw ever nearer to our journey’s final end — and to our ultimate beginning of perfect life in the constant light of the Son of God.

Tags: more coherent singleness special tag no 2 spouse criteria

Heh. Thinking about a Wednesday night many moons ago, when I was in junior high. We had a guest speaker, and I remember nothing of what he said, except that he told us we should all go home and write out a list of requirements that our future spouse would have to fulfill, so we wouldn’t be tempted to compromise out of desperation. He then listed about fifteen suggestions. I thought about it. Quite a bit.

Rebellious child that I was, I went home, rummaged the fake cherry rolltop for a piece of paper, and wrote out my complete-for-all-eternity list. All two words of it. Loves God. I figured that covered everything, but I added parentheses just in case: (Has an all-consuming, all-encompassing passion for the glory of God that far surpasses any other passion.) I think that’s a little redundant, but hey, it was junior high.

Didn’t ask much, huh?

I don’t suppose I really talk about romance much. Mostly because I can’t quite convince myself that I have any business whatsoever doing so, and because I equally doubt that anyone really cares what my love life looks (or doesn’t look) like.

Anyway… I would be interested in thoughts on my junior-high philosophy of ‘just the bottom line’. I mean, I could have said that I wanted to marry somebody who likes to learn, likes to mix things up a bit, hints at unpredictability, is creative, happy, and whose soul/spirit understands and knows mine. (Not a list. Just random things that popped in my head tonight.) But wouldn’t any such list only invite trouble? Suppose I meet a man who’s terribly good. Not somebody I ‘click’ with, but somebody who’s godly and who I would complement? Oh, sorry, can’t marry you, ’cause you’re too dull. Well, you’re not really dull, but you think stars are just another part of the night sky, and I could never marry a man who didn’t feel this magic I do when I look at all that shimmering white dust. Or you don’t understand why slap bracelets are just so cool because of the weird way the metal works to bend and flex with a life of its own that I’ve found irresistibly fascinating since grade school. It just doesn’t hold water, you know? I mean, he might not like the fact that I am totally uninterested in his new car — and what’s the real difference? Honestly, I can’t think of anything that a Christian could claim as essential that isn’t summed in my two-word phrase and its implications, but is such simplicity too broad?

Tags: more coherent spouse criteria