Marriage

Reprinted with permission from Baptist Bulletin Mar/Apr 2013. All rights reserved. Read Part 1.

I know of a man who met his wife in a most unusual way. One day he was making a run for his job as a cleaning supplies salesman when he passed by a house that caught his attention—actually, it was the mailbox that caught his eye. It bore the phrase, “Jesus—the Way, Truth, Life.” He was intrigued, and on impulse, he stopped and stuck his business card in the door.

“I thought that a family lived there,” he later said. As a man in his late 20s with an evangelistic bent, he was aware that sometimes people present as Christians who, in fact, are not, and he wanted to meet the family who owned the home and find out where they stood spiritually.

But instead of hearing from a family, he received a call from the young woman who owned the home—a nurse who worked the night shift. After chatting by phone and enjoying the conversation, he expressed an interest in getting to know her better, but she said he would have to meet her family first. So she suggested they meet for a Sunday service at the Baptist church her family attended. He stopped by the church, and the rest, as they say, is history. The couple hit it off, the family approved, and three years later they’re happily married and living in the house with the legendary mailbox!

Reprinted with permission from Baptist Bulletin Jan/Feb 2013. All rights reserved.

A few months ago I was serving in my church’s nursery during an evening service alongside a single woman who attended a Christian college, is now employed in the secular workforce, and faithfully serves Christ in ministries such as Awana, VBS, teaching, music, and hospitality. I’d been reading up on the challenges that marriage-minded Christian singles face, and I wanted to pick her brain regarding what she has experienced as a single in the church, as well as what she desires and hopes—things like, does she hope for marriage and family? If so, how does she meet Christian men? Has the church been a help to her as a single—has she felt cared for, encouraged, understood? Were believing friends, family, or those at church missing anything in their care for her during this season of life? My friend and I had just two little ones in the nursery that night, so as we cared for them, we had some time to talk.

“Most of my friends are married or dating,” she said. “With friends getting married and having kids, the shape of those friendships is changing. Everyone in my Adult Bible Fellowship is great, but sometimes I feel awkward as the only single person, although this is probably just me.

I do want to be married and have a family, and I pray for my future husband, but as far as meeting someone…” Her voice trailed off. “Where would we meet?”

Several weeks ago Wendy Alsup wrote a striking post about how complementarians (folks who believe that men and women have differing roles in society, the home, and the church) are shooting themselves in the foot with faulty reasoning and extra-Biblical teaching. It seems that on our way to understanding manhood and womanhood, our generation has started taking some shortcuts—shortcuts that are going to have significant consequences for whether or not we develop a fully biblical understanding of gender and human relationships. In this sense, the concerns she mentioned are serious; but even more so is her overarching point: while we may have a seemingly noble goal, if we don’t reach that goal in an authentic and legitimate manner, we undermine everything we are trying to accomplish.

This is not a new problem for us humans. Whether it’s yelling at our kids to be quiet or speeding down the highway to avoid being late to an appointment, we regularly—although often unintentionally—conduct our lives under the assumption that the end justifies the means. Wendy’s post also got me to thinking about how this kind of pragmatism can invade our relationships, specifically our marriages.

Is it possible that in our attempts to reach an ideal, in our progress toward becoming “good” wives and husbands, we could actually be harming each other? I think it’s more than possible; I think it’s very common. And like so many areas of Christian living, the danger is not so much in what we’re doing, as what’s happening in our hearts and revealed through the process of doing them. And while I can’t speak for the men, here some problematic tendencies I’ve observed among Christian women—they are simply things I’ve heard, things I’ve seen, and truthfully, things I’ve done myself at times.