I was still a teenager when I officially “went crazy,” according to my friends. I literally went from graduating from high school to planning a wedding with my beautiful young fiancée. Six months later I was waiting for her at the altar.
Why did my friends think I was crazy? Because in their well-pondered logic, I was still in the infatuation phase of the relationship. From their perspective, there was a likelihood that I was marrying Sarah because I still had the “warm fuzzies.” Good analysis, guys, but your logic was flawed!
We had invested seven years of friendship into this relationship already. We had fights where we got so mad at one another that we couldn’t even speak. We laughed so hard that we gasped for precious oxygen between intervals of embarrassingly high-pitched guffaws. We wiped away tears that we had caused one another to shed.
My point? Infatuation was not the engine driving our decision. Love was. Love anchored me to her bedside when she had her wisdom teeth removed and I helped her up from her bed to the bathroom door because she was so nauseated she couldn’t stand. Undiluted, ever-increasing love planted her feet before that altar and emboldened her tear-jerking vows to me—me—on our wedding day. Yes, it was love, but also peace. It was the perpetual peace of God in us that evaded well-intentioned skeptics and hand-wringing nervousness of people around us.
Though the objective of marriage is not to fulfill my needs, these are five reasons that I needed marriage—and still do:
1. I need what God hid for me to find in my wife. God has graciously and humorously deposited attributes of Himself throughout creation. My wife is a treasure trove of beauty that contains pieces of the mysteries of God that I am privileged to unearth, through the inexhaustibility of Christ in Sarah. (2 Corinthians 4:7)
2. I need to love someone even when there isn’t immediate gratification. Godly marriage is an invitation to invest into a something big that doesn’t only benefit us. I need to love outside of myself, my ambitions, my rewards. I need marriage because it evokes an “other-worldly,” supernatural, bond-breaking love that “covers a multitude of sins.” (I Peter 4:8)
3. I need my wife’s tenderness. I need my wife’s feminine tenderness. I get into “warrior mode,” slaying dragons, and hunting beasts to protect and provide for my family. But God gifted man with wives to bring the beauty and tenderness of His nature to man. My wife does that for me.
4. I need my wife’s relationship with the Lord. My wife is such a worshiper! She is prone to enter into the presence of God and man, waving the banner of His majesty. She brings to my relationship with the Lord the reverence and awe of Him that I so often neglect.
5. I need my wife’s friendship. I need an encounter, in the flesh, with true unconditional love. My wife knows things about me that none know, besides God Himself—and she loves me and approaches my weaknesses with patience and faith in the God Who “works all things together for the good of those who love Him.” (Romans 8:28)
Every night I kiss the face of a fellow pilgrim who nudges me ever-closer to the shores of Heaven. In the end, we will reach those shores together and look more like Jesus because of our journey in marriage. I needed marriage then, and I need it today. And I accept this certainty with a smile on my face.
Does marriage provide God-ordained solutions to your shortcomings? How does it push you closer to Christ?