Did I Marry the Right Person?

Continued from here.

Another one of society’s lies that too many in the Church have believed is that marital problems come from marrying the wrong person, so the solution is to break your marital covenant and find someone more compatible. If this were true, then the divorce rates of second marriages would not be higher than those of first marriages. Nevertheless, this myth persists, breaking apart what God has joined together and destroying families in the process.

Remember the powerful sermon on marriage I heard on my road trip? This pastor also said, “How do you know you married the right person? Because he or she said, ‘yes.’” When your spouse said, “yes,” to you on your wedding day and you said, “yes,” in return, God took two separate beings and made them one. That makes your spouse “the right person,” regardless of how you might feel about this.

I used to wonder whether I deviated from God’s plan for me in who I married because I was in a season of rebellion when my husband and I met and married. I never once prayed about whether he was the man God intended for me – I honestly did not care whether he was or not.

My husband and I are different in many ways. His perfect evening is watching a Carolina basketball game, and I am lucky to know that basketball is the sport where they dribble a ball and shoot it at a hoop. My perfect evening is dinner and a movie, but my husband doesn’t like to go to the movies. As the “newness” of our marriage waned, I became acutely aware of our differences.

Several months ago, God showed me that my husband is indeed the one He planned for me all along. I asked my husband how he came to regular church attendance in college when his family did not take him to church after grade school. He shared that no matter which dorm he was assigned, he happened to be placed on a hall surrounded by Christians who invited him to church and other religious functions. Then, God reminded me that as a teenager, I had prayed for my future spouse. Even while I was in a season of rebellion, God honored those prayers to prepare a Christian husband for me. Talk about faithfulness!

While it is true that my husband and I are different in many areas, God has shown me that this makes us complementary. Our son does not need carbon copy parents. As a parenting team, our differences actually provide our son with a much richer family. And then we have similarities in the places that matter, the most important of which is loving the LORD.

Continued here.

[Graphic: Cartoon of Grace standing by a tree with “Me + U 4ever” carved into it. Courtesy Bitmoji.]