Someone once sang “God bless the broken road that led me straight to you” 

But for some of us, that didn’t “connect” because there were actually multiple severe and broken roads that led us to the people we eventually married. 

And by that, I mean (among others) heart breaks. 

I recall, three times I was shipwrecked on my Romantic journey. So when a young man reached me the other week expressing his admiration for my little family and sought advice on marriage, I wished he’d seen how I didn’t arrive at the wedding aisle unbruised. 

But first, lest he lean on my own “wisdom,” we begun with some marriage fundamentals and ended up with some practicals, I thought I would revisit (and expound) some of our discussion here. 

Well, kind of. 

Marriage isn’t the goal. 

Together, early enough, I wanted to extinguish his over-assumption of my family and marriage, and so, we talked about diagnosing the problem of human nature well before anything. And so I went. 

“Bro, I am humbled by your curiosity and consideration in asking me, we need to talk at length, My short answer, however, would go something like…”

“Nobody in their power simply chooses a lovely happy family, (or a happy anything in this world) our secular culture parades a self-determinism in everything,  and has often persuaded Christians to operate in the same thinking. 

But my word is, love God supremely and what he’s accomplished for us in Christ and be ready to have that love cost you everything, everything, everything you hold dear —including your marriage aspirations or lack thereof. 

Whatever comes thereafter, having loved God supremely, whether it is lifelong celibacy or marriage, if God remains the center of your life, all things will work together “for good.” (Rom 8:28)

In hindsight, God literally denied me marriage until I was ready to “die a bachelor for him alone.” 

I mean, until I was ready to ultimately live for God and not a woman, he didn’t allow me one! 

Christian young adults need an environment that emphasizes God as the reward of believers, rather than his gifts. This is the end to which we were created. 

However, I quickly add, (lest bachelors pile more excuses here) that such environments also serve young people better if they also encourage a devoted momentum, especially among “guys” – in pursuing adult responsibility, namely family. 

Adult responsibility,  more so among mature Christian males, brings romantic clarity to women often trapped in a romantic haze, not far off.

Nevertheless, all Christian wisdom in choosing a future wife or husband precedes from recognizing the fear of the Lord as the beginning of wisdom and transcendence as exclusive to loving God, namely — with all your mind, heart, and soul. (After all, romantic passions seem to ultimately contest for these three faculties too) 

And Like CS Lewis reminds us in Weight of Glory, 

“The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshipers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.”

 The young man I spoke to didn’t get to hear about all the broken roads and heartbreaks that came before my vows, but at least he got a chance to hear the broken thinking that often wounded me so badly, along the journey to marriage, namely —that you can want marriage so bad, more than you want God, the author of marriage.

And that’s where everything begins to go wrong.