Marriage 28
Single people often make two cardinal
mistakes while dating. Each is similarly different than the other. The woman is
not blind to the man's weaknesses, but she has a plan for that. She is going to
fix him. After they get married, she is going to go to work hammer and tongs
and turn him into the man his mother should have. On the other hand, the man
contemplates his future bride with unmitigated delight. She is alluringly
beautiful and sweetly endearing. The wedding will encapsulate her in a
chrysalis of amber. This charming creature of youth and beauty and tenderness
will be his to his dying day.
They are both wrong.
Let us examine each briefly in turn.
My dear fellow, I hate to break it to
you, but the footsteps of time chase all of us down. Solomon tells us to
rejoice with the wife of our youth not with our youthful wife. (Proverbs
5.18) God designed women to be constantly changing, physically and
emotionally. I do not mean He designed them to be unstable. I mean, He created
them to meet the varied needs of the husband and children around them, needs
that shift with the passing of time. As I pen this, I am fifty-one. My children
are twenty-two, twenty, and fifteen. If Mandy was the same woman now as the one
I married in 1999, my children and I would be in a world of hurt. But she is
not. She is the same individual, but the decades of life in between have
wrought some changes. If I fight that or resent that, I will have a constant
erosion at the center of my marriage.
My dear lady, I hate to break it to
you, but first off, if he will not change for you as he seeks to win you, why
would he after he has? Second, as men age, they generally become more resistant
to change. That is why old men wear the pants they bought thirty years ago.
Their life often resembles a canyon worn deep by the river of time, channels
unchanged except for their depth. Third, you cannot change anyone; only the
Holy Spirit can. The king’s heart is in the hand of the Lord, as the rivers
of water: he turneth it whithersoever he will. (Proverbs 21.1) While you
can pray for the Lord to turn your husband, you must also accept it is beyond
your power to do so directly. Fourth, and most importantly, failure to
understand this produces a profoundly flawed marriage, one in which the wife
has either become a battleaxe of a nag that the husband flees from or one in
which the wife has so emasculated the husband he could not lead a horse to water.
What is the moral of the story? Man,
choose carefully, then be flexible as the Lord adjusts your wife for what you
and your family are going to need next. Do not sigh with regret as she grows
with the passing of the years. Woman, choose carefully, and then support your
husband as God goes to work, forming him into the image of the Saviour. Do not
mother him or nag him. Do not attempt to be his Holy Spirit. There is no
vacancy in the Trinity.
“I can change him.”
“She won’t ever change.”
Myths.
Excellent thoughts. Thank you, brother.
ReplyDeleteExcellent!
ReplyDeleteA man who changes over time is often referred to as "mellowing"
ReplyDeletethus, equating it to the changes brought to whiskey or fine wine over time.
And, like said spirits, one cannot but leave it alone and occasionally test to see if it changes for the better or the worse.