Marriage - Why?

This morning I was thinking about marriage and what my mother told me growing up. She said, "Marriage is one of the hardest things in life you will ever do."

As I thought about mom's statement, I thought about how God set up marriage in the first book of the Bible (Genesis). A lot of things happened through that first story of man and his fall from relationship with God. One of the things that did not happen was divorce. Buy why? When studying the way that God originally set up marriage, I have come to realize that marriage was supposed to be a wonderful relationship with God right in the middle of it. Why then was marriage allowed to continue even after God was no longer involved?

Here are some of the things that ran through my mind:

1. Marriage is the closest thing that we as humans have to picture love in our world. When you see a bride and groom at the altar giving their commitment to one another, you many times see so much joy and love in their faces. That is the same love that God has for us always.
   
2. When we pray for a marriage partner, we include God in the process. When we do not pray that God will guide us to the right person, we get our own random choices.
   
3. When we step out to meet other people in search of that partner, we make ourselves vulnerable to being hurt. We need God's direction to help us find the person we should be with but we also have to be actively involved.
4. If we are not blinded by the "happily ever after" principle of love but continue to pray for each other every day and dwell on why we love that person and their positive attributes rather than the negative, we will avoid a lot of the pitfalls along the way. It is really easy to get negative about those closest to us and that is a real danger to every marriage. Our minds control our relationships good or bad.
   
5. A true marriage is commitment. Commitment comes at a price. That commitment should always include God. Each person in the partnership is God's workmanship and one should never rule over the other but they should work together.
6. When disagreements come up, sometimes a decision must be made where there is strong disagreement. A man's job is to approach the subject with the very love of Christ, a woman's job is to voice why she is opposed to a decision in a nice way with God's help. If a man is making all the decisions without his wife's input, he may as well be married to himself. If a woman is more focused on herself than her husband, she may as well be married to herself. Marriage only works when we give and take in love. It is not the man's job to get his wife to submit and it is not the woman's job to judge how her husband is not measuring up to the love of Christ. It is both of their jobs to pray for one another first and then about the situation together. Sometimes if the decision does not have to be made right away, it should be shelved.
   
7. At the end of it all, it is well worth it when God is involved every inch of the way. If you can't think of something good about the person you committed your life to, go to Proverbs 31: 10-29 (Amplified Version of the Bible) and read this out loud with you and your mate's names in the places for the man and the woman. If you have the courage to do this, you will find that you have a great amount of peace when you get to the end. Here is a link to get you started: http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=proverbs%2031:10-29&version=45

While this is just a short synopsis on marriage, I have found that the suggestion in #7 can put your mind in a whole new place and give you peace. It is just another way to put God in the middle of the most beautiful relationship on earth.