I wouldn’t want to imagine life without Julia. I enjoy being with her more than anyone else in this world. I love her more than I ever thought you could love someone, and I miss her whenever I am not with her. I wouldn’t want to be married to anyone else other than Julia, which is good, because I plan on being married to her forever, and she has to let me die first.
But I reject the entire premise of soul mates.
Do you remember those awesome Evangelical 90’s/ early 2000’s where Jesus was kind of suppose to be like our boyfriend/girlfriend and we all kissed dating good-bye because we just knew that God was going to bring us THE ONE and then life would be awesome? And THE ONE would most likely be a stay-at-home mom, or at the very least a teacher, and we would have to be in college when we would meet at some sort of rally to save children from disease or something. We would know that she was THE ONE because of her plethora of WWJD bracelets and because (duh) she had also kissed dating goodbye. We would get married and it would be awesome FOREVER.
But then we went to college and were confronted with a solid theologian biblical spiritual emphasis week preacher (thanks Clayton King) who shattered our dreams by informing us that God doesn’t have a husband/wife for us, doesn’t have a plan for whom we marry. NOT TRUE I scolded the speaker in my head attacking him with the full force of Jeremiah 29:11 that God “knows the plans he has for me, plans to prosper me and not to harm me, plans to give me a hope and a future,” and obviously that means a hot Christian wife because God “delights in giving me the desires of my heart.”
He slammed through my horrible (yet popular) biblical abuse by reminding me that the first verse applied to the people of Israel in regards to a specific time and just didn’t even dignify my horrible abuse of the second verse with a rebuttal. Nope, he said, a wife is not only not a biblical promise, it is also not a specific element of God’s “plan for my life.” God’s plan is for us to be made more holy, more like Christ… not marry a certain person. (This advice can also be used when individuals ask what college God wants them to go to, accompanied by, “God doesn’t want you to be an idiot, so go somewhere you will learn.”)
There is no biblical basis to indicate that God has one soul mate for you to find and marry. You could have a great marriage with any number of compatible people. There is no ONE PERSON for you. But once you marry someone, that person becomes your one person. As for compatibility, all that really matters is that she loves the lord, makes you laugh, and was someone to whom you were attracted. The rest is frosting.
This is profoundly unromantic advice. We love to hear of people who “just can’t help who they love,” or people who “fall in love,” or “find the one person meant for them.” Even within the Christian circle, we love to talk about how God “had someone” for someone else for all of time. But what happens to these people when the unstoppable and uncontrollable force that prompted them to start loving, lets them stop loving, or love someone else? What happens is a world where most marriages end in divorce, and even those that don’t are often unhappy.
My marriage is not based on a set of choices over which I had no control. It is based on a daily choice to love this woman, this wife that I chose out of many people that I could have chosen to love (in theory, don’t imagine that many others were lined up and knocking at the door). She is not some elusive soul mate, not some divine fulfillment, not some perfect step on the rigorously laid out but o so secret “Plan for My Life.”
But she is the person that I chose to ask out in college. She is the one who stayed beside me when everyone told us we shouldn’t be together. She is the one who agreed to travel the world with me and be involved in ministry. She is the person who agreed to marry me. At any step here, we could have made other choices and you know what? We might have married other people, or stayed single, and had happy and full lives.
But now I delight in choosing to love her every day.
I like it better this way, with the pressure on me and not on fate, cosmos, or divinity. I will not fall out of love, cannot fall out of love, because I willingly dived in and I’m choosing daily to stay in. This is my joyous task, my daily decision. This is my marriage.
Every day I pray for my daughter; Piper’s future. I pray for who she might marry, but also what job she will have, who her friends will be, and most of all, that she delights in becoming more like Christ. But when Piper come home starry-eyed from camp announcing that she can’t wait till the day she meets the man God has for her, I will probably pop her bubble and remind her that God doesn’t have a husband stored away somewhere for her
He has a whole life, one of rich and abundant choices. And it is awesome.
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