Again, from January 5th, slacker!
You can let just about anything
define who you are as a person. I’ve let
anything from bipolar disorder to singleness to minimalism define me. It’s so hard to remember that Christ defines
who we are. His death and more
importantly His resurrection defines who we are. Everything else comes secondary in defining
us. We often define ourselves by what we
do for a living, what relationship we’re currently in, our nationality, our
socioeconomic class, our race, our denomination, what kind of coffee we drink,
truly just about anything. All those
things come secondary to who we are in Christ.
2015 is a new year and with it
comes a new identity for me. I am still
His and that is still my primary identity.
Now I’m married though. Two
become one. I am no longer just my own
person nor am I solely responsible for my decisions and their
consequences. My decisions and actions
have an immediate effect on my wife who has to live with me every day.
As we were driving to Ft.
Lauderdale the other day, she said she liked introducing me as her
husband. When she said the word husband
I immediately felt a huge new sense of responsibility. God has entrusted Steffani to my care. He has tasked me with loving her like Christ
loves the Church. That carries a ton of
weight with it. It is no small matter
and is not to be taken lightly.
Maybe that’s why I took so long
to come around to the idea of marriage.
Some people act so flippantly about it like it’s no big deal. Marriage is a huge deal, and should be
treated as such. It is not to be entered
into lightly. One must weigh the
consequences of the decision you’re about to make.
I can remember for a long time
telling people I’d never get married because I couldn’t get the cost/benefit
analysis to work out in favor of marriage.
Women would tell me something about when you’re in love that won’t
matter. Well, it does still matter, but
I forgot one key factor in my analysis.
He who has a wife of noble character has no lack of gain. It’s in the book of Proverbs and is something
that should be taken into account.
Now, I realize cost/benefit
analysis when looking at a relationship is about as unromantic as can be. That’s just how I tend to think though. Ever since 2008 or so, I’ve gained an
interest in economics. It started
because people were talking about the state of the economy and I had no idea
what they
were talking about.
It seems like if I say I will
never do something, God causes that very thing to happen. For several years, people asked me if there
was any country I had no desire to go to.
I would always reply I truly had no desire to go to South East Asia. As it turns out, I spent 10 months there in
the span of about 18 months, who knew?
Ever since about age 22, I told people I was never going to get
married. Lo and behold, I’m now married.
It’s been said that you make
plans and God laughs. It’s really
true. There is wisdom in planning of
course, but we need to hold our plans loosely knowing that God might ask
something different of us than what we originally had in mind. It’s kind of hard to try and explain that to
potential partners for our ministry. We
want to open an entrepreneurship school in Central America or the Caribbean but
we also recognize God might lead us somewhere differently.
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