I wrote this blog 7 years ago. I think I will come up with 5 more reasons:)
Today is the 34th anniversary of our marriage. Mark is taking a nap(the Sunday afternoon kind) and so it seemed like a great time to blog about my thoughts about marriage. I wrote a blog about a week ago, asking the question "Should people still get married or just live together?" My main reason to marry was to reveal your selfish nature. Looking back, I am smiling, "Is that all I could come up with?" Not a very persuasive reason for people to jump into marriage! So here are some other reasons why marriage was a good decision 34 years ago.
1. Mark and I had to make a conscious decision to work at marriage. Did we work at it everyday? Heavens, no! We each had our seasons of expecting the other person to do all of the work and us to reap all the benefits. Many compromises had to happen along the way. Mark likes guy movies. I grew up with 3 sisters so I was not used to murders every 5 minutes in my movies. I have to admit that he weaned me off chick flicks so I would probably never choose that as my source of entertainment. Mark loves to dance. I am so insecure because I can't dance. Well, along the way Mark has turned me into a little bit of a dancer. He started out with dancing with me anytime we rented a movie. The end of the movie signaled a time to dance. Then he snuck it in when we were making Friendship bread together. He turns up the I Pod and we dance after the bread goes in the oven. Then, the icing on the cake was last fall. We signed for for country western dance lessons! Many compromises.
2. We learned so much about prayer. Understatement! Somewhere along the way, we agreed to make reading our Bible together and praying together every morning a top priority in our marriage. May I add a commercial here? If you are not reading your Bible and praying on a regular basis before you marry, you probably won't be doing that together after you are married. We decide when we need to leave for work or whatever, and we back that up by 30-60 minutes. If we need to leave for work by 7:00, we agree to be dressed and ready to go by 6:20. Then we sit together in living room and read our Bible and pray together. Saturdays, we spend a longer time on the back porch. We carefully selected the chairs for the back porch. We call them "magic moment" chairs. A lot of life's issues have been prayed about at 6:30 at the Cooper's house. Years of stuff. Bad, good, very sad, hopeless times, times of great joy...they all cycled through prayer.
3. Learning to serve the other person. I look back to the time to our early days of marriage and I cringe to think about how self-serving I was. I was honestly afraid that if I served Mark, unconditionally, that I would just be a doormat. This is what a lot of wives are afraid of, that they will do all the giving and get nothing in return. But isn't that the essence of the Christian life? We are obedient, no matter how crazy it seems. The Bible is full of stories where God commanded the people to do almost foolish things and the results were unbelievable. God has shown that to be true over and over again in our marriage. If I am obedient to his word, he takes care of the marriage part. When I serve Mark and not worry about whether Mark will reciprocate, I am in for the sweetest joys life can offer.
4. Seeing how your mate grows in his walk with the Lord. Mark Cooper is simply not the same person that I married 34 years ago. Compared to the way that I feel about Mark today, I honestly did not know what it meant to love someone. I "loved" the idea of being married. I "loved" the idea of a wedding and keeping a house. I "loved" the idea of someone giving me attention. I "loved" the idea of having someone around to talk to and do stuff with. I "loved" the idea of the other person completing me, whatever that is supposed to mean. But I cannot honestly say that I loved Mark, for who he really was, warts and all. In fact, I closed my eyes to any warts. I wanted to marry a perfect person, not a person with faults or weaknesses. The amazing thing about living with a growing Christian, as opposed to a perfect Christian, is that the person continues to grow and become more Christlike. As Mark becomes more Christlike, I am more attracted to this person I am spending my life with.
5. I actually was going to name 10 things but this is getting too long. My 5th reason to get married is see God use a couple of wretched sinners to make a difference in his kingdom. We are so very flawed. We are so average. I laugh sometimes when I think about how un-cool I am! No athletic ability, whatsoever. Can't find my way to anywhere. I am always lost. We are not much to look at, definitely not rich, lacking in talents and yet God has blessed us by using us. How can he? Because we keep asking him to. We keep putting one foot in front of the other and showing up. Showing up for prayer every morning, showing up for ministry in our church, showing up for jobs, showing up to be a parent to our married sons...not feeling confident at all in our own abilities. But we are more confident than ever in God's abilities to use us.
Let me finish by saying this...thanks for reading this blog. I really appreciate it. I prayed that God would speak in a mighty way to whoever reads this. So you got prayed for.
