Dear Editor,
I was interested and encouraged by Rowina Seidler’s article, in April’s EN, about the lack of biblical precedent for boyfriends.
Let me ask my fellow readers: ‘I wonder where you met (or where you are seeking) your spouse? In the college CU? At work? Or, as in my case, across the table tennis table at youth group?’.
We recently spent nine months working at a mission hospital in Madagascar. While getting to know the Christians in our local church, I often asked them that same question, and found that their answers were very similar.
Andry told us that at the age of 15 he had prayed that the Lord would show him when he was 30 whom he was to marry. ‘Why choose 30?’, I asked. ‘Because I hoped that by then I would be mature enough to take on the responsibilities of marriage and family life. The Lord began his ministry at 30 so I thought that was an appropriate age’, was his reply. How many 15-year-old boys think like this?! Sure enough, when he was 30 he reminded the Lord that the time had come to find a wife, approached a young woman in his church to ask if she would take him on and was accepted a couple of days later!
Francis was in his 30s when he was praying about whom to marry and asked his brother Rija’s advice. Rija reduced the shortlist to five, several of whom Francis immediately crossed off the list (he didn’t tell us why!). He decided to write to Seheno whom he had taught in Bible class some years previously; she meanwhile had been praying that God would provide her with a godly husband – ‘like Francis who used to lead the Bible class’. Rija himself married a girl he had taught in Sunday school ten years before.
Why do we not hear similar testimonies here in the UK? Most of us ‘went out’ with someone, fell in love and got married, rather than setting out purposefully to find a spouse or praying as a teenager to be led to one. Perhaps the nearest we come to the Malagasy way is internet dating, where both parties are openly hoping for marriage before the relationship begins. Is it possible in our highly sexualised society to remain resolutely single while waiting for the Lord to answer our prayers for a spouse? Are Christian fathers encouraging their sons to pray for a godly wife rather than steering clear of the commitment to marry? Should our youth group ‘relationships’ sessions include the possibility of ‘falling in love’ after the commitment to marry?
As a married (but not, I hope, smug) Christian I am wondering what unmarried readers make of all this?
Every blessing,
