Is It Worth It?

     I'm coming very close now to the end of my first full year of marriage. We have our plans and are suitably excited and I thank God for this tremendous blessing. As I believe I've mentioned before, I've always wanted to get married.  Now that I'm here I can say that it is indeed better than I thought it would be but also different than I thought. In my previous post “The Amazing and Wonderful Normal”  I talked about the surprising 'normal-ness' of marriage. How everything becomes just another day, and yet more than that.

     Here is where we get to today's point. Some time ago while talking about marriage, I had a friend ask me “Is it worth it?” I nodded and said yes at the time but as I thought about that seemingly simple question I could not help but think of the meaning it might have possessed. Was it meant as more than a trite question that everyone asks but doesn't really think about, sort of like “how ya doin'?” I've had some time to ponder and here are my thoughts.

     On the surface of that question it has to be said that yes, yes it is worth it. Whatever “it” is, marriage's worth surpasses. Whether time spent waiting, the resources used, the effort involved, all of it is worth the result. There are times when, during dating, it may seem like a whole lot of trouble and it would make sense to question the worth of all this hard slogging work. Believe me, if you're doing your dating right there will be times when it is work indeed. The interesting thing is that you can never understand just how worth it it is until you've been married for a while, like how we cannot understand the Word of God as we do until we are saved.

     Beyond that though, I couldn't shake the feeling that behind that question was another question, “Is it worth waiting physically?” This question presents a problems for me as I want to simply answer yes, it is worth it! That however, is hardly the point is it? Our bodies desire that physical closeness and they desire the culmination of that relationship; but we are commanded to be masters of our desires, to lay them at the feet of Christ as our Lord! So whether or not it's 'worth it' to wait, we are to be obedient to God and reserve ourselves to the one to whom we become 'one flesh.' This is what is truly worth it, obedience and submission to God. Not merely God as Savior but God as King of our lives. As David was king in Jerusalem so should Jesus be King in our Hearts, the master of His domain with the final say in all things. We as Christians do not have the right to weigh the odds and compare lists of pros and cons. We listen, we read, we learn, and we obey. That may seem harsh or rigid or even insipid but that is where we will find real meaning. Our worth was only ever to be in our relationship with God and it is only there we will find meaning today! Besides the pragmatic benefit or emotional worth of being able to give all of yourself to your spouse with no one else to lay any claim to you, it is simply of far greater benefit to obey the one who is Lord over all.

     Don't fall into the trap of trying to decide as if you had any power to make a choice. We know what God wants of us and that is all we need. The Christian life is not hard because we have so many choices to make, it is hard because those choices are already made for us and those choices go against the flow of the world. The choice you do have, the only choice, is whether or not you will obey the God who made you, bought you, saved you, and adopted you. The God who loves you. 

Is it worth it?  Yes.  Yes it is.