Do You Really Want THE JOB?

I had a conversation with a 72 year old lady who I frequently work out with at my YMCA that went like this:

She: Do you get lonely?

LARISSA: No, not really.

She: I date. I want to find a man whom I can marry.

LARISSA: Do you really want the job?

She: (silence with a blank stare)

LARISSA: You understand it’s a job, right?

She: I don’t mind cooking every now and then. But I like to eat out. (with a smirk in her eye) - I am a night partner, you know what I mean, right?

LARISSA: Do you realize that the purpose of marriage is not to get pleasure but to serve the other? That’s what it was designed for.

She: If he is a nice person and is considerate, I don’t mind serving.

LARISSA: You are missing the point. There are no ‘ifs’. It does not matter if they follow through with the commitment to serve you. You are going into a marriage to serve the other. Period.

She: I can do laundry, I don’t mind cleaning occasionally...

LARISSA: Do you know that women in general live longer than men?

She: Oh really?

LARISSA: Which means, the older we are, the less men of the right age are available. Do you want to spend the rest of your life being a nurse to someone?

She: I want to meet someone who is kind, considerate, friendly, and rich.

LARISSA: Men like that are already taken. Only those who don’t want to take care of themselves are out there. That is exactly the reason they are still available.

She: I was dating this guy. We used to talk on the phone a lot. One day during our conversation on the phone I told him that I don’t have any money. He hang up on me.

LARISSA: Yep.

She: I still want to find a nice man to date. Wait a second, (as she glanced at the TV screen) - here’s something horrible on the news!

So, she proceeded watching the news and I could not help but think: Is it any wonder that young girls dream about something that marriagewas never designed to give them, when a mature 72 year old is still thinking about marriage in terms of ‘prince charming and happily ever after’?

Surely, there is nothing wrong with teaching our girls tolook for love in a relationship with a man. But what really the word ‘love’ means in this context? What does it look like?

Don’t get me wrong, it took me a lot of years, three failed marriages, and conclusion that I am simply not a wife material before I actually decided to find out what is it that marriage is for.

You might not know this about me, but I am a Christian, I believe in God the Father who created me for His glory and Who has designed a marriage relationship. He knows exactly what the purpose of that relationship is.

He is the one who has shown me through a very talented pastor what love which we all search for looks like, as it relates to choosing a person to date and to eventually marry, so that children might be born into that relationship and be raised in love.

How I wish that I knew about marriage at 20 what I know now! 

I am neither regretful nor desperate. 

I have a strong desire in my heart to teach young girls who are around 10-11 years old, may be, what exactly they need to be looking for in every single young man, as they grow into young ladies who’s heads are filled with dreams about their future.

For now though, I will share with you about how love looks like, what became a revelation for me very recently, and hope it will speak to your heart as much as it did to mine.

The most unexpected fact about the passage below is the first way love manifests itself. When I first saw it – I mean really understood what those lines mean, I was completely blown away. I’ve underlined it for emphasis.

Here it is:

1 Corinthians 13:4-7New International Version (NIV)

⁴ Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. ⁵ It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. ⁶ Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. ⁷ It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

I am not sure if you are familiar with this passage of scripture at all, but 3 verses right before the passage above say this (my loose translation): None of our accomplishments matter, if we do not love like that. That’s God’s opinion – as the Holy Scripture is His words.

That statement is so heavy…

I tried to read verses 4-7 from 1 Corinthians 13 replacing ‘love’ with ‘if you are’ and inverting positive statement into negative and vice versa – the conclusion at the end of the passage was shocking – ‘then you don’t love’.

Makes me wonder, what exactly people who marry for love mean when they say to one another ‘I love you’… 

Well, I was one of those people – 3 times, so I am definitely not pointing fingers here...