Mr. Right
It’s ludicrous to believe that successful marriages depend on discovering the one person out of the more than six billion people on earth who is just right for you. — Les & Leslie Parrott, Saving Your Marriage Before It Starts, 31.
The problem the Parrotts identify here is related to a popular view of the will of God. According to this view, God has a plan for your life that will lead to the greatest possible happiness, fulfillment, fruitfulness, and blessing. The plan is not spelled out in Scripture — Scripture doesn’t say what courses you should take in college or what jobs you ought to accept or whom you should marry — but you are responsible to discover the plan and follow it. And if you miss “God’s perfect will for your life” — if you take the wrong classes, accept the wrong job, marry the wrong spouse — the result will be misery.
Well-meaning people sometimes try to comfort a single friend by saying, “Don’t worry. God has someone out there who is just perfect for you. Apparently Bob wasn’t the one, but the right one is out there somewhere.”
Well, maybe. In fact, maybe there are a thousand men who would be, if not Mr. Right, at least a suitable and godly spouse with whom this single girl would be able to have a marriage that glorifies God and that enriches both partners. It simply isn’t true that God has chosen one man (or, if you’re male, one woman) who would be the right spouse and whom you’ve somehow got to locate and wed or you’ll be doomed to marital misery. And it isn’t true that if you marry someone and then have problems, it must mean that you missed out on Mr. or Miss Right, that you missed out on the person God made who would be perfect for you.
There is no Mr. Right, no perfect spouse, no “perfect will of God for your life.” That’s a truth that ought to give singles hope, an increased hope of finding a spouse without being scared off by every flaw and a hope that goes hand in hand with responsibility. Choose wisely, but know that whoever you choose you will not be Mr. and Mrs. Right. And then work in faith to serve God together in your marriage as Mr. and Mrs. Suitable-and-Growing.
January 7th, 2011 at 3:12 pm
Right on.
I was teaching through Judges a couple of years back and stopped to make this very point when I got to chapter 21. How did the sons of Benjamin know that the dancing girl they swooped up and carried off was their one and only “soul mate”?
What’s more, if you were to get married, and your spouse were to die, and then you are remarried to a widow – then which one of you is which one’s “Mr. Right”?
Maybe I didn’t articulate my thoughts too well, but my points weren’t received enthusiastically to say the least. But it is apparent that we live with Disney Princess definitions of romance and love, and the world is more complicated than that. Or maybe simpler.
January 7th, 2011 at 5:13 pm
I heard Henry Krabbendam speak on this topic about fifteen years ago down in San Diego. What a liberating concept. God holds out a variety of godly choices and says ‘I delight in your choice because your trust is in me.’