Lately, I have been doing a really bad thing.
It is the thing of equating my future spouse with Jesus.
Note: I know that it is not guaranteed that I will have a spouse. I’m okay with that. I have, though, been feeling more and more called to marriage lately. Not like I need to get hitched tomorrow, but like God is preparing me to grow with and submit to the man of His choosing, and like I could use a strong spiritual leader in this life-o-mine. All that to say that for the sake of this blog post I am going to speak as though there is an actual husband in my future.
ANYWAY, this man that I will marry, well, he won’t be Jesus. It’s one of those things about humanity. He’s not going to be that.
And that is where my issue is.
My thinking has become so morphed, and just blatantly wrong. I’ve begun to think of him as Jesus.
I expect him to forgive me,
I expect him to accept me,
I expect him to make me feel valued,
I expect him to redeem me,
To lead me,
To make me grow,
To teach me,
To rebuke me,
To change me,
To fix me.
And while, yes, I want my future husband to forgive me, accept me, rebuke me, etc, I cannot expect that I will one day get married and suddenly all of these needs will be provided for.
I cannot expect another human being, no matter how much he may love me, to fix all of the issues that come together to be me.
I think I expect him to be some sort of priest. Like, when I’m married, I’ll be able to confess all my sins I’ve ever done to him and then I will be free from guilt, but the truth is that I am already free from guilt. The Lord has taken all my sin, and though I am an awful, awful person, he has forgiven me, and I no longer have to feel the weight of my guilt. I don’t know why I let myself forget that.
I know this must sound ridiculous, because explicitly stated, it just sounds dumb, but my hope for a partner has somehow gotten so deeply embedded in my psyche that this good gift has been perverted into a ridiculous expectation.
Here’s the truth:
A husband cannot forgive me,
A husband cannot accept me,
A husband cannot make me feel valued,
A husband cannot redeem me,
He can’t lead me,
He can’t make me grow,
He can’t teach me,
He can’t rebuke me,
He can’t change me,
He can’t fix me.
Not without Christ.
And that’s probably not a startling new insight, but I just needed to say it, I just needed to say it out loud (or rather, type it on my computer) that my thinking is broken. And it’s taking over.
This makes me think of a story my pastor told once.
One day his wife sat up in bed and just said, “Dave, you’re not Jesus.”
And it was a turning point in their marriage. She realized that she couldn’t expect him to save her, that he couldn’t be the greatest thing she lived for. He realized the same.
And I think about that all the time.
And this Advent, I don’t want to be focused on waiting for a human husband to fix me, but on waiting on the return of a divine Savior who has already fixed me, and at the same time is in the process of doing so, who knew my flaws and chose me anyway, who has forgiven me, accepted me, valued me, redeemed me, led me, grown me, taught me, rebuked me, changed me, fixed me.
I want to wait on that Guy.
Cheers.
Also, on an unrelated note, I made a Freaky Friday Soundtrack YouTube playlist tonight. Keepin it classy, keepin it real. Link to the Magic.
