When to Lose is to Win
On the demands of love
There are times when one has to wrestle with God, dearly hoping one will be defeated. Hoping that your own wants are proved weaker than your obedience to God. Case in point: marriage and family formation. Modern society makes the dream of marriage and family difficult to realize – and particularly so if you wish to do so in a righteous way. In the following, we shall look at the various obstacles set in our way.
Free fall
Our culture is in a state of sexual chaos. How do you map a righteous path from courtship to marriage, when courtship is a word most people find unfamiliar, and marriage is considered optional? Even relatively conservative people think of marriage as some vague end state only to be considered after a long period of cohabitation. Not as the beginning of a life together, but simply a way of making official an already shared life. It is thought absurd to decline from sex before marriage in a society riddled with sex before and outside marriage. Ours is a society where extramarital sex is a status symbol and a building block of sound reputation and high self-esteem.
Few people now think along traditional lines concerning sex and sexual relations, or consider the traditional line at all palatable. When you add in other elements of sexual ethics, such as negative views towards contraception, and especially pro-life views on abortion, we have a very great obstacle in our hands.
Backing up a bit, how do you even take the first step in a righteous manner? Dating apps have become normative. That’s where the women are and that’s where they expect to be approached. Foregoing their use will hamper your endeavors greatly. In a previous piece I’ve gone through the reasons for believing dating apps are not righteous.
To put long story short: they operate based on a superficial, dehumanizing process. They bring artificiality and mechanization in the most precious and intimate areas of your life, areas which should definitely remain natural, organic, humane, and rightly ordained. Perhaps most alarmingly, they also signify a lack of trust in God, an attempt to break your life into a game of numbers and probabilities. It is righteous to understand that randomness is not the principle around which the world operates. Treating love and family formation as if they were based on probability is a veritable act of sacrilege.
Nevertheless, the temptation to use the apps will be strong and will likely grow stronger as you try and fail through more traditional means. In your mind you’ll know that it’s through the apps that you’d be more likely to succeed in fulfilling your dream. As the case may be, the choice to forego their use may amount to the sacrifice of the dream itself.
Unevenly yoked
Another obstacle is that, as Paul says, we should not yoke ourselves together with unbelievers, for what do light and darkness have in common? After all, how could you be joined in marriage if you aren’t even joined on the same strait path towards the narrow gate? This of course means that your wife would need to be a Christian.
However, based on the statistics from recent years, the number of Christians among young women has collapsed, after already being low for decades. So as you encounter women organically, there’s only a small chance that the lovely girl you meet and get infatuated with will be a Christian. This will again test you – will you chase after your dream of wife and family, or will you either say no to her, or require her convert for things to progress? Requiring conversion will usually amount to same as simply saying no, to say nothing about the genuineness of such conversions.
Also worth considering is the question of the end state. Were you to somehow succeed in mapping your path righteously in finding or converting a Christian wife – could you expect yourself to live up to the demands of husbandhood at the destination? Here it is good to keep in mind that we live in a society that offers zero moral support for a husband in his duties.
In fact quite the reverse, all you’ll get from society is only going to damage your efforts: anti-paternal messaging, feminist pro-equality propaganda, rules and expectations that step on family autonomy and husband’s authority… Will you have what it takes to succeed at something inherently challenging, but now in conditions absolutely merciless?
And this time it won’t be only your own soul at stake, but the souls of all those you love and are responsible of as their leader.
Pushed to the brink
On a social level, Christianity demands us to view the World as deeply broken, in particular the modern secularized society we find ourselves in. This negative and guarded attitude to the World is divinely warranted, but from the point of view of fulfilling the dream it is quite problematic. Men who have very negative attitudes towards their culture and society aren’t very attractive as husband candidates. But are you willing to lie to yourself or to your prospective wife?
“If you belonged to the world, it would love you as its own. As it is, you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world. That is why the world hates you.”
As noted in relation to dating apps, underlying all these practical issues is the fundamental question of worldview. Why are we here? What is our primary goal? Is it to fall in love and create families? Or is it to become righteous? The determination of primacy here will determine your life.
If you set your dream of wife and family on top, you will have no qualms using dating apps or doing anything else unscrupulous to achieve it. But if righteousness is the ultimate goal, you may well need let go of the dream. The difficulty is that the sexual and procreative drive, the desire and the longing for love, are naturally so strong in us – but righteousness so weak.
On the level of sheer feeling it may appear like you are giving up everything while receiving nothing in return. In a worldly sense that is true, because the kingdom of God is not of this world. Be that as it may, it doesn’t feel like a fair demand.
But consider Abraham. He had to be willing to sacrifice his familial happiness post hoc. How much more crushed and conflicted must he have felt? To give up the wonderful son he had been given in his old age. Yet that was the demand. What we are demanded here is the willingness to sacrifice only our dream of a family, not an actual flesh and blood family.
“If you cling to your life, you will lose it, and if you let your life go, you will save it.”
And mark you: what we are demanded is willingness. As with Abraham and the last second revoking of the divine demand, there’s a chance that God will not ultimately demand we give up our dream either - after we have decided to be willing to forego it.
We may justly determine that we are unable to combine righteousness with our dream. But keep in mind that is only looking at the matter from the perspective of our human capacity. Yes, it may indeed be impossible for us. But not impossible for God.
The astonishing thing is that by losing your wrestling match with God, you may perhaps gain your dreams. Not because of your own stubborn efforts against the divine grain, but because of grace and trust in the divine plan. That is the perspective of hope against hope.
It may also help to keep in mind that ultimately we are owed nothing. The Christian teaching is that the only thing we justly deserve is damnation. Whatever else we may get, even a lonely life of unfulfilled dreams, is still a gift of grace compared to our just deserts.
On a more positive note, it may help to remind ourselves of the stakes.
“What good it will be for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul?”
People tend to think only of money or power when they read that passage. But I believe it relates pressingly to earthly love and the moral compromises attaining it may require.
Let us imagine on one side is placed the dream of getting to spend the rest of your life with a lovely wife and a loving family of your own. On the other is the eternal fate of your soul. Which will you put first when pushed to the brink?
