Common Grounds Online: Amy Lauger, A Poor Match?

Julie is the daughter of a picture-perfect Christian couple. Her father is an elder and a successful businessman and her mother is a devoted stay-at- home mom and Sunday school teacher. Julie was surrounded by love, security, and godly nurture throughout her childhood and her time at a well-respected Christian college. In the early days of her first job, she met Mark. His was a childhood much different from hers. His father struggled with alcoholism and eventually left his mother to raise three children alone on a high school education and little support. Mark didn’t go to church much growing up and rebelled quite a bit in high school. However, at his secular college he accepted Christ through a campus ministry and has sought thereafter to live a life pleasing to the Lord. Julie was immediately attracted to Mark’s humor and passion for Christ and he adored her giftedness, faithfulness to God and clear sense of purpose in life. The two began dating seriously but encountered much resistance from Julie’s parents, who were afraid of what his difficult background could mean for his relationship with their daughter. They urged her to reconsider her feelings toward him.

So often I have seen well-intentioned Christians respond this way to such matches. Sometimes I’ll hear someone say, "They come from different backgrounds. It just won’t work." Or, "she just has too much baggage for him." When I hear such words, I simply want to cringe. Regardless of the speaker’s intentions, as a child of divorce myself, such words make me feel like damaged goods, if you will, and solely a liability to any good, stable Christian man from a good, stable Christian family who might want to marry me. And what makes me cringe even more is that their comments remind me that if I’m honest I often also believe it to be true. I cannot deny that issues stemming from my childhood have unhealthily crept into my relationships with men. And that frightens me. And with half of marriages, both Christian and otherwise, ending in divorce, I am certainly not alone.

Humanly speaking, it makes perfect sense to say that a child from a broken home will inevitably struggle with brokenness, ambivalence, and strife in relationships as an adult. Yet the great paradox that is the gospel turns everything upside down. The weak become strong, the poor become rich. When Paul pleaded with God to take away the thorn in his flesh, the Lord said to him, "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness" (2 Cor. 12:9). Conventional wisdom teaches that hardships lead to brokenness and unhealthiness. Yet, through Christ, hardships lead to maturity instead of dysfunction. For Scripture says, "We also rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope" (Romans 5:3-4).

The lives of both Julie and Mark are in God’s hands. The paths they are destined to take are not laid out merely by the circumstances of their lives. What’s more important is how they live in the midst of those circumstances. Will they choose to live according to their own wisdom or will they acknowledge and seek God in all their ways? They are both in desperate need of the gospel. Without it, Mark would be angry and bitter and Julie would be self-righteous and naive. However, with reliance upon God’s grace, amazing things can happen in both of their lives. Perhaps their different backgrounds will interfere with a good marriage. Or maybe God will choose to use their very different paths to shape them to be just what the other needs as they uniquely point each other to the beauty of Christ. Who knows but God?