May 6, 2017.

My overactive mind is at work again😊 and it all began with an innocent statement that happened to escape from the lips of a friend. Follow my thought process please….

L.O.V.E, Some say it’s the most abused word in the English dictionary, to a large extent I agree. Stand before a gathering of people and ask for a definition for the word ‘love’ and you’d get a myriad of responses. I like to say Love can’t be defined, and trying to define love is like trying to define God, imagine that, wouldn’t that be an exercise in futility? I believe that no matter how much we try or how much knowledge we acquire we would never be able to pen down the words that can sufficiently define love. So what we often do is describe its expressions as we see demonstrated around, so we often say love is a strong feeling, because that’s an expression we see, we say it’s sacrifice because that’s how we see love demonstrated but we barely scratch the surface of what Love truly means, at best, we only describe its attributes.

It was a totally different discussion we (I and some female friends) were having when someone said “these days people don’t marry for Love…..” she hadn’t made her point but those words just stuck to my heart so strongly and I started thinking (my mind is a worker bee), Should Love even be the reason we marry? Now before you judge me let me land please, just follow me.

Let me start by reviewing the concept of marriage and love as I understand it. I believe marriage is a union between two people with the aim of helping each other reach their God given purpose (hmm, we should talk about purpose soon too you know, my mind is already drifting again, I better quickly finish this before it runs off!😊), and the best way I can possibly describe love is this; Love is God’s nature. End of story. I realized that when people talk about marrying for love, they are often referring to that deep seated feeling that you have towards someone so much so that you care more about that person than you do for yourself, you always want to be around them and when you say you can’t go a day without them you actually mean it. So we often believe that once we genuinely get to feel this way about someone then it’s time to marry, Yipee! It’s really cute, but as good as it sounds, I really believe that it falls short of God’s design. Just keep following me please…

The word of God commands us to love all of mankind even those that hate us. So if love is the reason why we marry, then I should just marry anybody because I’m expected to love everyone after all. Now people have tried to divide love into ‘types’ but lets not even go there now. I sincerely believe that, that strong feeling that we so attach to Love is actually ‘attraction’ which is in itself beautiful but as much as it’s an essential criteria for why we chose who we chose, that can’t be the REASON why we marry.

When God gave Eve to Adam (I always like to go back to where things all started) there was just one thing God said Adam needed ‘a helpMEET’ (yes, MEET not MATE!,) and come to think of it, it makes sense that if marriage is part of the journey towards achieving God’s reason for putting us on earth then we should do it with someone who can help us achieve this and someone we can be a help to too. If it was all about love, think of it, haven’t you been ‘in love’ with someone who you were totally not compatible with? Now just imagine marrying that person…it would be chaos, because eventually the feelings (known to some as Love) would simmer down and then what?

Just so I’m not misquoted, let me emphasize that, attraction is important and all those feelings that we tend to summarize as love (the buterflies and jelly tummies) are lovely too but they are secondary (if you don’t agree, bite my head off😛). One last thought, I once saw  this somewhere “Love who you marry or marry who you Love?” well this is my choice; Marry a help that’s meet for YOU and then love that person forever, because in the end we are actually meant to love everybody and love is something we grow into every day.😉

JESUSRULES#