Soapy delusions

I titled this entry "Soapy Delusions" because KatieLyn's reasons for calling off the wedding so closely resemble the scripting of a soap opera.  I needed a working title that could be a catalyst to bump me off my writer's block. The intent had been to come back and edit with a more Jane Austen-ish title. But shortly after I typed the heading, I also realized that KarieLyn's justifications have all the weight of bubbles, (practically none,) and that they could be burst with a sharp jab of truth. So, "Soapy Delusions" it is; on to the bubble bursting.

Today I am going to look at KatieLyn's two leading "reasons" for running out on marriage with Joe. I'm sorry that I have to put that word in quotation marks, but the interest of accuracy requires that they be there. Her "reasons" were not well-reasoned. They were unfounded excuses.

Reason #1

"Sadly, I put Joe's and mine relationship ahead of my relationship with God."

That sounds all nice and pious, doesn't it?  The prim little bride has entered the confessional and admitted to breaking the number-one commandment: I am the Lord your God; you shall have no other gods before me!  Surely no good god-fearing soul is going to argue with The Commandments. God must come first; therefore I must jilt Joe.

In truth, there are many problems with that reasoning. The first one will be obvious to any mature Christian:  If you have a relationship that has taken precedence over your relationship with God, the first step is to repent and re-sort your priorities.  Put God first again.

 You do not necessarily have to throw out whatever you had made more important than the Lord. That verse from Matthew 18:8, "And if your hand or your foot causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away," that's an idiom folks! An idiom is an expression that means something other than the literal meaning. This idiom is meant to convey that missing God and being thrown into the eternal fire is very serious stuff. It does not mean that God has commanded amputation as the go-to solution.  Even a godless world recognizes common sense and has a secular proverb, "Don't throw out the baby with the bathwater."

Another problem with that excuse is that KatieLyn has never once been willing to articulate an example of how she put hers and Joe's relationship before her relationship with God. They were doing Bible studies together and praying together regularly. Certainly Joe never felt their relationship was detracting from his relationship with God. To the contrary, he saw it as carrying out God's plan for their lives. His relationship with KatieLyn was enriching his relationship with the Lord and bringing him closer to God because the Lord was entrusting him with new and heightened responsibilities of being a husband.

Because KatieLyn has never explained why she felt that she could not be in a relationship with Joe and still put God first, especially in light of the fact that God told her that Joe was the husband for whom she'd been seeking with a prodigious amount of prayer, it raises this question that I think God would want to ask her:  "Katie dear, I already told you that marrying Joe was My plan for your life. You liked it at the time and thanked Me. Now, exactly, how does running away from My plan put Me first?"

Reason #2

"I was in love with the idea of marriage rather than in love with Joe."

Since when have these been a rather-than preference thing? Since never. When God ordained marriage in the Garden of Eden, Adam loved both his wife AND the idea of being married to her. When both the bride and the groom in a relationship have an inner witness that marriage to each other is God's will for their lives, as KatieLyn and Joe did, then they certainly ought to be in love with the idea of marriage—it was God's idea, after all.

And who could have matured beyond the teen years and not been able to distinguish the difference? (Okay, there is Bonnie Lee Bakley, but both she and her tenth husband were nutty, which sort of makes my point.) A normal girl will develop the ability to differentiate between being in love with being in love and being in love with a man during her teen years. Women who do not know the difference by the time they have passed the mid-20s have deep emotional problems. KatieLyn was late in her twenty-eighth year and should have known better.

The night that KatieLyn fled, she confessed to Joe that she still loved him. You can see how this leaves me with a very awkward dilemma. Either KatieLyn is a complete twit, or she is not giving the real reason for running off in the middle of the night. If she is not giving the real reason, either she knows that she is lying or she is completely deceived. If she is completely deceived, she is either a twit 0.2 or the devil has her in his clutches. I tend to believe that the devil has her in his clutches, and while this is the worst of all possibilities, it is also the easiest one to forgive.  A person can always repent and be delivered from the devil; it is much harder to fix twit.

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This will undoubtedly be an oft repeated theme on this blog, but Satan hates marriage. Marriage is integral to God's divine design to fill the earth with the knowledge of God. Married parents provide a stable, nurturing atmosphere for raising up children who know, respect, and love God. Of course, the devil is going to try to prevent a marriage that would produce those results!

And the lesson for this post ties into that truth. The devil is an enabler. Both of those excuses enabled KatieLyn to feel that she was doing a 'noble act' by sparing Joe from the mistake of his life. It did not matter that her justification doesn't wash, (see how I tied 'doesn't wash' back to the 'soapy' title?) The devil is perfectly fine with dishing up nonsensical excuses as long as the excuses can confuse a person into losing her faith.

The Lesson
Like bubbles, KatieLyn's so-called reasons were taking up volumes of space in her mind, but there was practically no substance to them.