“Thank you for being the man of my dreams.”
We had been sitting there watching the sunrise, smelling the sea breeze coming off the gulf when she said it. We were on this small beach in Portland TX, just a short walk from Grandpa’s house. All during her childhood Stacie had come here at various times to play. There are photos in the Jones family albums and some home video projects to document this. Stacie and her siblings called it the ‘Mountain Beach’ for obvious reasons.
Anytime the woman of my dreams tells me I’m the man of her dreams, it leaves me a bit breathless. Stacie explained that all through her childhood when she had come here having her siblings was enough company most of the time. But frequently she imagined what it would be like to have that ‘special man’ with her. Especially as she grew older. I’m not particularly happy that she was lonely for so long, but the memory of it made her hug me tight and I like that. I was her ‘special man’ with her on an adventure at Mountain Beach.
What’s this got to do with you?
Maybe nothing. But as I sat there that morning soaking up the beauty of God’s creation and basking in the love of my wife I thought of the years before I had met Stacie. When I thought of that decade of singleness, I thought of all the other single men I know. And that led me to musing as to whether any of you single young men out there have the same mindset I once had.
Disclaimer: I am not trying to force anyone to get married. I am also not trying to run a guilt trip on any single young men. I am just sharing some encouragement that I could have used a number of years ago.
I thought of marriage as something rather nice in the far off fuzzy future. Somehow I never quite made the connection between my current actions and my distant future. A course in ‘Goals Clarification’ might have helped. But the crux of the situation was revealed to me in some dark night of the soul in my personal journey: I was guarding myself against marriage, while professing a desire for marriage.
To my surprise I discovered that marriage, or preparation for marriage, wasn’t really a goal that I had. I had the goal of being a godly single man. I had a goal of keeping myself for my future wife. I even had a goal of following a specific set of guidelines for courtship. And that was just it- that was my discovery- I was so busy trying to achieve the perfect courtship that I was not preparing for marriage. In fact, it seemed that I was not so much concerned about getting married as I was about making sure that I ‘did it right’ before I got married.
This is somewhat like having a view of Christianity that only focuses on our time on earth. The most important part of Christianity is Eternity. Our time on earth is preparation for that time. It is really important that we learn as much about Eternity as possible and then live the short amount of time here on earth accordingly.
Marriage is about the years a husband and wife spend together raising a godly heritage. The process leading up to that is preparation. I was spending so much time trying to decide and explain what I believed about preparation for marriage that I was not even preparing for marriage. Once I corrected my thinking on this, my behavior changed and I began preparing for marriage.
And that is how I ended up on Mountain Beach with my beautiful wife Stacie.