Why Marriage When It Looks Scary

            I left class on Tuesday full of anxiety. My heartrate was heightened, my breathing was shallow and rapid, and my body was full of stress tension. I felt fear, literal fear. We had been talking about engagement and marriage, the next two steps after dating and courtship.  I didn’t know why I was scared or what I was scared of, but I was scared.

            I’ve never seen anything good come out of a marriage. I would say that I did—at this point in my life—but it took me a long time to see that. I lived for five years not knowing if my life was even worth the ride. So other than the fact that I exist, nothing. Not one positive, happy thing. But a lot of ugly, obscene, unhappy, crying in the fetal position things. So, why get married? What’s the point? In class we talked about the challenges that a couple would face in the first year of their marriage and beyond. In real life people warn, “Don’t be fooled, marriage isn’t all kittens and roses.” I know that. So, what’s the point?

            I was walking back home from class with some friends on Thursday, when Hannah stopped us all and pointed to the curbside “Look! It’s a rosebush! I’ve seen it before, but it didn’t have actual roses, so I didn’t know. I thought it was just a bush. I didn’t see the thorns, either.”

            “I feel like there’s a lesson that can be learned from this,” Kate said.

            We started making up allegories.

            “You don’t see someone’s thorns (or roses) until you really know them.”

            “Even though it has thorns, roses still grow.”

            Then we noticed a vine, struggling its way up through the middle of the rosebush.

            “It’s a husband and wife, supporting one another and growing in harmony,” Kate said.

            “Or it’s a parasite,” I replied.

            She sighed “You’re both so negative.”

            We passed by another clump of flowering bushes and stopped to play with the snowball-like flowers. As we walked away, Kate looked back and pointed at the different bushes growing together “It’s like: husband, wife, family.”

            I patted her on the shoulder “We can tell you’re majoring in Marriage and Family Studies.”

            “Marriage between a man and a woman is ordained of God and... the family is central to the Creator’s plan for the eternal destiny of His children,” she quoted (The Family:A Proclamation to the World).

            That’s when it hit me: that’s why.

            God loves us. He is our eternal, very literal, heavenly father. We are His children. We lived with Him as spirits in a premortal realm before we lived on this planet. In order for us to progress, to “grow up” to become all that we could be, we had to gain physical bodies and have certain experiences in them that would help us along that journey to becoming. That’s what this life is about, and the family provides us with both a safe and loving environment to experience life in as well as many of those experiences along the way. It gives us the opportunity to learn how to love people despite their imperfections and to act selflessly. It gives us the chance to understand a fraction of how much God loves us as we are loved by our parents and have our own children. It stretches us to our limits in our goal to become like Jesus Christ. It give us emotional and physical support as we go through life.

            That’s why the family is so important: because it is central to God’s plan. And marriage is important because it is the beginning of a family.

            Those of us who didn’t have “perfect Christian families” know how hard it was. Is. Always will be. It’s easy to become bitter. It’s easy to say that it’s all a joke. Don’t think that I haven’t been there. Don’t think that I haven’t said that. I’ve been there. I’ve said all of that. But I realize today that that pain is a testament to how true the statement is that the family is central to God’s plan. If it wasn’t, we wouldn’t care about the dysfunction. It wouldn’t hurt so much, cause so many problems, or stick with us for so long.

            I can hear the “So what’s?” in the background. One of them is often my own. “Yeah, that’s great that the family is so central to God’s wonderful plan for His children—did you miss the point that mine wasn’t?!” The reason why I’m writing this is I believe that there is hope for better. First of all, Jesus Christ can heal us from the scars that we have acquired over the years. He can change us. I’ve seen it, people. In my own life. He. Can. Heal. You. If you ask. Second of all, we are powerful beings. We can create what we didn’t have growing up for our own families. My roommate has this positive, six sibling, loving, supportive family with wonderful parents and I don’t. The other day I asked her how I was ever going to be able to do the same because I didn’t grow up with that stuff; I’m not going to know how it works. She said to me “Kyann, my parents didn’t grow up like that; they stuck close to God and they created what they wanted.”

Oh.

“You can, too.”

Oh! I can!

That’s what the best news ever of the gospel is: the fact that, no matter what, “I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me” (Philippians 4:13).  That’s why I’m taking this class, that’s why I moved to this place: because I believed that things could get better and that I could be the one to make it happen with God’s help. And it is getting better, it’s just that most of the time I’m too impatient to recognize and appreciate it. (Which must be why patience is a virtue.)

Kyann

P.S. If you don’t have Christ in your life, I would encourage you to check this website out, because He’s the best and you can find out how to connect with Him there.