Eavesdropping

 

I overheard a conversation in town last night:

“Hey, haven’t seen you for a while, are you still married?”  That’s what I heard a 50+ year-old man say to a young lady of about 25 that was sitting near me in a restaurant. 

Good grief, is that what it has all come too now?  The expected hail is not “how are you” or “great to see you,” it’s “are you still married” which carries with it the implied assumption that you likely might not be.  I can’t imagine a conversation starting out like that 50 years ago, or even 20 years ago.  We have come to the point where we treat marriage and sexual control as antiquated concepts of ancient history.  “Who needs ‘em,” we say.  The statistics bear this out with around 50% of all marriages ending in divorce, and an even higher percentage of re-marriages ending that way, as well.  Many just choose to live together for a season with no evidence of commitment before man or God, and most of society has no problem with that.

On the other hand, we have gays clamoring for the right to get married.  How weird a contradiction in our civilization is that!  Marriage and family are fundamental to the health of our society…any society.  When that breaks down, everything tends to break down.  I know from personal experience how difficult it is for everyone in a family to go through divorce and to raise a child alone.  The increased vulnerability to all sorts of economic, social and moral problems and failures can’t be overstated. 

Are there genuine reasons for divorce?  Sure.  Dangerous abusive relationships, adultery, and some others come to mind.  But if the mind-set in our society is that when the flush of romance dies I get to “opt-out,” then I think we’ve gone too far.  We also need to spend more time on looking at who we marry and why (basic compatibility.)  Most people rarely know their mate well enough before marriage it seems, and that sows the seeds of disaster all to often.  Perhaps the requirements for a marriage license ought to be more like getting a driver’s license (some would say even a physician’s license – LOL), in that you have to prove you’ve learned a few things about making lasting relationships work before you are allowed to marry.

I suspect we have moved away so far from God’s standard that we just may have lost our way entirely.  If we look at world history or even just Biblical history, collectively moving away from God’s standards doesn’t usually bode well for a country…it’s time to make some changes or else prepare for really tough times ahead.  We may not find ourselves hauled off to captivity into Babylon like the Jewish nation was, but there is all manner of creative ways to be hauled off into captivity these days, and I don’t want to find out what it looks or feels like.