Investments & Returns...

 

Before my big brother got married, he and I were talking about the institution of marriage. I was giving my fairy tale ideas about marriage, when he began to chuckle and shake his head. He told me “Marriage is a business arrangement.” I argued that it was about love and mutual respect, and he countered that it was about stability and finances.

Little did I know that we both were on to something.

Looking back at the situation now, I think that we were both more right than we were giving each other credit. Marriage is about a combination of a lot of things; love, respect, finances, honesty… I could go on and on, but I won’t. There are a lot of separate aspects of marriage that work together to achieve a common goal that we as wives, along with them as husbands, merge together to make a successful product and/or service.

Kind of like a business.

Based on the limited experience that I have with the business world, when one company wants to invest in another company, whether they offer services or products, they will not put any form of finances into it until it proves itself to give them a significant return on their investment. The company looks at every aspect of it’s potential investment, from its employees and their value to the expenses, reliability of the product/service and everything else that has to do with the company. They want to make sure that the money they invest will not be lost.

This should be similar to the way we approach potential marriages.

1 Corinthians 3:6

“I planted the seed in your hearts, and Apollos watered

 it, but it was God who made it grow.

 It’s not important who does the planting or who does the watering.

What’s important is that God makes the seed grow.”

I am a big fan of having some form of independent life established before getting married. I know that history says that a woman is found and seemingly rescued from a life of spinsterhood by a knight in shining armor, but times have changed. Two income households are necessary for the comfortable lifestyles that we all want these days. A lot of time, energy and finances go into marriage.

But we can have a bank vault full of money. If God isn’t watering, we aren’t growing.

God gives us so many talents and skills that we use in our jobs to earn that money that we use to build our lives with our husbands. And He has equipped our husbands as well! However, He gave us these things, so isn’t it only right that we put Him first, in marriage and in life?

That business that we were discussing earlier, it wasn’t about you and your intended or your husband merging together; it was about your marriage being invested in with God’s blessings. We can work together and as hard as we possibly can, but unless we acknowledge God as our Savior, we’re working for nothing. God wants to invest in marriages, and expects those marriages to yield a return to Him. We can plant and water and plant and water.

But God gives the increase…