God's Plan for Your Life....Ladies.

For this blog, I am going to return to my Christian beliefs before transitioning to other ideas.  I want to show you how the Marriage Life Cycle matches Biblical teaching on women and marriage.

Now that I have spent the vast majority of my posts building bridges and setting out some new ideas and views of some general principles of life, I now am going to absolutely blow this up and ruin everything.  To perform this daring and dangerous act, I am going to touch the third rails of both women and religion.  I believe God has a plan for your life, ladies....and it covers the three parts of the marriage life cycle.

From the KJV:

I Timothy 5:14

I will therefore that the younger women marry, bear children, guide the house, give none occasion to the adversary to speak reproachfully.

Titus 2:4-5

That they may teach the young women to be sober, to love their husbands, to love their children,

To be discreet, chaste, keepers at home, good, obedient to their own husbands, that the word of God be not blasphemed.
 

I can hear you screaming now.  Don't bother, I am going to unpack the whole set of instructions so we can all comprehend exactly what God is getting at.  It is important we all understand what we believe and why and the purpose of our actions here on earth in the sight of divine plan that has specific purposes.

The end result of this plan is to turn every woman into the Proverbs 31 woman, who in case you did not read closely already had children (vs 28).  So the steps God Lays out are logical, and designed to make the process of growth as smooth as possible.  Those steps are:

1. That the younger women marry.

2. That they have children.

3. That the guide the house.

This is literally step one of the Marriage Life Cycle - establishing your household.  Where and how and with whom are you going to build a life is going to go a huge way to determining the quality of the rest of your life.  According to the Got Questions web site, the correct age for a woman to marry is based on "...the word hyperakmos in reference to a female. In this case, it’s a young woman who’s engaged to be married. Hyperakmos is translated as “past her youth” (NASB), past “the flower of her age” (KJV), or “past marriageable age” (CSB). The word literally means “ripe,” a common euphemism in many cultures for describing a woman’s capability for bearing children. Paul’s inclusion of the word definitely indicates that the marriageable age was sometime after puberty, when a woman is fully grown."

So young women means just that, women who are adults and young enough to bear children.  If you think about it this just makes sense for anyone wantinf a family.  And while women who marry at a very young age have higher divorce rates than average, according to Focus on the Family reporting, this stabilizes around 22-25 years old.  By that time, the average couple is mature enough to marry and develop a stable relationship.

However, you have to do these in the correct order, because legion are the women who have caused themselves a lifetime of struggle by having babies out of wedlock.  When others tell you you don't need a man to raise your family they are outright lying to you; having children outside of marriage is a leading indicator of poverty and that is undeniably true.  God's plan is always for children to be born to married parents as this is also a leading indicator of their future well-being.  Marriage is simply critical to the development of ALL the members of the house hold-including the parents.

There are two other reasons you want to marry early; first, the WWALTs in society are already by the age of 22 or so laying down the basis for their future life, and the vast majority will have taken a husband by 26 or so.  The next wave of women, noticing all the quality men are starting to disappear off the market, will redouble their efforts to get a decent man and thin the herd even more.  So once you get to about 27 or so, you are shopping the discount rack.  There are a very few good men left, but they drive a garbage truck or something like that and will never be the incredible prince you believe you deserve.  Like it or not, you are in a real competition for a good man, and waiting is almost a sure-fire way of missing out.  Every man cannot be the CEO of K-mart, dear.  Some flip burgers, and guess where they are found?  You got it, on your discount rack at 30.  Or divorcees, that's always fun too.

So if you are serious about a family you should get married asap, but you are not supposed to do all this on your own.  In I Timothy Chapter 5, you will see there is supposed to be a support network in the Church for both the men and the women to get encouragement and advice and counsel for the husband and wife.  And not just pastors or professional counselors either, but a large and loose group of men and women who are willing to make themselves available.

This is necessary because you CANNOT BE a Proverbs 31 woman at 25 years old.  You don't know enough.  Even if you just got your medical license as a doctor, you can barely rent an apartment and make travel plans.  You have no idea of how to care for others or how your finances are affected by your choices and the laws of your society.  You have no clue about the amazing and bizarre different types of people in the world.  And all of you, your whole family, needs a safe space - we call it a "home" - from which you can learn all this stuff from a moderately safe distance.

And look what the older women are supposed to teach you; to be sober (in every meaning of the word), how to love your husband and love your children.  Why?  Because life is hard, and boring, and bad things happen.  You should use the women in the Church to help keep you on an even keel through it all.  To get advice about everything, from "What about him?" to "We had a big fight.  Now what?"  Because love and commitment and sacrifice do not come any more naturally to women than men, despite what you read in your feminist studies book.

This is how it should work and does in the real world work in a general sense.  Ultimately, all good families start with parents willing to pull together and fight to be closer rather than the opposite.  That Proverbs 31 woman knows her husband well, and they have discussed and worked out not just their daily routine but know each other right down to specifics.  They discussed the field she buys in verse 16, and her husband is not concerned with her ability to handle the details, because they are in "one accord" to use the biblical term.

The woman who does not marry misses out on some of the most important time available to her to develop into a good wife/human being.  There is a great spiritual principle here: YOU BECOME WHATEVER YOU PRACTICE.  And spending a decade being "independent" while other women are doing the work of building a marriage will make you just that - overly independent - and basically unmarriable.  That is why there are so few marriages beyond 32 or so, and why while they may not break apart, they are not nearly as good, either.  A "go along to get along" marriage is just another version of singleness, and works out just that way with blinding regularity.  I know of exactly one couple who married over the age of forty who married into a great relationship.  One.  And of course while children at an advanced age are not impossible, most require expensive financial outlays usually not necessary while you are still fertile.

So it turns out God is not a mighty patriarch in the sky looking to suppress the superior Matriachy after all, but instead he has a plan that covers for your physical, emotional, and psychological needs, and is meant to give you and your husband a solid base from which to grow into adulthood.  It is a good plan, it works, and you should follow it.  Let me make two last observations, and I will be done.

First, those in the Church who encourage women to wait and marry when they are older are in a indirect way making a discreet capitulation to the inevitability of fornication, as it is simply unreasonable to expect healthy young adults to become 40 Year Old Virgins.  I did not lose my own virginity until 20, and everyone in the whole world assumes I must have had some revoltingly disgusting attribute to be a virgin to that age, even back in the 1980's.  So the Church has to whistle past the graveyard here, even as it is well-documented that premarital sex damages the ability to pair bond more than any other single factor.

The Church does universally cater to women and only women, to the point that this has become totally out of any reasonable balance.  The problem is, the Church grovels before women to the point of absurdity, and the "women's programs" that every Church has are nothing more than cheer-leading sessions that gush to reinforce the idea of female superiority.  From all that I have seen, the vast majority of "church programs" are utterly worthless, but none come anywhere near as being as destructive as women's ministry.  I have actually had a woman tell me she is a "Christian feminist", the most ridiculous contradiction in terms I have ever heard.

And now that you hate my guts, I would like to wish you a Happy Mother's Day.  Be blessed.