Chapter 30: Planning and Preparation

 Nancy:

    After accepting Loren’s proposal, we began to discuss our wedding plans. Of course, this began with a discussion on setting the date.

    “I definitely don’t want to be a June bride,” I said. “It’s a cookie-cutter thing. I just don’t want to be like everybody else. There are certain traditions I don’t care for and that’s one of them.

    “July … now that would be too hot. August would definitely be too hot. September would start cooling down …” But suddenly, Loren interrupted earnestly. “We are not waiting until September!”

    “Yes sir.” I said, as I recoiled meekly. But when he explained his reasons, I honestly had to agree with them.

    “Honey,” he said, in a much softer tone, “I think we need to be very humble about this, and realistically consider our limitations. Can we talk about this?”

    “Sure, go ahead.”

    “Well, I’ve seen this before. I’ve known lots of Christian couples who had long engage­ments and it ended up being harmful. Eventually, it led them to a fall. Even if they were virgins, they just couldn’t help it: they fell into premarital sex.

    “Of course, they were ashamed and crushed when that happened, and felt that they’d ruined something very precious. It was especially tragic since they had almost made it. Some of them talked to me about it afterward and this is what they said in hindsight:

    “Why was their engagement so long? Because their friends and family had advised them to be patient and wait. But why had they all suggested that? Nancy, even they didn’t know. They’d only said it because they heard everyone else saying it!

    “But if you’ll stop to think about it, those poor couples were playing with fire. They knew they were getting married and that they would share a sexual life, and a part of them needed to adjust to that—yet the reality itself was a long way off. They started splitting at the seams; it was just too much temptation for them to bear. And I’ve even seen this happen with very strong Christians.

    “If there’s a reason for waiting, like a college graduation or something, that’s one thing; but if not, I think it’s asking for trouble. If marriage is what their future holds, then I really suggest they get on with it.”

    I’d heard similar advice from one of my pastors so I saw his point at once. Maybe, deep down inside, there was still a little part of me that was trying to buy more time—just out of habit!

    All right then, we adjusted our plans and cut our engagement time in half. We began to plan for a wedding in late May. Just three-and-a-half months to plan a wedding and I had no idea what that would entail. But as it turned out, we were very glad that we did this.

    The temptation Loren described was certainly real and it was getting quite difficult toward the end—but we made it. I don’t know where we would have gotten the strength to last much longer, and especially not twice as long. This is something every Christian couple should humbly consider from the outset, when they’re setting their wedding date. Better to keep a humble attitude and play it safe from the beginning than to kid yourself and regret it later.

Loren:

    For us, the next challenge was in finding a pastor to perform our ceremony. As it happened, this tore a scab from one of our old wounds because none of them would do it unless we attended their premarital counseling. One pastor even wanted to know what rights of mediation his church would have in our marriage, if he performed our ceremony!

    Nancy and I knew that most churches got their premarital counseling from psychology, and we’d agreed not to accept that in our marriage. We had no doubt that their intentions were good, but the results had proven to us that it should be rejected.

    Even so, it challenged us in another way. Simply put, we wanted to have a common background with the other Christian couples we knew. “Ah,” they would say. “We remember going through the process when we were engaged: the blood tests, the marriage license, the announcements, the premarital counseling ...”

    “Ah yes,” we would answer. “We shared that experience ...” We wanted to be a part of the fabric of marriage as a cultural experience shared with our fellow believers. This may be hard for you to grasp, but when you actually find yourselves in that place it’s hard to say ‘No.’ Yet in the end we found a much better solution, based on Titus 2:3-4:

“the older women … should admonish the younger women to love their husbands, to love their children, to be discreet, chaste, homemakers, good, obedient to their own husbands, that the word of God may not be blasphemed.”

    To chart a new course, we sought the advice of older couples whose marriages we knew to be strong. Two of those couples had been married for more than 60 years! If they were willing to talk, we used an approach like this:

    “We’ve decided not to attend premarital counseling because it’s based on too many theories with poor results. Instead, we’d like to ask some couples who know from experience how it really works. We know you’ve been married for a long time and that you’ve probably been through a lot. So if you wouldn’t mind, could we ask you a few questions?

    “All of those premarital theories aside, once you actually did get married, what did you actually find? What were some things you needed to adjust to, in real life? How did you go about solving your differences? What’s kept you together? And what sort of advice would you pass along to a new Christian couple like us?”

    The advice they gave was consistently wonderful, and the results were even better! And I’ll bet it gave us a greater identification with the true fabric of marriage than most other couples of our generation.

    By the way, once in a while we also asked some younger couples for their advice, and sure enough their premarital counseling came from psychology. Their advice sounded okay on the surface, yet it was always based on faulty premises. Here are a few examples, so you can see what I mean:

    “They taught us how to fight fair!” (Premise: marriage is about fighting, let’s teach them how.)

    “They taught us to find a ‘safe’ place to argue, like going to Wal-Mart!” (Premise: marriage is about arguing. Never trust your spouse completely, seek the moral support of strangers.)

    “They taught us to define our expectations of each other.” (Premise: marriage is a give-and-take arrangement, quid-pro-quo, not a mutual dedication.)

    One may readily see the constant, underlying theme of ‘self’ emerging. This brings us to the most fundamental clash between psychology and scripture. Psychology wants to preserve individuality within a marriage, whereas Scripture declares that the two have become one. Psychology sets up limits, boundaries, and barriers to control the extent of the relationship – so is there any wonder that a sense of partnership suffers, and that divorce sends them back to being single again? (Mark 10:7-9; Proverbs 11:24).

    Over and over, we heard an expression from the younger couples that “Marriage is a 50-50 arrangement.”

    “Not so!” said another person. “My pastor says it’s more like 75-75!” But even that is wrong. We must look to Christ and the church for the true example (Ephesians 5:25):

    When Jesus gave Himself for the church, He didn’t just give an arm and a leg. From the crown of His head to the souls of His feet, and for as wide as He could spread His arms, He was pierced, bruised, and scourged on our behalf; and from deeply within His heart He bears our griefs and sorrows, and cares for our well-being even above His own; and He does so sincerely and eternally. His devotion to us is total and He requires the same in return (Matthew 10:37; John 15:12-13).

    Who can believe that Jesus would be satisfied with a 50-percent devotion—or even 75-percent—from His bride, the church? Just as He gave Himself for us, aren’t we to be a living sacrifice for Him, in return? And shouldn’t our devotion to Him be heartfelt and complete? Obviously, one hundred percent is the only ratio of devotion that could ever please Him (Revelation 3:16; Romans 8:11-12; 12:1; Mark 12:30-34).

    The dedication between a Christian man and woman is similar. This doesn’t mean devotion is blind, but it does flow through a generous, selfless prudence that seeks the good of their partner even above their own (Ephesians 1:8; Philippians 1:9-10; 2:3-5). It follows the example of Jesus, the husband, who works to present us faultless before the throne of His glory with exceeding great joy; and of the church, his bride, who does her husband good and not evil all the days of her life (Jude 24; Proverbs 31:12).

    For the record, that’s what we saw reflected in the successful marriages of the older couples, and that’s what made their advice superior in every way. In it, we saw the constant theme of honor, a true understanding of commitment and a selfless sense of sacrifice for their partner. And, may I say it? Their marriage was based on loving each other, as Christ loves the church, as opposed to merely loving themselves.

Nancy:

    Even though we’d declined premarital counseling, we needed professional advice in other ways and we sought it where we needed it. For example, we both had a weakness in financial planning, so we took a seminar in that. We also consulted Loren’s friend from Houston, who was a natural genius in that area.

    Another example: we were now in our early 40’s and thinking of having children, so we consulted a physician. He referred us to a geneticist, and we also consulted a nutritionist. Furthermore, we read Dr. Ed Wheat’s book, Intended for Pleasure, so we could educate our virgin minds on the sexual matters that would follow.

    Birth control was another area we needed to discuss. Our friends and family advised us, almost universally, to wait for a year (or at least six months), before trying to have children so we could dedicate our first year to the marriage itself. One of my close friends even begged me to do this, and we completely agreed with her (based on Deuteronomy 24:5).

    Another area where we needed assistance was in wedding planning, but I’m only going to touch on some of the basics here. Start by planning your budget. Get an estimate of how many guests you might have, then try to reserve a suitable church for your ceremony. You’ll need to do this early since churches can be booked up for months in advance. Next, be sure to get on the registry gun—register at some of the major department stores. Then send out your invitations.

    In all of your preparation, try to remember that after every wedding comes a MARRIAGE. So if you go into debt over your wedding, you might start off your marriage with a financial crisis – and that could hinder you for many years to come. So use a little prudence in planning your budget, and use a little pre-hindsight: one day after your wedding, the cake will be eaten, the invitations will be in the trash, the decorations will be taken down and the tuxedos will be returned. But for the rest of your life, your pictures will remain and you’ll still have your rings. So where should you be putting most of your available funds?

    The Lord blessed Loren and me so greatly that we were able to pay cash for our entire wedding and honeymoon, right down to some expenses we had never even thought of. And He worked through our family and friends in the body of Christ to meet many of those needs.

Loren:

    For us, the final concern was our wedding vows. For many years I’d sought the ideal of Christ and the church as the basis for a Christian marriage, and I wanted our vows to reflect that. I wanted them to reflect the entire Biblical concept of a marriage, as derived from the heavenly model.

    I’d often thought of writing those vows myself, but that can be a melancholy experience for a single man. And now that our wedding was near and we were so busy planning, I was just too short on time. But fortunately the Lord looked on us favorably and sent the body of Christ to our rescue!

    We soon met Pastor Fred Brothers of Father’s House church, here in Tulsa. He not only agreed to perform our ceremony, but suggested some special vows that he had written himself. I looked them over with sheer delight! They reflected Christ and the church almost perfectly, and his sense of prose was beautiful. Even if I’d taken months to plan it and had done my very best writing with many revisions, I could never have approached such a masterpiece. The hand of the Lord was with him!

    Pastor Fred Brothers’ ceremony appears in the next chapter and is reprinted by permission.