Marriage, a Means or an End?

What are some key ingredients in the recipe for "losing your passion"?

• Make sure you see all your relationships as ways to get what you want.
• Never ask the "Why?" question when deciding how to spend your free-time.
• Look at your job as mainly a means to get money.
• View money as the end, rather than a means to more important things.

Ultimately, we lose passion for living and we lose perspective in our day-to-day lives when we neglect, forget, or never look into how it all begins.  Why do I have all these relationships?  What is the best use of my free time?  Why does the company exist that I work for and what is my role?  Why does money drive so many people and does it really fulfill its promises?

Marriage is no different, for if marriage is the goal, then we can define it how we want and we can determine our (and others') worth based on it.  We get into the marriage and, sometimes sooner and sometimes later, we ask ourselves, "Is this all there is?"  It's not a commentary on our spouse, but rather on our false expectations of marriage.  Even the most important person in our earthly life was never intended to fill our void (no matter how great the movie line is, Jerry Maguire).

Why does the nagging inner voice keep asking, "Is this all there is?"  Because the most important relationship we could ever hope of having has been tainted forever.  You and I have something in common - it's our need for complete communion with our Creator.  We fill this void with money, people, success, power, pleasure, etc.  We experience short term satisfaction and enjoyment but we know, at the heart of it all, that it just didn't cut it for us.

Back to marriage.  Because marriage, then, was never meant to fill the void or "complete" anyone, what is it for?  It is a means (and a very important one according to Genesis 3:24 and Ephesians 5:22-33) to showing someone what love looks like and that Jesus is the ultimate lover, dying for our sins, in our place.  If God is our most important relationship, and Jesus is the means to reconciling with our God, then selfless, heterosexual, only-one-spouse marriage is the only definition of marriage that can help us get back to God.

Yes, many heterosexual marriages are selfish.  In fact, one could argue that, on any scale that a person could invent, many homosexual marriages have more redeemable qualities than many heterosexual marriages.  But this is no reason to redefine marriage.  After all, who am I to doubt the true love of a teacher for her 16-year old boyfriend/student?  Without some sort of guidelines and standards of what's appropriate and what isn't, we are all reduced to our own definitions (and we all know what wins when our feelings have war with our self-imposed standards).

Who should define marriage then?  Allow the Inventor of marriage to define it, run with that definition, and enjoy marriage for the means to see God that it was meant to be.  Or, define marriage the way you see fit, see it as an end in itself, and constantly come up against a dead end on the road of a life that is truly full of life.