She could have saved herself many years of sorrow by simply asking God about the man she was or was not to marry.
Others have had similar stories. Aimee Semple McPherson and John Alexander Dowie, just to name two, had marriage difficulties that affected them and their ministries.
Today, divorce among Christians is astronomical. That's not God's way. If He brings people together, they should stay together. If He didn't bring them together, they should never have gotten married in the first place.
In counseling young people, I tell them not to date everybody who comes along. I don't care how nice looking the girl may be or how popular she is. Before you ever ask someone for a date, you should get down on your knees and ask God, "Is it all right to ask this person out?" If He says, "No, don't do it," there are reasons He doesn't want you going out with that person.
There have been too many mistakes made on dates that God never sanctioned in the first place. Dating the wrong person also can lead you into marrying the wrong person, because every date is a potential marriage. The first date is the first step toward marriage.
Marriages are not 50/50 propositions. They are 100/100 propositions. You cannot give 50 percent and expect your mate to give 50 percent. If you do that, when the trials and hardships come and one of you pulls back just 5 percent, that opens the door for the devil to come in. But when you're giving 100 percent and your mate is giving 100 percent, if one of you pulls back 85.2 percent, you still have a wall surrounding you that will keep the devil out of your marriage.
If you can't go 100 percent with someone, don't marry that person. Too many people who have walked the aisle and said "I do" wished later that they hadn't. That should never happen in a marriage. It won't if God's in it.
One thing that destroys marriages quicker than anything else is mistaken priorities. After the Lord, your mate should be the most important thing in your life. Many ministers forget this. They wind up putting the ministry before their mates. People in the secular world often put their jobs before their families.
The ministry can wait. The family can't wait. The ministry or the job doesn't depend on you, anyway. It depends on God. Ministers who have problems with their families should straighten those problems out before they go on ministering.
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