You Complete Me?

I want you to be free from anxieties. The unmarried man is anxious about the things of the Lord, how to please the Lord. But the married man is anxious about worldly things, how to please his wife, and his interests are divided. 1 Corinthians 7:32-34

When I went to treatment, I left a disaster back home. While in treatment then, I found it difficult to focus on the reason I was there. I spent much of the first two weeks obsessing about getting out and putting my life back together. My counselor wisely told me I was no good to anyone at home until I figured out how to stay sober. The only way to fix the rest of my life was to work on my relationship with God, repent, and find recovery. While I was enslaved to my addiction, I couldn’t return home the right way. It was only in living in a right relationship with God, that I could go back to be the husband and father I was supposed to be.

In my addiction put my self-destructive desires above God and family. Not everyone struggles with drugs, but still, many of us do invert our priorities, looking for life and meaning in the wrong place. We do this whenever we seek our entire purpose and identity in our romantic relationships. We do this by looking to our significant others for ultimate fulfillment. You complete me. We recognize that we’re lacking something and so, we try to find that one person who can truly satisfy us. But another human can never complete us. God made us so that we can be made whole only in him.

In today’s passage, Paul taught that marriage was worthwhile, but that it didn’t provide the ultimate meaning of life. He said that as Christians, our highest purpose is found in our relationship with him. If we marry, we make a commitment to our spouse, which we must fulfill once we’ve made it. That commitment though, can be a distraction from the life for which we were made, particularly if we put it above God.

As Christians, we must follow God above all. Our families are a gift from God, but if we put our families above him, even a good thing can become self-destructive. A husband or wife can never bear the burden of being God to us. If we want marriage to be what it was meant to be, we’ll find our joy, purpose, and meaning in God first. Once we’re complete in that relationship, then we can be who our spouses need us to be.