I was shocked...

...maybe I shouldn't have been, but I was. Over the weekend I ran into a good friend, whom I hadn't seen in a while, so we hadn't had the opportunity to talk. She got married last year and she told me she is currently separating from her husband. I was somewhat surprised, but not entirely. At the time when she told me she was getting married, I asked her if she was sure. There were somethings that I had noticed that didn't totally convinced me, but she said yes, that she was sure. I believe there are some things as a Christian (specially if your family is also Christian, which is her case) that can point you are going in the right direction. Parents agreement on both sides I think is very important. As much as we would like to say..."but no...I am marrying him/her, not his/her family"...in some sense this is true, but it is also true that you will have to deal with the family also. You'll avoid a lot of headaches if you just have the parents blessing. Which was not her case in the beginning, then her parents kind of accepted the situation that she was going to get married anyway. Then I also felt they had different views of ministry. She is someone who likes to participate a lot in church, him...I just started seeing him come to church when he came with her, at that time. I can't say now. This is something that I personally didn't witness, but a friend told me that once, when they were still going out not married yet, she saw him talking to her in a harsh way. I thought, if he is treating her like that now, how will he treat her when they are married? Also I felt that she was rushing, that she felt that she was already at an age where she should get married. I don't know in other cultures, but in the panamanian culture they kind of put pressure on you, that you have to get married at a certain age if not then you'll be too old later, specially women. Of one thing I am sure is that nobody is going to rush me into this decision, not my family, not society, not people at church, nobody. It is too important a decision to rush through it. I believe that after the decision of accepting Christ the second decision of importance in life is who you are going to marry. When God time comes it will come, if it doesn't come, so be it I will accept God's will, but I really do want to get married. Both my brothers are divorced, I definitely do not want to go through that. So I talked to her about it, but she said she was sure. There was not much I could do then. After they got married I prayed that they would have a good marriage, that whatever I had felt at the time wouldn't become a reality in their lives. But now here we are one year later and they are already divorcing. It's sad. As far as I understand divorce rates among Christians are as high as non-Christians. We are sometimes so hard-headed, God is pointing in this direction but we want to go the other way.

I pray God to always give me a heart who can listen to Him. That I can do whatever He tells me to do. And that when I make the decision of who I am going to share the rest of my life with, I can be 100% sure that God is at the top of our relationship and that we both have similar goals and perspectives. It would be really hard to make a marriage work if I want to go this way and my husband wants to go in a totally opposite direction. I have to admit that sometimes I worry that I would make the wrong decision, but I am reminded then that my life is in His hands.

I am going to visit my friend to talk more to her. I know she must be going through very difficult times right now and a divorce can lower your self-esteem, your worth as an individual, you can feel like a failure. God will have to do a lot of restoring in her. I hope God can use me and give her maybe a little bit of comfort through me. I will be praying a lot for her and him as only God can restore whatever they have lost in this process.

Today I was watching a program where they were talking about relationships and dating and the lady who was speaking said something that I thought was a very interesting point of view. In the greek there are 3 types of love (I don't know exactly how to say them in english so I'll just go ahead and say them the way we say them in spanish, actually greek I guess). What in english and spanish we just call love in greek has three different perspectives. There is "fileo (phileo) love" which is like a brotherly love, the one you feel towards family and friends, there is "eros love" which refers to romantic or sexual love and there is "agape love" which is the perfect love, the one that is God, the one that never expects anything in return. The lady speaking said that she fits all these types of love into a pyramid, where "agape love" should be on the bottom of the pyramid, as a foundation, we should try to have this type of love as much as we can in our lives. Then at the middle of the pyramid we should have "phileo love", those special people we care about in our lives. And then at the top "eros love" that should be with only one person, our husband or wife. But we have it all backwards nowadays. People have "eros love" at the bottom, as the foundation. They base their relationships on looks, on sexual attraction and instead of being the narrowest part of the pyramid is the widest, so instead of having one sexual partner, people are having many. And then they have "agape love" at the top, very narrow, very little of that type of love in their lives (actually this type of love I believe you can only have it when you have God in your life). Also she said that we live in the age of the microwave, instant coffee, drive thru, and people sometimes want to have their relationships the same way. They don't want to take the time to know the other person, they rush through things and once they are married they find out that they have married a total stranger, someone that they don't really know, but since they were attracted sexually they felt good about marriage. So then they end up having good sex for 1/2 hour and then they don't know what to do with this person for the other 23 & 1/2 hours of the day as they don't have anything to talk about or share. You need time to get to know another person, and even with time once you are married you are going to discover a lot of things that you didn't know about him/her.