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I Ain't Never Tried It

I was merely in line at the cash register, trying to pay for the two dollars worth of gas with which I had wet the bottom of the tank of my old clunker. I wasn't looking for any sort of deeply enlightening experience, revelatory of the decaying foundations of our society. But these epiphanies do tend to come unbidden.

A young lady entered the store and greeted the young man ahead of me in the checkout line.

"Hey, how's it goin'? Haven't seen you in awhile," she chirped.

"I got married," said the young man.

"You did? How is it?"

"Okay, I guess. It's as good as you make it."

"Yeah, I guess so. I ain't never tried it."

One does not have to be a sociologist doing a scientific study to see that the divorce rate can't be anything but high in a culture where this sort of conversation can take place. When young people of marriageable age think and speak of marriage as something one merely "tries," it can hardly come as a surprise when many of the marriages that are "tried" end up having "failed."

Not long ago in a Bible class on the subject of "Marriage, Divorce, and Remarriage," a young man asked, "What if you marry someone and find out afterwards that they have been married previously and are unscripturally divorced?" His question wasn't frivolous. We're living in a time when it can be a mistake for young people in their early twenties, or even late teens, to assume the person they are dating has never "tried" marriage before. Nowadays, it often pays to ask for and demand an honest answer.

The fact of the matter is: the scourge of divorce in our society won't abate until we return to the biblical notion that divorce, in the absence of adultery (Mt. 19:9), is not even to be considered an option, at the beginning of a marriage or anywhere along the way. Jesus said, "So then, they are no longer two but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let not man separate" (Mt. 19: 6).

Gary Henry
WordPoints.com