How foolish of me, to believe that I could count on the goodness I saw in Dominique to bring him to rightly see God and seek Him! There is not such goodness and greatness in any person! It is only the goodness of God that can accomplish such things, and only His power is great enough! I should have been relying and trusting in God to do this work, and waited for it to happen before I married Dominique; and instead, I was once again relying on what I thought a human being capable of doing.

Dominique did become a Christian, four years after we were married. As soon as I say that, I know I will need to answer those who hear this from us and are quick to respond, "See! He did become a Christian, so you were right! Don't tell me not to marry this person I love, just because he or she isn't a Christian. It worked out okay for you, so it'll work out okay for me, too!" (Of course, much of this dilemma is avoided from the start by holding firm to not even date a person who admits he or she is not a Christian. But these things don't always happen in such clear and obvious terms, do they?)

Let me say this plainly, for I have seen many, many people around me over the years making this same mistake that Dominique and I made. Yes, Dominique became a Christian, but did you notice it was four years after we were married? I will not go into the detail of all that happened in those four years, but I will say this: many of the problems and much of the discord between us those first years was based upon the lack of unity in our beliefs.

We did not see things the same way. When faced with an issue that arose between us, we were not each arriving at the discussion table with the same set of standards. Though the desire of our hearts was to love each other, the driving force behind that desire was not from the same source in both of us. Without the unity of working from the same source at the outset, how can two people hope to end up in union together at the end of the discussion, at the end of the argument, at the end of the fight, at the end of the day?

Ask either of us. We will both tell you the same thing. Knowing what we know today after some thirty years of marriage, much of the difficulties and heartaches that we endured for the first years of our marriage simply would not have happened if we had been willing to wait until we were BOTH committed Christians BEFORE we were married. We paid a price for our foolishness. The price has to do with the hurt feelings and anger and habits of self defense and retaliation that build up in the midst of the struggles with each other during those years when you're trying to be married, but you are not truly one in mind and spirit.

Even though you may both end up being Christians together later, the effects of those years of discord will carry the bad habits over into your new life together. Folks, it takes a LONG time to break down those habits and rebuild a life together that is finally free from the instinctive behavior of the past. In the meantime, while the two of you are working together to get over the hurdles of "our old ways of doing things," there will still be rough times because of our tendencies to fall right back into what we're used to doing. And now, it may no longer be just the two of you. You may have children and now they will be affected by your difficult times. Do you start to see how far-reaching our foolish choices can be?