DIVORCED BEFORE WEDDING | What you must know while dating!
A lot of people got divorced even before they got married and they never knew until certain realities started playing out. The foundation of any building or idea is what may truly make that building or idea stand. Bringing it to the context of our discourse, the foundation of every relationship is what will truly determine if it will stand the test of time. The Bible says in Psalm 11:3 that the righteous can do nothing about something that is destroyed from foundation! You may be a very nice man or woman but when you don’t pay attention to the foundation of your relationship, you may obviously be seen together with your spouse but separated in reality.
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While a building may be renovated from the surface, the foundation of a building cannot be renovated! To renovate a foundation means to destroy the building entirely. The foundation of every relationship is based on what the both of you agree because relationship has to do with one relating to another. For there to be relationship, there has to be something relating with something and for that relationship to thrive, the two persons relating together must come to an understanding. It is this understanding that forms the very foundation of relationship, this is the formative stage of oneness! The Bible says in Amos 3:3 “can two people walk together except they agree?” The foundation is the beginning of every vision, every relationship, every building and so on! Jesus made it clear that a wise man sits down and count the cost before building; the wise also build on a solid foundation because anything built on weak foundation cannot stand the test of time. There is nothing you can do to manage a weak foundation; it will definitely fall when the test of storm comes!
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Relationships starts in an amazing way, there is a lot of romance and care! A lot of displays of love and deep affection but on the long run, the test of storm come, that is where love is truly proven and that is also where the strength of the foundation is tested! Love in itself is not enough to keep a relationship; foundations aren’t entirely built on love. While love must be a cementing element of making the foundation concrete, there are lots of factors that must also be considered! Foundation of marriage must be built on your personal philosophy and that of the person you are aiming to walk with.
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So many people are separated philosophically; they don’t even know it because they don’t pay attention to it! They thought they were in agreement but they eventually realize they have never been in agreement. Being in uniform doesn’t mean being united, uniformity and unity are two different words. Your philosophy means your perspective and opinions and understanding the philosophy of your partner is key to sustaining any relationship and this is what the Bible meant when it asked “can two walk together without agreement?” You must look out to see if there is any point where your philosophy and that of your potential spouse meet and blend. When you discover there is no blend, then there is no point being together because at some point there will be a great deal of disagreement which will ruin the marriage. The Bible says “do not be equally yoked with unbelievers” and as much as Paul wasn’t talking about marriage here, I want to borrow the words and explain something to you. The people we call unbelievers have something they believe in; they are unbelievers because they don’t believe in what we believe in the way we believe in it. Bringing it to the theme of this teaching, you will realize that in the context of marriage, you don’t have to be equally yoked with someone who doesn’t share same belief with you.
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If you believe that a woman and a man should be given an equal play ground in the society, you may not need to marry a man who believes women are just afterthoughts and not originally God’s plan because at a point there will be sharp disagreements that may have serious thunderbolt-impact on the relationship! But then, even if at first it seemed he or she is just the person you have been praying for, there are deep and hidden parts of people you must find out. On the surface level, people may appear nice but on the inside they are truly struggling with their real personality! You may meet a young fine rich man in Church who loves praying and studying the Bible but that is not enough because marriage is not solely spiritual, it is a human practice because anyone can marry and have good marriage regardless of religion if they work on themselves to be better spouse. Without an in depth emotional and intellectual agreement, you have to be careful on what grounds you are building a relationship.
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There is a major part of people you do not see immediately, you may see a gentle banker but inside of him is an aggressive man who even struggles with alcohol and drugs secretly! People’s past, environments, experiences and all the phase they went through and the manner with which they went through it forms the bigger part of them! He may be very caring when it comes to buying gifts but he may be a bully who is going through it as a challenge! Every single thing people pass through forms their philosophy even if they are struggling with it or not. Unfortunately, we enter relationships and keep displaying the very good part of us, in fact some only pretend to be good just to be able to keep up with the relationship and have the person stay and we just keep enjoying the goodies and look away from the main thing! Every single thing you experience in a relationship is a pointer to who your partner is and it is up to you to either accept it or not. When you decide to spend the rest of your life with someone, you are also spending the rest of your life with their philosophy and character.
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It is important that you don’t get carried away by cares and romance and you ignore certain signs! If you don’t like clubbing and eventually marry someone who loves clubbing, you will find it hard adapting to a life you aren’t familiar with! At first, you may feel marriage will change that person but listen to me carefully, marriage changes no one, we can only decide to live with people’s weaknesses and accept them how they are or we leave them being that we’ve discovered we cannot manage that weakness. Let’s use weakness X and weakness Y as an example; you may be strong enough to manage weakness X but very weak to manage weakness Y while another person may be strong enough to manage weakness Y but weak to manage weakness X. This is how it is and it is not bad that you decided to walk away because you cannot cope after discovering another part of someone. It is better to have a broken courtship than a broken marriage. When you marry someone you don’t have a blend of philosophy with then you both aren’t married in the true sense of marriage. Marriage is an agreement to fine-tune yourselves into oneness but oil and water cannot mix no matter how you try, so oil should mix with oil and water should mix with water.
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When you make up your mind to marry someone, you are going into union not just with the beauty of the person but also, with their highs and lows, their strength and their weaknesses, their beauty and ugliness and so on! You can imagine a woman who has series of sexual abuse to the point she became exposed to several uncommon sexual fantasies and practices; you can only stay with such a person if you’ve decided to live with that part of her and adapt just as she slowly adapt to your own kind of life too. You aren’t just marrying her present, you are also marrying her past! If you can’t come to terms with that, you better withdraw on time. Imagine a young man, who grew up in a gangster environment, he may have developed some kind of uncommon toughness and street attitudes. If you aren’t someone who is comfortable with it or who can live with it, then you don’t have to force yourself into marriage thinking that marriage alone will change him or her. It is like thinking a promiscuous man will still not run after women just because he is married! Marriage changes nobody, it is a union of two persons who have made up their minds to manage the imperfections of one another. It is on the foundation of agreement including philosophical agreement that marriage can thrive!
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So many people are married but they are struggling with what is obtainable now and what they used to have; reason is because they can’t find the fulfilment they are looking for in that marriage. When you get into a relationship, sit down and discuss creatively with your partner so that you can unlock those hidden part of them! Don’t be afraid to ask questions. While it may not be nice to ask judgemental questions find a way in the midst of nice discussions to get your findings! Marriage is a life time stuff and you don’t have to leave your destiny into the hands of what you don’t understand. Divorce isn’t such a nice thing; it is true that divorce seem very obtainable now but if you ask people who once divorced, they will tell you it wasn’t a nice thing and if they had their way, they would have wanted to turn back the hands of time and skip that part where they met their ex-spouses. Until you diagnose people’s past, you may not know the real person behind the person you are dating.
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When you eventually begin to discover certain traits that you can’t live with, don’t go on with that relationship just because you don’t want him or her to cry or because you don’t want such a beauty not to belong to you; you may never ever like the outcome on the long run. Now let me say something very important before it seem I am driving this to one extreme. There is no perfect person on the planet earth but there are things you can condone especially when you realize it is not something they are even working on changing! There are persons whose design aren’t compatible with your design; don’t hate them, love them and support them when you can but don’t date them and discontinue dating them if you have gone into that level. You can always bring discussions that will trigger a display of one’s hidden philosophies! Talk about everything including sex! There are people who have certain sexual fantasies that aren’t consistent with your own philosophy and there are persons who don’t think about sex the way you think about them; all of these things must be considered before marriage so that you don’t enter an already broken marriage. Aside discussing with him or her, also ask questions from other people, try to learn about their childhood and even about their parents!
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The big reason why you are making your findings isn’t because you are looking for reasons to leave that relationship but because you are counting your cost which is the attitude of a wise man. You cannot be one with someone you don’t agree with so you must know if it is worth paying the price for or not and if it is something within the capacity of strength to handle, endure or condone. There is a creed inside each and every one of us and that creed will continue to influence what we do and how we do it! There are certain women whose ideology of marriage is based on the size of a man’s erection and the size of his pocket, you’ve got to be sure if you agree with them philosophically or not; don’t think inviting him or her to church meetings is enough! Don’t expect them to change for the sake of marriage; you can only decide to live with it if you can. You have to know everything from the very little details to even their sexual preferences.
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Never spiritualize marriage and the efforts of getting things work, don’t go praying for him or her to change especially when they showed interest in changing! It may have worked for someone else (as they claim) but you must understand that people don’t switch characters because we pray; people decide to change when they personally see the need to. Marriage has spiritual indications but marriage in itself is natural and you don’t need deep bible studies and prayer sessions to unravel the philosophies of people! You can’t change the unnatural sexual taste of someone by praying in tongues, you must understand the place of prayers and works! When people want to change, prayers will be very important but they must make a personal decision and efforts towards becoming better. Jesus didn’t die on the cross to make marriages work, He didn’t die to gives us good business! The mission statement of Jesus never included making marriages work; well, I believe in miracles and miracles can happen in marriages too but when it don’t happen, never hold Jesus responsible; you’re responsible for your marriage.
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In summary, you will need to understand your own philosophy before you can even understand that of another person and you will need to know that you don’t have to judge anyone! People experience a lot of things and never feel you are better than someone else. If there is something about someone you can’t live without it is okay to move on but don’t go ahead making a mess of their identity, don’t start thinking you are better than them just because they are struggling with something, you have your own struggles too and you have your own sides that certain people too cannot condone. The reason why you must understand your own convictions and creed is so that you can comfortably identify someone who shares the same convictions with you. This way, you will save yourself from entering a relationship that is bound to fail.
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God bless you
I am George O.N
The Man-In-God
#GracefulGeorge
