shanksteps of faith #70
A young man is looking for a good woman as a life mate. He wants a wife. Throughout high-school he “dates” various girls. Then in college he decides that one of his high-school sweethearts was the one for him. They get married. A few years later they are unhappy and get a divorce. This scenario of falling “in love” then falling away from “love” seems much to common in the US. It shows how vastly different our way of “love” is from Gods way, and how meaningless marriage has become. It seems
like a church and government sanctioned live in arrangement as long as it benefits both parties. This type of relationship is quite different from the Bible’s view of lifelong marriage, as well as Jesus’ relation to the “church”.
Here in our part of Cameroon you can obtain a wife by various different means.
1- Your parents may talk to someone else’s parents and decide that you would be good for each other. Often it’s the son’s parents who look for a daughter for him. They might inform him of this and ask his opinion of different girls or they might just arrange with her parents without his knowledge. They might arrange this and then just bring her home one-day and they’re married! Marriage here is mostly in the direct biblical sense. Once you’ve slept with each other your married! There are almost
no wedding services or other party with respect to marriage. Our cook was a late teenager when his older brother decided he was old enough and wasn’t finding a wife for himself. So the older brother went out and found what he considered a good wife and brought her home and gave her to the younger brother, and the rest is history.
2- Another way you may get a wife is by spending time with various girls and choosing the one who you like the most. Then you can contact the girl’s parents and arrange a dowry and take her home. You may pay the dowry in advance or have it as a debt to pay off over time.
3- I recently heard of another unique way of getting a wife. One of our near retirement nurses found his wife this way. He was getting “older” and had not found a wife for himself yet. One day he went to the market and found a girl he knew was single and was interested in and just “grabbed her, and took her home!” He had not shown previous interest with her. The next day when her father found out what had happened, he chewed out this guy. The guy listened, and then when the father had run out
of words to say they talked over the dowry. Incidentally, he has been happily married for over 30 years.
4- Some get theirs in a similar way by going to the “bili bili” (millet wine) market and just grabbing a drunken woman and taking her home. So she might have just changed husbands. If so the new husband may have to pay off the old husband.
I guess there are many different ways to get a wife in my culture also. But it does seem that some other cultures have more success staying married than the American culture does. Are you married? If so I hope you are working on your marriage and not letting work or children or church responsibilities draw your family apart. God designed our families to be a learning area for eternity. Learning to love, learning to adapt, learning to put others first, learning what God’s love for us, His children,
is like. Hopefully these are attributes that are being cultivated in your family. Pray for us that our family will better represent God’s ideal for a family.
In His Service, Shanks