I Am Waiting To Feel Married

It has been four years and you still catch yourself thinking of it as new.

Not in a bad way. You like him. The flat is nice. Everybody says the first years are the hardest and you have not found them hard.

But there is a feeling you were expecting and it has not turned up. A settledness. A sense of being a married person rather than a person who got married.

You put the ring on in the morning and it is still slightly an event. The promise was made four years ago and it has never quite stopped feeling like somebody else's promise.

And because you are sensible, you have decided this is a matter of time. Give it another year. Give it until there are children, or a house, or something that makes it undeniable.

Which means you have quietly put your own marriage on probation, and you are the one holding the clipboard.

Let me take the clipboard off you, because that feeling is not coming, and the reason it is not coming is not the one you fear.

Every good gift, and no variableness

There is a line in James about where good things come from, and I want the second half of it more than the first.

Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning (James 1:17, King James Version)

No variableness. No shadow of turning.

The giver does not flicker. What He gives does not come with a period of settling in, during which the recipient waits to find out whether it took.

You have been given something from a Father with no variableness in Him, and James has never once described a gift that arrives provisionally. James 1:17 puts the giving above and calls the giver unchanging, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a settled thing in a person who is still waiting.

Now put your four years against that. You have been waiting for a confirmation. The confirmation was the giving. It happened at the front and it did not come in installments.

You are holding a completed gift and waiting for it to be delivered, and it has never once been in transit. The passage puts the whole of the giving in the Father's hands and leaves no settling period in the account, and the Spirit of God is the one who tells a person the thing already arrived.

Why the feeling did not come

Let me be practical, because the theology only helps if it explains the flat.

There is no such thing as a feeling of being married. There is no distinct sensation for it, in the way there is no distinct sensation for being thirty four, or for being a citizen of your country.

What people mean when they say they feel married is usually accumulation. Shared years. A crisis got through together. The particular boredom of somebody's cough at three in the morning for the ten thousandth time.

That is not a feeling that confirms a status. It is a set of memories, and it arrives on its own schedule and not on the one you set.

So the reason it has not turned up in four years is that four years is not very many, and the thing you are waiting for is made of years.

You are waiting for something time makes rather than something a marriage issues, and no verse has ever once made that feeling the proof of anything. James 1:17 puts the perfect gift in the giving rather than in the settling, and the Holy Spirit is the one who separates a status from a sensation.

You were married on the day and the promise was made and God joined it, and none of that has ever once been on probation. It is written that every good gift is from above with no variableness in the giver, and the Spirit of God is the one who takes a marriage off a person's watch list.

Say it, and stop waiting for a day

Here is the assignment, and it has a stopping in it, which is where the relief is.

Say out loud, alone, in your own home: God joined this. He did it once and it holds.

Then stop waiting for the feeling today. For one day, do not check whether you feel married. Do not notice the ring in the morning as an event. Do not do the calculation about how long it has been.

Live in the marriage as a married person, which is what you actually are.

You are able to live inside a settled thing while it still feels new, and the settledness has never once been the part that made it real. James 1:17 has the gift given complete from a Father who does not turn, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present in a home where somebody has stopped waiting for a confirmation.

And when you catch yourself checking, say the sentence again and put the kettle on.