Heavenly Father Knows Best--by Linden Malki

The original intention of God when He created mankind was that we live in families, headed by a man and a woman committed to each other.  Our very flesh is both related and different, and the idea is that "a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and they become one flesh." We are designed to connect intimately and in the process new life grows and becomes a child who has part of his or her very body derived from each parent.  This is a relationship that can be exhilarating at its best and incredibly painful when it goes bad.

St Paul put it like this: "Flee from sexual immorality. All other sins ar person commits are outside the body, but whoever sins sexually sins against their own body. Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own, who were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your bodies. " (I Corinthians 6:18-20)

Part of the problem is that we are not all committed to life with His Spirit, and we are all imperfect creatures with temptations and a history of disobedience. From the beginning of human history, we have missed the ideal, both as individuals and societies.  God, in His relationship with people, has described His commitment to us and His relationship to us as similar to a marriage, with the ideal of fidelity to Him and from Him.  As individuals, we have often missed the mark, and as societies we have gotten involved in relationships that are not healthy.  We see even people who knew God tempted to get involved with people who didn't take God's ideal seriously, and have paid for it in pain, bad relationships, disease, children who were damaged or even sacrificed. 

It's often easier to get into bad relationships than out of them.  I grew up in a neighborhood where several families had kids who were totally unsupervised; one of my memories was at about 5 or 6, sitting on a curb with several other kids while an 11-year old told us what he and his girlfriend did. This guy grew up with a trail of broken relationships and abandoned kids, and a brother who "had to get married" at 16. Two of my friends had babies at 14. My mom installed protective inhibitions, which saved me from what I later recognized as a probable  molestation at 8. After listening to friends say that having said "yes" made it impossible to say "no", I decided that any reason I wasn't married to someone was sufficient reason to say "no".  I was blessed by a good marriage to a good man for 41 years and four children; who had also grown up in a church family.  I do believe that commitment and fidelity are well worth the effort!