I'm going to a wedding, and I hate playing dressup, but the Aardvark will look HOT today.
Hot in a Sopranos sort of way. Black pleated, cuffed trousers, black button-down, black and charcoal tie. White sneakers (KIDDING!) Black shoes. Slick scalp.
Sopranos? Never watched it once.

The ensemble almost seems funereal. My niece Kim is getting married to a fine young man, who has had an almost courtship level of relationship with her parents. I do not mourn for them. I have great joy for their adventure. My problem is the dissolution of so many Christian (!) marriages around me. My daughter married a nice young man...who turned out to be an abusive bounder with delusions of culthood. They are separated, primarily for her safety. The "D" word has been kicked around, but I'm sorry, there is ZERO scriptural reason for divorce. One can drag "feelings", and "it's not fair" into it all day long, but it still doesn't change what Jesus said about it. Period.

Two, count 'em, TWO families in our congregation have disintegrated, because one spouse in each wanted a different place to put it. I have a suspicion that I know what is going on.

There is a deadly triumvirate preached in our neck of the woods: marriagedivorce&remarriage.
Just like that: marriagedivorce&remarriage. When someone preaches on ISSUES facing the church, that one is top of the heap: marriagedivorce&remarriage.

What is wrong with this picture?
To teach on marriage like that seems to me to plant the idea that the three somehow go together: marriagedivorce&remarriage. Rather like soupandsandwich, friesanketchup, BurnsandAllen...
If the concept of sowing and reaping has any credence- Jesus taught it, and agriculture works- then ought we not preach and teach on marriage (Ephesians 5:25, "Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it..." would be a great place to start.) and LATER present divorce as the vile aberration it is, rather than linking it in the hearer's mind
with marriage? I believe that we are reaping the harvest of decades of bad, copycat preaching.
Amongst other things.

The lesson of the dating scene is not much better. If this relationship sours, welllll, I can always find another.

I pray that this marriage will be as blessed and full as Kim's parents has been, and that Momoovark's and mine has been, and that Christ intended for marriage to be.