**This article was originally published for The Long Middle on Substack**
We always marry the wrong person.
God does too. The biggest difference? I didn’t know what I was getting into and God did.
Stanley Hauerwas said the real work of marriage is learning to love and care for the stranger you find yourself married to. Not the person you proposed to. The stranger they became. The stranger you became.
He’s right. It’s impossible to marry the right person, because people don’t hold still long enough for that to happen. The woman across from you at the altar won’t exist 10 years from now. And neither will you.
It’s not all bad news, though. A curious husband will eventually find himself sitting on a treasure trove of new discoveries. You get the opportunity to keep meeting your wife all over again. New fears, new joys, new scars, new strengths. Changes are almost invisible up close. You’ll never catch them on a random Tuesday. But one day, you’ll look across the table and realize you’re sitting with someone you’ve never met. Some of what you find will delight you. Some of it will break your heart. We hold fast anyway.
At least that’s the idea.
I don’t think the strangers part is the problem, though. The real problem is that we keep acting surprised.
We expect permanence from people God designed to grow. And if they’re not growing, they’re decaying. Either way, they’re never stagnant. We expect consistency from hearts that are still being formed. We want our spouse to stay recognizable while we quietly demand the right to change.
Marriage really does expose this fantasy outright. The stranger across the table was never the crisis. The crisis is realizing you’ve become one too.
Marriage can’t hold without covenant. Take that away and marriage is just two flawed people promising to stay loyal to strangers for 50 years. On paper, that’s a terrible plan.
We see this play out in the human marriage contracts. A contract is brittle. It’s literally paper. One party tears it, the other gets to rip it back, everybody lawyers up, and the fight is on. A covenant is a different kind of animal. It’s a vow made before God, to God, with God and God has never once broken a vow.
We have. I surely have. I’ve made a covenant before God a decade and half ago, and I’m realizing I have not given it the seriousness it deserves.
I’ve been disturbed by this recently, because I’m seeing what a covenant actually fuses together. Jesus said what God joins, let no man separate. The old King James puts it Let no man put asunder. Asunder means to tear apart into pieces. What gets torn is one flesh. Pull one flesh apart and you’re tearing a body. That’s the warning. You don’t tear a body apart lightly.
If somebody rips your arm off, would you live? Probably. Would it be bloody, gruesome, and something you’d be working through the rest of your life? Absolutely. We live in a culture that talks about divorce like it’s just a clean break. It’s never been clean. It’s an amputation we’ve learned to schedule politely.
The way I see it, a marriage dies 2 ways. One is desertion. Someone says I’m done, and you can’t make them stay. The other is domination. Someone is forced to stay, held in place by control.
These extremes are diametrically opposed to God’s design for marriage. That’s why sexual immorality and abandonment are real grounds for separation. Holding fast does not mean enduring anything. The covenant was never meant to be a cage, and God does not bless a man who turns it into one.
Desertion and domination are both human reflexes under fear and stress. A covenant with God lives above both and guards against both.
The most remarkable thing about God is not that he loves us. It’s that he was never confused about who we were. Nothing has ever surprised him about us. Not my pride. Not my selfishness. Not my wandering. Not the thousand small rebellions I dress up as independence. He saw all of it before our vows, and he stayed anyway.
That’s what makes Jeremiah 3 so unsettling. Most of us know the comforting marriage verses read at weddings. Few of us linger on the divine divorce papers.
God is speaking about Israel, his covenant people. They betrayed him repeatedly, publicly, persistently. Eventually he says it plainly:
I gave faithless Israel her certificate of divorce and sent her away because of all her adulteries. — Jeremiah 3:8
God wrote the papers. God signed them. God read them aloud. Faithless Israel earned every word.
And then something strange happens. God keeps talking.
A few verses later God says, Return, faithless one. Not because she deserved it. Not because she finally learned her lesson. Not because she promised to never do it again. Return just because God is still faithful.
So, the divorce papers are hardly the surprising part. It’s the invitation back.
Most of my life, I assumed the biggest threat to my marriage was whatever was happening around me. Stress. Conflict. Disappointment. Unmet expectations. I was wrong, again. The biggest threat was always the man who insisted on sitting at the head of the table.
Me.
There’s something in me that needs to rule. My schedule. My comfort. My story. Even my marriage. I’ll gladly give Jesus a seat at the table, just as long as he doesn’t reach for the head of it.
And that’s how I keep handing God divorce papers. Not with a lawyer. With self-rule. With indifference. With the quiet assumption that my life belongs to me.
Marriage drags all of it into the light. That’s why it feels so hard. Not because your spouse is crazy difficult. Because you are. Because I am. Every exposure feels like an ambush.
And my instinct, every single time, is to protect myself. I come from a long lineage of liars. So do you. We’ve been told to guard the crown. So, we lie to keep it, right up until the lying kills the very thing we swore to protect. The man who won’t die for his marriage ends up burying it. He keeps the throne and rules over rubble.
Here’s what holding fast means to me. It means refusing to make self-protection your highest good, and laying the crown down. Again. And again. And again. Not because your spouse earned it. Because God did.
Near the end of his life, Paul wrote this from a prison cell, and called it trustworthy:
If we died with him, we will also live with him;
If we endure, we will also reign with him.
If we disown him, he will also disown us;
if we are faithless, he remains faithful,
for he cannot disown himself. — 2 Timothy 2:11-13
It’s the last line that undoes me. He cannot disown himself. Faithfulness is not something God does. It’s something God is. Which means his covenant was never hanging on my performance. It was hanging on his character and his Son hanging on a cross.
A quick glance makes Jeremiah 3 look like it’s about divorce. I think it’s about something much deeper. God had every reason, justification, and legal right to leave. And He didn’t.
Reading it properly, I see beyond Israel. I see myself. Every time I wander back to old habits, old idols, old thought patterns, I treat our covenant like a human contract. It is basically me sliding papers quietly across the table to God.
And every time, God reads them. Every time, God looks up. Every time, God holds the door open for me and says return.
What kind of strange God is that?
Is that really the One who reigns over this universe?
If it is, then maybe I can learn to love and care for the stranger I married, in the same strange way God has always loved and cared for me.
