The True Prince

By Deacon Migena Kocaj

I love getting those long-expected or surprise texts with engagement pictures. I jump with joy, and I kneel in prayer.
The faces and landscapes are different, but the look on their faces is always the same. All starry-eyed, all jumping around from excitement. So in love, so well-intended.
I can’t help but chuckle at the memory of my own engagement pictures. Oh, that “The world is mine” look! 😅😅😅😅
Oh, how real it was, oh, how pure! Oh, how it was as naive as it should have been!

“… then I was in his eyes as one who finds peace.” — Song of Solomon 8:10

No blame and no ridiculing for my young self or for any of them.

“He who finds a wife finds what is good and receives favor from the Lord.” Prov.18:22.

“Enjoy life with the wife whom you love, …” says Ecclesiastes 9:9.

Enjoy the journey, EACH step of it. Enjoy the journey, with all the anticipation and expectations. There is beauty and much purpose in the process that we’re called to live as illustration of the relationship between Christ and the church. Love and sacrifice, unity and oneness are required to make it flourishing and fruitful for God’s glory.
As one who has traveled some miles ahead, here is a letter to my younger self and to the latest starry-eyed couple.

My precious one! You’ve been called to the journey of marriage. 
I beg you to prepare to walk on your knees as literally as possible. The path may get narrower and narrower, the wild blackberry vines more and more out of control.
The prince on the horse will turn out to be a vehicle of transportation to the new land of thorns you have to weed and labor on.
A partner “in crime’ to work out your character, your faith, your legacy.
Fast forward some months from those promises, and you will come to question them. Lacked promises, unfulfilled promises, flaky promises, broken promises…
I promise you: you’ll have problems with those promises.
They’re meant to be challenged, to be broken, to be made real.
I promise you: your submitting and honoring bride promises will not hold so long either. The lack of patience in adjusting, the temptation to make things right (your way!), the need for more deep breaths than exhaling hard, ..., will exhaust your strength and your knowledge tools.

But please, please, whenever you feel like running, run to the Father, and don’t run away. He will quiet you like a baby; He will redeem and restore your situations over and over and lead you to the True Prince. The One who promises and delivers. The One who never fails to love you, and the One who saves for real! He will guide you in obedience and safety. He will protect you, carrying on bigger sacrifices than yours, because He sacrificed for you first.
The truly ‘happily ever after’ comes only AFTER. After you trust Him, after you rely on Him, after you rest in Him. AFTER we are with Him.

With Love,

Your sister in Christ.

I made a marriage version of Habakkuk 3:17:

Though the spouse is not the one I thought, though finances have unexpected ups and downs, though the kids don’t turn out to be the stellar in every field of life, though they refuse to follow your pointing to God and only focus on your “muddy” face, though I’m shocked at my own reactions and failures,
Yet I will rejoice in the Lord;
I will take joy in the God of my salvation.
God, the Lord, is my strength;
He makes my feet stand up and walk on water, He makes my heart fall asleep in the middle of storms.

I'll leave you with some excerpts I draw from reading lately “The Four Loves" by C.S.Lewis.

"The rivalry between all natural loves and the love of God is something a Christian dare not forget."

"Love, having become a god, becomes a demon."

“Do not let your happiness depend on something you may lose. If love is to be a blessing, not a misery, it must be for the only Beloved who will never pass away.”

“It is probably impossible to love any human being simply "too much". We may love him too much in proportion to our love for God; but it is the smallness of our love for God, not the greatness of our love for man, that constitutes the inordinancy."

"By loving Him more than them we shall love them more than we now do."