WHERE ON EARTH WILL YOU LOCATE THE RIGHT PERSON TO MARRY? The Complete Version

In the early eighties to the early nineties, November/December was the wedding season. Those days my kinsfolk almost always took their weddings to our hometown. Cross-cultural marriages weren’t as commonplace as they are today. Times have changed since then. Now young couples do their nuptials on- and off-season. Months ago, a friend tied the knot on a Thursday. Yes, on a Thursday in September!

    

I am amazed at the frequency and frenetic pace of today’s weddings. Saturdays are clogged with a thousand wedding receptions, legion of asoebi-clad matrons thronging reception halls across the city, and ribbon-draped cars darting through the almost tranquil morning traffic. There is a wedding boom right now and my friends are caught up in the party. To my bewilderment, they seem to have found ‘the bone of my bone and the flesh of my flesh,’ almost without effort. How did they manage it? Where did they look? Did they pick the first available nice guy with a fat wallet and a big car, or the first pretty girl with brains and an affinity for saying yes? Pardon my cynicism, but I am strongly inclined to believe more than a few did.

    

For those who must follow the footsteps of Jesus, it is not as easy as that. We must query ourselves: how many places have we looked? Are we sure we are looking in the right place(s)? Can we trust our experience? Can we trust our friends’ counsel? Of the many books available on the subject, are there any with tailored answers for our unique situation? ‘So where do we look?’ we agonize every birthday as we observe the lines in the corner of our eyes, pull the stubborn strings of grey out of our scalp and stare at the smiling faces of our friend and his bride peering down at us from the dozen wedding commemorative calendars we received the year before.

    

Again, pardon me for sounding cynical, but this is how it goes these days (and this is gospel truth however unpalatable it may taste): boy meets girl, could be anywhere—in the library, at work, at a party, in church, at a club, in the market, at a wedding!—he likes her, falls in ‘love’, ’toasts’ her. She sizes him up. Nice guy, she thinks, fat wallet, a BSc, good job, why not? She decides to give it a try; after all, she is not getting any younger. They begin to date—whatever that means. After a while, she lovingly coerces him towards the altar. Some girls even resort to blackmail. Lines like, ‘My ex-boyfriend just came back from Italy; imagine he is asking me to marry him…’ and, ‘my dad is pressurizing me to marry Obafemi Martins,’ are not uncommon. Nine out of ten, boy panics; raids his bank, empty his account, pester his old folks, create a ‘meet the family’ scenario, put a sheepskin, confront his church’s marriage committee, deceive them from day one, may set up a committee of friends and the countdown to Saturday begins. Well it could be Thursday! Sometimes, the guy just landed a good job and wants to add to his new-found status of respectability by taking a wife—it could be any girl!

    

It doesn’t sound right, does it? How then do we proceed, we that are called by his name? What is God’s take on this? Reach for your bibles to the books of Genesis 24 and John 4. They hide signposts directing us to where we should look. 

When it was time for Isaac to marry, Abraham sent his servant (Eliezer) to get a wife for his son. He implored Eliezer: ‘you will not let my son marry one of these local Canaanite women. Go ahead to my homeland, to my relatives, and find a wife there for my son Isaac.’ Why not a Canaanite woman? A Canaanite woman? It sounds like a carnal woman to me. Marry one and be yoked with an unbeliever. The people of Canaan are no believers of Yahweh, the one true God. They are into the Baal thing. Canaan is no place to take a wife. Off to our relatives, to the communion of believers, we must go.

    

The servant made an oath to his master, loaded ten camels with gifts, and embarked on the long trek across vast wastelands, away from the heathen Canaanite woman to where Abraham’s brothers lived. He came by the side of a well outside the village, made his camels kneel, found a place, and sank to a stone under a tree exhausted. It was evening; the sun rays were duller now, and the air cooler. The village women spouted out of their houses to fetch water. As they proceeded to the well, they cast suspicious glances at the pitiable figure slumped in the shade of a tree, the dust from his long journey enveloping his clothes, his legs caked with dirt. ‘Who is that beggar?’ I can imagine them mumble to themselves as they cast their buckets into the well. ‘He looks thirsty. Perhaps we should fetch him water to drink,’ one woman may have suggested. ‘Fetch him water and be damned!’ I can imagine the other women chorusing, ‘do you want to catch cholera?’

    

Bewildered by the task ahead of him, Eliezer may have gazed in amazement as the women filed out of the village as in a beauty pageant and assembled at the well. Which will be his master’s wife? Supposing he choose a vixen?  So he prayed:

This is my request: I will ask one of them for a drink. If she says, ‘yes certainly I will water your camel too!’ let her be the one you appointed as Isaac’s wife. By this, I will know that you have shown kindness to my master. (Gen. 24:14)

    
His prayer was answered. A girl, Rebecca, pure as the early morning dew, sweet and gentle as the lily of the field, yet hardy like a springy gazelle, not only consented to fetch him water but also watered his camels, something even the ablest of men will find quite a task. Camels gulp up a lot of water, especially after a long trek across the desert.

    

Thousands of years later, again we come across another encounter by a well. As before, it was between a man and a woman, between the Christ and a Samaritan woman. Jesus and his disciples were going to Galilee and had to pass through Samaria. It was about noon. Tired from the long walk and probably dehydrated by the scorching eastern sun, he came by the side of a well in a Samaritan village and had to pause to rest while his disciples go in to buy food. Soon, a Samaritan woman came to draw water and He asked for a drink. She was surprised. What communion has the dove with the vulture? She said to Jesus: ‘you are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman. Why are you asking me for a drink?’ Jesus replied, ‘if only you knew the gift God has for you and who I am, you would ask me, and I would give you living water,’ (John 4:9, 10). ‘What spurious claims!’ the woman may have thought, ‘who is this strange Jew anyway? Is he greater than our father Jacob who built this well? What water is he talking about?

Jesus replied, ‘people soon become thirsty again after drinking this water, but the water I give them takes away thirst altogether. It becomes a perpetual spring within them, giving them eternal life.’ (John 4:13, 14)

    
Here was a woman encountering God and yet missing him. But in spite of her doubt, in spite of challenging his authority, he offered her salvation, the chance of eternal life. Christ did not rebuke her in spite of her sordidness. He was not repelled by her sin. Far from it. He offered her life instead. True, she has been married to five men—wrong men—and living with the wrong man still. If only she had met Christ sooner!

    

But where is the well? Christ stopped at Sychar, by a well on the spot of land Jacob gave his son Joseph. I find myself wondering if this is the same well Eliezer met Rebecca, Jacob’s mother. I wonder: what is it about water that attracts us? What power is inherent in a body of water? Why do some artists receive the inspiration for their greatest masterpieces on the banks of a river? What attracts tourist to beaches? Why must we be immersed in water to be baptized? Why do animists make fetish sacrifices at the riverbanks? Why is it that even in the wild, there is often almost a code of nonaggression at the waterholes, allowing prey and predator to deep their tongues and drink from the same pool? It seems to me that the life-giving nature of water exacts a pull on us, bringing out the best of good people and the worst of the bad.

    

Water sustains life. A well was of great importance in the arid regions of old Palestine as it is today with the Bedouin tribes of the deserts of Arabian and every community living without the benefit of potable water supply or flowing streams. Water is a ‘sustainer’ of life. Could the well therefore be a metaphor for a sustainable source of life? But where can we find this source of sustainable life?  Could it be the church, not the denominations we belong to, but the body of Christ, the communion of believers? At Christ bosom alone is available the assurance of a sustained, abundant life as he promised the Samaritan woman. The well therefore symbolizes the life-giving presence of God. When you go to a place of abundant life—not a club!—you would find your mate, the one God created for you.

    

Women, stay by the well! Seldom do we find a woman adorned in the snow-white frock of Genesis 24:16 or the impeccable virtues of Proverbs 31:10-31. Like the Samaritan woman, most girls today have made the mistake of ‘being with’ five (or more) men and are not married to the man (or men) they now sleep with. And like the Samaritan woman, it is because they did not go to the well sooner. If it is any consolation to know, most men are guilty of worse. For our sisters though, tarnished as they are, I will say, ‘stay by the well.’ There you will meet your mate. You will meet the kind of man you deserve, Christ Jesus! He loves you in spite of your sordid past, and challenges your accusers to ‘cast the first stone,’ if they dare. He is willing to give you water that will keep you eternally. First, love him, not like the Samaritan woman, who staring love in the eye, missed it! Love him enough to water even his camels. Then he shall send you a mate; someone like him. Someone that will love and respect you as he does, provide for you materially, emotionally, and spiritually, just as Christ provides water that will last eternally.

    

Men, stay by the well! So few men can sing with confidence the refrain, ‘we want to follow the ways of Jesus’. But for those who must walk in his footsteps, however small their feet, I will say, ‘stay by the well.’ By the well in the region where believers dwell, seek a woman who has true faith in Christ. Seek God’s guidance through prayer, believing that, ‘charm is deceptive, and beauty does not last; but a woman who fears the lord will be greatly praised,’ (Prov.31:30). You will find your mate—a Rebecca, a virtuous woman, a lover of God; someone who is cooperative, helpful, generous and hardworking.

    

Very few have been to the well before tying the knot, and I must confess I know of none. But I know a lot of disillusioned husbands and disappointed wives. Most people are ‘pro-choice’, much in the fashion of the abortionist as regards this issue. Hear them say, ‘it’s a matter of choice!’ with a smirk not unlike Eve’s when she presented Adam with the forbidden fruit. If the word of God is true and the Bible the Christians’ manifesto, shouldn’t we live by its precepts? Is it not true that for every man there is a woman, as there was Eve to Adam, the Christ to the church? If that were the truth, where would we find our mate, the bone of our bone, and flesh of our flesh, other than at the foot of Jesus ‘by side of the well’?

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