Church Voices

Lashawn Barber renders some excellent advice:

Contrary to smooth Bill “Slick Willie” Clinton and his supporters, who made the nonsensical claim that a man’s personal life is separate from his professional/political life, a person is who he is in all areas of his life. Unfaithfulness is a character flaw, and that flaw affects the whole man, not just the “personal” one.

As an aside, here’s a little advice for women in the audience. If you’re seeing a married man and he leaves his wife for you, it has little to do with you, despite what he says. While you’re feeling special and better than she, understand that one day he’ll probably do the same thing to you. Your man’s low character will manifest itself again when the next pretty young thing crosses his path. So don’t act surprised when he serves you divorce papers — if he marries you, that is — at the most inopportune moment.

No matter what particular gender you happen to fall into this is an excellent observation. The character of the person you marry will affect every facet of his or her life. If that person has negative traits while you’re dating they will have them when you’re married. If that person treats others badly, eventually, they will treat you badly.

I urge everyone who isn’t yet married to consider this piece of wisdom very carefully because if you choose poorly then there’s a lot of heartache coming your way, heartache that could have been avoided.

As long as I’m rendering marriage advice (or should I say stealing Lashawn’s marriage advice) let me just comment very quickly on the topic of money. Fiscal responsiblity goes a long way towards making a happy marriage. Make sure that your future spouse is on the same page as you when it comes to money, because if one spouse is trying to be fiscally responsible and one is not, chances are that there’s a divorce coming down the road. If you only talk about one issue in marriage counseling make it about money (obviously you should be talking about more than one issue, but you see my point).