Love and marriage; love and marriage go together like a horse and carriage. Right?
Except marriage requires much more than just love to make it work. It requires respect, commitment, humility, honest communication, and the list goes on. But I think we can agree that the most important component in a successful marriage is the Lord.  A cord of three strands is not easily broken and a marriage founded and rooted Christ cannot be moved.
That doesn’t keep the shaking from coming, though. Every marriage goes through times of hardship, shaking, and testing. The challenges presented to missionary marriages are often very difficult and unique. And anytime anyone is serving the Lord, Satan can and will use every tactic he can to try and make you fall. How do we trust God with our marriages? How do we leave the most important person, the most important relationship in our lives, in His hands?
In the very beginning of our relationship, Jacob and I had to earn one another’s trust. But trust was not something that came easily for Jacob. He always wanted to know where I was and what I was doing- he was scared that I would find something or someone better than him. He didn’t want to lose me and so he instead held on tightly to me rather than the Lord. Then one day the Lord spoke to him and asked “do you know that Naomi is the one I have created for you?” Jacob said, “Absolutely. I never doubt that. You spoke to me and told me she was the one.”  Then God said, “Then trust Me with Naomi.”  After that Jacob had a whole new mindset. Even if I hurt him or left him he new that God had created me for him. And he could trust God to bring me back. Why? Because he had the spoken word of God in his heart that we were supposed to get married- there was no other person for him. He could always come back to what God had said. Even when things got tough or we went through hard times or when that special feeling wasn’t there, we could go back to what He had spoken. This principle can be applied in so many aspects of our lives, not just marriage. And the neat thing was, when Jacob finally trusted God with our relationship, he learned how to trust me.  Now we don’t face issues of “I wonder if he’s going to leave me”. We face issues with having time to spend together, not wanting to grow distant. We don’t want to celebrate our 50th anniversary and not enjoy being around each other. So we make it a point to trust God with each day and each step. And we’ve learned that if we keep him first- in our lives and our relationship, we won’t be able to help but remain close.  God wants our marriage to succeed and bring Him glory more than we do, and we can not only trust Him to give us the tools to do it, but to help us use those tools, too.