It's good for you, just not in the way you expect.

Marriage is God’s great bait and switch.

We seek marriage as a source of happiness, companionship, and pleasure, things which do sometimes come from being married. But marriage also brings tremendous strife, pain, and frustration.

And after 13 years of it, I can tell you that marriage (and the parenting that’s supposed to come with it) is the single greatest force for transformation in any person’s life. The reason is simple. In marriage, all the darkest parts of your personality are revealed and demand correction. As such, marriage is God’s great crucifier of wickedness…if we let it be.

To put matters a different way, I wouldn’t be half the man I am today if I hadn’t been married for so long. It’s just all too easy to remain who you are when you don’t have to constantly adjust and adapt to the needs and interests of another person from whom it’s virtually impossible to hide anything.

So, I feel sorry for singles. Not because of what they miss in marriage that they think they’re missing, but for what they miss in marriage that they don’t even realize they’re missing.

Postscript: And the great Christian hope for singles is not that they would get married, but that they would learn to derive this same benefit directly from Christ Himself.