As women, we often dream of the day we meet our Prince charming and live happily ever after together. Some of us have experienced the wonder of this moment and the rest of us still look forward to this breath taking encounter. We want to be perfectly ready, to have our husbands look at us with awe and wonder. We want them to be proud of the women that we are, to adore and honour us.
So we learn to be good wives, to be effective home makers, to be family oriented, to nurture our children and still keep a
full time or part time job as the case may be, we try to keep a balanced (home-work-ministry-health) life.
We follow the patterns of our marriage coaches and mentors and try to pattern our lives after theirs. We invest into our marital life way before we start our marriage journey to ensure that we’re prepared and well equipped to face whatever comes. We read books on marriage, relationships, family life, dating, etc, attend seminars and sometimes even join support groups. We learn how to cook assorted dishes so that we can ‘spoil our husbands’, after all, the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, right? We are extremely hard working and want our
husbands to be called ‘blessed’. We put in so much work to bless our husbands with our substance and that in itself is beautiful.
While this is important, I wonder if we could channel all the energy and effort and skill and expertise we put into becoming the perfect wives for our husbands into being the perfect bride for our Bridegroom; if we can imbibe all these strategies into preparing ourselves for His second coming and ultimately, our Marriage feast, making sure we are sparkling clean in our ‘finest of pure white linen’ so that when He returns to take us, He can beam with pride at the glorious bride that we have become, ready for Heaven and worthy of being called His honourable bride.
Have we accepted His proposal yet? Are we being transformed by the renewal of our minds?
As a church, we ought to be more intentional about this- preparing mindfully for our Bride groom, checking out the different dimensions of our spirituality and ensuring that we’re living a worthy life. Have we accepted His proposal yet? Are we being transformed by the renewal of our minds? Are we generous to the helpless and needy (Pr 31:20)? Have we been generous with sharing the good news of salvation and bringing light to the darkness lurking in the corners? While we pray and aim to be Proverbs 31 women, trying to emulate her in our relationships, are we also preparing to be that kind of wife/bride to our Heavenly Bridegroom? Can God trust us with His wealth? Can we adequately redistribute it and not run at a loss.
Have we been faithful to our callings and assignments? Are we always “dressed for service with our lamps burning? (Luke 12:35 NLT) Are we
winning souls and exhibiting Christ-like traits worthy of emulation? Are we the standard measure of wife material for our Bridegroom, Jesus Christ? How many yards of wife material do we have in us?
This is a call to be more intentional in our preparations towards His second
coming as we are towards our marital affairs. As 1 Timothy 4:8 says, “Physical training is good, but training for godliness is much better, promising benefits in this life and in the life to come” (NLT).
Likewise, Preparing for our earthly groom is good, but preparing for our Heavenly Groom is much better, promising benefits in this life and in the life to come.
Finally, Jesus Christ in Matt 25:13 encourages us to keep watch for we do not
know when the Bridegroom will return for our marriage feast. We must be alert, sober, vigilant, ever ready with extra oil so we don’t go off, trying to do good when He comes and then it might be too late.
written by Akabuogu Chidimma Joy