A Girl Worth Fighting For

This is one of my favorite songs from the movie Mulan and I think a lot of times our views of marriage are a lot like the soldiers in this video, we focus a lot on the characteristics we are looking for in a person, their looks, their personality and the hope that we will be amazing in their eyes, but I think there is a line in this song that goes overlooked, not necessarily in the movie, but in life: What do we want? A girl worth fighting for.

Over the past few years, my views of marriage have morphed quite significantly. If you would have asked me as a sophomore in high school you would have gotten answers straight from the mouth of an antsy teenager, influenced by her boy-crazy peers and who got her "best" dating advice from the chick flicks that she saw in the theaters on the weekends, self-conscious and unaware, anxious for any boy to tell her that she was worthwhile.

If you were to ask me now, you would hear the words of someone who has actually been in a few relationships, someone who is learning self-worth outside of the view of others and more specifically, guys.  Today, you would hear the words of someone who has been able to travel, go to college, work in the "real world" and witness relationships of ALL kinds.  But, you would also hear the words of someone who has had to experience the sting of broken relationships, divorce and live the pain that sinful desires can bring.

I guess that is the sad reality of growing up, facing the truth about sinful nature. When my parents first separated 2.5 years ago, I could not possibly understand what God's plan was, but over the last six months or so, I have been able to step back and see that God is at work in ways that He could never have been within my parents marriage.

The separation of my parents caused me to question everything I knew about marriage and it happened at a really ironic time in my life, the summer that I was shooting wedding photography almost every weekend, surrounded by couples in the very early stages of their lifelong journey together, couples who couldn't contain the joy of being together.  My mind struggled with this dichotomy, why is that we start out so happy, so in love and end up living life from day to day, fighting with each other, arguing about everything, breaking apart lives and families?

Recently it dawned on me, we need someone who is willing to fight, but not in the way that you would think.

So, what do we want? A girl worth fighting for!

The thing we miss is that we are not going to agree on everything in life, but we need to come to a place in our relationship where we are fighting with each other.  We need to fight. Fight to spend time together, fight to spend time with your kids, fight to solve misunderstandings, fight to keep the love alive.

Why do we think that this will come easily, that we can just coast along in our marriages, in our relationships and that peace and joy will just fall into our laps?  We forget that marriage, that making a relationship last for the long term takes hard work.  We need to learn that marriage is a fight, it is a battle every single day a war against Satan who realizes that our marriages can be a great defense, someone who knows us, fights for us, prays for us, encourages and uplifts us, challenges us to be better, to be more.

What a great picture of marriage that is, a couple on the front lines of battle, watching each other backs, picking each other up when the other is down, leaving no one behind, what if we could embrace that picture, what if we could approach marriage that way?  How would our generation change the statistics on marriage?

So, Future Husbands,

What do you want? A girl worth fighting for.