Paul urges Timothy to avoid "profane myths and old wives' tales." The NIV translates this as "godless and silly myths." He is warning them to remain at the center of the faith. How easy it is to be indoctrinated by a society that does not take seriously the truths of God's Word and wake up discovering that something about us is being destroyed by these godless and silly myths. Instead, we are called to train ourselves in godliness.
I would like to identify several profane myths and old wives' tales that can literally destroy marital harmony and actually break up your marriage.
Myth #1 is the Perfect-Person myth.
It goes like this: Boy meets girl. Girl meets boy. They marry and live happily ever after. This myth says that if you marry the right person, you will have a wonderful life together. Your problems will be minimized. Yours will be a storybook love affair, different from what it would be if you happened to marry the wrong person.
These kinds of marriages are peopled by handsome men and beautiful women who have darling little children. These people live in lovely homes. They have substantial incomes. They are successful in their work. They are physically agile and enjoy sports. There is plenty of money to do all the things that happily married couples do. Harsh words are not spoken. Disagreements are few and far between. If both are Christians, God will see to it that nothing extraordinarily bad will happen to this family.
Anne and I married right into this myth. We had an ideal courtship. It was storybook stuff. There was no question that she was the right person for me and I was the right person for her. People loved us to tell the story of how we met in Taiwan and again in Hong Kong, as she was on her way to teach for the summer in Cambodia and I was leading a tour around the world for Dr. Norman Vincent Peale. The story surrounding our meeting in 1963 and wedding in 1964 could provide material for a romantic novel.
But the facts are that Anne and I had our problems, and those problems emerged not too long after the honeymoon. The sad thing was that Anne and I lived with the myth for a prolonged period of time, at varying degrees of confusion and frustration, wondering why, since we knew we had married the right person, we were both in pain and causing pain for each other. It took us quite a few years before we were prepared to get the help we needed because we were caught up in the "perfect-person myth."
The truth is that every couple is going to have some problems of one kind or another. Our problems will be different from yours, and your problems will differ from those of others or of your friends. Whenever you get two people together, given the many differences in family backgrounds, cultural expectations, and finely tuned differences in individual temperaments, there will be marital difficulties. The sooner you and I discover this truth and put away the myth, the better off our marriages will be. I am not saying that God did not want you to marry your spouse. I am not saying that there is not a right person for you. What I am saying is that there is no such thing as a perfect person, just as there is no such thing as a perfect family. You and I are sinners saved by God's grace. When we marry, we are still sinners saved by God's grace, and every couple needs God's grace to survive one day at a time.
