According to the Cambridge Advanced Learners’ Dictionary, the word “foolish” means “unwise, stupid or not showing good judgement.” So, what does it mean to be foolish in a marital or premarital relationship? Foolishness is when your parents go through a lot of suffering to bring you up from childhood, put you through school and you eventually grow up, get married, live in affluence and forget about the same parents, leaving them to suffer hunger in the hinterland; not because you lack, but because you married a wife that you knew hated your parents and has overbearing influence over you.
Foolishness is having sex with someone else outside your legally married spouse and assuming that nobody knows about it. Foolishness is when you keep having sex with two different people and keep promising them that you will marry them. Foolishness is when you have sex with someone of the opposite sex who is not legally married to you.
It is when you waste the scarce resources of time to indulge in homosexuality or lesbianism rather than seek how you can manage your limited time on earth to please your creator and pursue his purpose for your life.
Foolishness is when you bear malice with your spouse, refuse to forgive his or her offence and yet, go to church every now and then to clap hands and shout and disturb the entire environment, deceiving yourself that you are a Christian. Foolishness is when you speak negative words about your spouse to your children and take actions intended to make your children hate or disrespect your spouse.
Foolishness is when you keep a child outside wedlock without telling your spouse about the child. Foolishness is when you have children with different sex partners without thinking or doing anything about the children’s welfare. Foolishness is when you are a single lady, and a married man who you are aware that his spouse is alive, proposes marriage to you and you accept the proposal.
Foolishness is when you leave your wife to singlehandedly bear all the financial responsibilities in the home without making any effort to learn a skill, secure a job or generate any income.
Foolishness is when you indulge in economic competition with your spouse or refuse to see your spouse as part of you, after going to God’s altar on wedding day to take a marriage vow. Foolishness is when you find it difficult to release money to your legally married spouse but easily grant financial requests of some mistress somewhere. Foolishness is when you assume that someone is your wife or husband without ever sitting down to discuss the rules of engagement, purpose of marriage and destination of the relationship. If you do not know where you are going, you may never know whether or not you are actually moving.
You will not know when you arrive. Foolishness is when you dishonour your parents in presence of your children and expect your children to honour you when you grow old. Foolishness is when you turn a blind eye to ungodly relationships by your unmarried daughters or sons in the name of trying to encourage them to get married.
Foolishness is when you collaborate with your business partner to arrange a wedding of your child to his or her child, just for the sake of your business interest, even when the couple in question are strangers to, and do not love each other.
Foolishness is when you marry someone that is financially loaded without asking questions or bothering about the person’s source of revenue. Foolishness is when you as a lady, marry someone who is still being fed and housed by his parents and does nothing, or plans to do nothing for a living.
Foolishness is when you arrange for and get wedded to someone that you are seeing physically for the first time on your wedding day. Foolishness is when you agree to marry a guy who physically assaults, disrespects and humiliates you all the time.
Foolishness is when at age 60, you still use your car to pick teenagers from campuses or along the road and take them to hotels for sexual pleasure. Foolishness is when you expose yourself to pornography and assume that your children will not do the same thing. This is actually beyond foolishness. It is spiritual bondage.
Various acts of foolishness displayed by some people in the marital institution today are uncountable. However, there is always a cause and a remedy for each case. The basic cause of any form of foolishness is in Psalm 14:1.
“The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God.” Once you have disrespect or disregard for God’s word or instructions, consider yourself a foolish person. In any case, there are solutions to the problem of a foolish heart.
“That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved” (Romans 10:9).
“Trust in the LORD with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways submit to him, and he will make your paths straight,” (Proverbs 3:5-7). “Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man” (Ecclesiastes 12:13).
-ALBINUS CHIEDU, +234 8038117704, [email protected]
