by Rev Dunamis Okunowo | Sep 3, 2026 | Engaged & Dating
Reading Time: 5 minutesYou’re sitting in the church parking lot afterward, engine running, neither of you quite ready to pull out yet. This is the fourth church you’ve visited together in two months — his has the hymns and the pastor who baptized him as a baby; hers has the modern worship set and a young couples’ ministry that already feels like community. Both are good. Neither of you wants to simply “win” this one by attrition. “We can’t keep visiting churches forever,” he finally says. “At some point this has to be ours, not yours and mine.”
Hebrews was written to Christians tempted to drift away from gathered community — under pressure, discouraged, some already skipping meeting together. The writer doesn’t just recommend church attendance as a nice habit; he frames it as essential to spiritual survival, especially as hard times approach.
“Let’s consider how to provoke one another to love and good works, not forsaking our own assembling together, as is the custom of some, but exhorting one another, and so much the more, as you see the Day approaching.” (Hebrews 10:24-25)
Notice the “one another” language woven through this passage. Church, in the New Testament’s vision, isn’t a solo spiritual consumer activity where you show up, receive something, and leave unchanged by the people around you. It’s a body that provokes, exhorts, and encourages its members toward love and good works. Applied directly to an engaged couple, this means choosing a church home together before the wedding isn’t a logistical afterthought squeezed in between venue tours and cake tastings — it’s choosing the community that will disciple your marriage, hold you accountable, and walk with you through both celebration and crisis long after the wedding day photos are put away.
Here’s the risk worth naming honestly: a couple who never settles into one shared church often ends up, functionally, without either the community or the accountability this passage describes. Each partner stays tethered to their own separate spiritual “home,” attending on alternating Sundays or drifting between the two, never actually becoming one body together the way they’re becoming one household in every other area of life. You can be perfectly cordial about it and still, five years into marriage, realize you never actually built the shared community this passage assumes every believer needs.
The tension is real, though, and worth taking seriously rather than steamrolling. Blending church backgrounds means navigating denominational differences, worship style preferences, and loyalty to a childhood church or a pastor who has mattered to you personally for years. The way through isn’t for one person to simply defer to the other’s preference indefinitely, nor for the search to become another arena for someone to “win.” Evaluate together, out loud, by a different standard than comfort: where will we actually be built up? Where will we know and be known, as a couple, within a reasonable amount of time? Where will we be exhorted toward love and good works rather than just entertained for an hour a week?
It’s worth naming a subtler danger here too: sometimes the disagreement isn’t really about which church is objectively better, but about deeper loyalties neither person has voiced. Staying at a childhood church can be less about theology and more about not wanting to disappoint parents who have attended there for decades. Preferring a new church can be less about worship style and more about wanting a fresh identity separate from the family you grew up in. Naming those underlying loyalties honestly with each other, rather than arguing only about surface preferences, usually gets a couple unstuck far faster than another round of visiting churches. Ask directly: is there a reason beyond preference that one of us is attached to a particular option, and would it help to say that out loud?
Pay attention, too, to the urgency in “as you see the Day approaching.” The writer of Hebrews isn’t casual about this instruction — gathered community becomes more essential, not less, as difficulty increases. For a couple heading into marriage, which carries its own set of trials ahead, settling into committed community before the wedding rather than after means you enter marriage already surrounded, rather than scrambling to build support for the first time after a crisis hits.
Consider, too, what settling into a church home together does for your engagement itself, not just your future marriage. Premarital counseling is far more effective when it comes from people who will still know you next year, not a one-time seminar you never see again. A young marrieds’ ministry can surround you with couples five or ten years ahead of you, willing to answer honest questions about conflict, intimacy, or in-laws that you might feel awkward asking your own parents. And practically, a pastor who has watched you serve and grow together for months before the wedding will know you far better standing at the altar than one who met you during a single planning meeting. The church you choose now shapes not only your wedding day, but the entire season leading up to it.
Back in that parking lot, the couple decides on a plan instead of continuing to drift between two churches indefinitely: three more visits together, with an actual list of questions — is there a couples’ or young marrieds’ ministry, will we be known by name within a year, does the preaching challenge us both, not just comfort us — and a commitment to choose one within two months and actually get involved, not merely attend. Getting involved matters as much as the choosing: joining a small group, signing up to serve on a team, introducing themselves to the couples’ ministry leader by name rather than staying anonymous in the back row. A church home isn’t established by attendance alone; it’s established by being known, which only happens through consistent, visible participation over time.
The church you choose together isn’t just where you’ll get married. It’s who will help carry you when marriage gets hard. Choose it with the same intentionality you’re choosing each other.
Reflect
- Right now, are you and your partner actually building toward one shared church community, or are you each still functionally rooted in separate ones?
- What would it cost you personally to leave a church you love for the sake of building a shared spiritual home with your partner — and are you willing to have that conversation honestly?
- If you got married this year, is there a church community right now that would notice if you disappeared for a month?
A Prayer for Today
God, thank you for the gift of your church, and for the community we still need to fully find together. Forgive us for letting comfort or convenience keep us rooted in separate spiritual homes instead of building one shared community before we're married. Give us wisdom as we choose a church together — not based on which one is easier, but on where we'll actually be known, exhorted, and built up as a couple. Prepare the community that will walk with us through both the joyful and hard seasons ahead. Help us commit, not just visit. In Jesus's name, amen.
Your Action Step
This week, agree together on two or three churches to visit as a couple over the next month, with a plan to commit to one before the wedding.
by Rev Dunamis Okunowo | Sep 2, 2026 | Engaged & Dating
Reading Time: 5 minutesEight months in, you still don’t have a name for what this is. You’ve met his roommates. You’ve spent four holidays with her family. You text good morning and good night every day without fail. But when a friend asked at brunch what you two actually are, you both gave a different answer, and neither of you laughed it off as easily as you wanted to. It’s a little like hiking a trail with no markers — you’ve covered real ground together, but neither of you actually chose the direction; you just kept walking because stopping felt harder than continuing.
Proverbs 16 sits among Solomon’s collected wisdom sayings about the tension between human planning and divine sovereignty — a recurring theme throughout this chapter especially. Verse 9 captures it in a single line meant to be memorized and lived, not just admired from a distance.
“A man’s heart plans his course, but Yahweh directs his steps.” (Proverbs 16:9)
Notice what this verse doesn’t say. It doesn’t condemn planning; it states planning as a simple fact of wise living — “a man’s heart plans his course” is presented as normal and expected, not as prideful overreach. What the verse corrects is the illusion that planning equals control. You can plan the course. God directs the actual steps. Applied to dating, this is not a verse against intentionality. If anything, it assumes intentionality as the starting point — you’re meant to plan your course — while trusting God with how the details actually unfold.
That distinction matters, because “dating on purpose” often gets confused with either rigid over-planning on one end, or passive drifting dressed up as spirituality on the other. Drifting looks like letting a relationship coast on convenience and inertia without either person actually choosing it — staying together because breaking up feels harder than continuing, avoiding the conversation about direction because ambiguity feels safer than a real answer. Some couples call this “letting God lead” or “not rushing things,” but it often isn’t trust in God’s sovereignty at all. It’s frequently just avoidance of a hard conversation, wearing spiritual language as a disguise. God directing your steps assumes you’re walking somewhere with intention, not standing still hoping direction will find you on its own.
It helps to notice how the rest of Proverbs treats planning as a mark of maturity, not its opposite. The book repeatedly contrasts the sluggard, who drifts through life reacting to whatever’s in front of him, with the wise person, who thinks ahead, weighs consequences, and commits to a direction. Nowhere does Scripture praise aimlessness as a form of spiritual surrender. Faith, in the biblical imagination, looks like Nehemiah surveying the broken walls before he ever picked up a trowel, or Paul planning missionary routes he then submitted to the Spirit’s redirection. The pattern is always the same: plan with real intention, then hold that plan open-handed enough for God to redirect it. A relationship that never gets planned in the first place isn’t more open to God’s leading — it’s simply directionless, with no plan for him to redirect.
Dating on purpose looks specific and concrete: naming what you’re actually doing together — are we dating with marriage as the aim, or is this genuinely undefined and both of us are at peace with that? Having regular, honest check-ins about where the relationship is headed instead of assuming you both already know. Being willing to end a relationship that has clarified it isn’t leading toward marriage, rather than letting it drift on for years out of comfort or fear of starting over. This isn’t about rushing anyone into a decision — it’s about respecting the other person’s time and heart enough to be honest about direction, because vague relationships often quietly cost someone years they could have spent building a life with someone actually walking the same course.
It’s worth being honest about why ambiguity feels safer than clarity for so many couples. Naming a direction out loud means risking a real answer — maybe your partner isn’t actually planning toward marriage the way you assumed, or maybe you’ll discover you’ve been more hesitant than you realized once you have to put it into words. Staying vague protects both people from that risk, at least temporarily. But Proverbs doesn’t offer risk-avoidance as wisdom. It offers planning, submitted to God, as wisdom. The couple who never asks the direction question isn’t being more faithful; they’re simply postponing a conversation that will eventually happen anyway, usually at a point where more time and more of each other’s hearts are already invested.
Take that eight-month couple. Prompted by the brunch question neither of them could answer well, they finally sit down that week and have the conversation they’d been circling for months — naming their intentions, their expectations around exclusivity, what moving toward marriage would actually mean and on what kind of timeline. It’s not a comfortable conversation. There’s real relief in some of what gets said, and honestly, there might be grief too, if it turns out they want different things. But either outcome is better than another eight months of walking an unmarked trail, letting momentum decide something neither of them ever chose on purpose.
It’s worth adding that dating on purpose doesn’t require having every answer figured out on the first serious conversation. Direction can be genuine even when the exact timeline isn’t settled yet. What matters is that both people are actually choosing, together and out loud, rather than one person quietly hoping the relationship becomes something neither of them has agreed to pursue. A couple can honestly say we’re moving toward marriage and still need real conversations later about when. What they can’t do, if they want to date with integrity, is let month after month pass without ever naming the direction at all.
Purposeful dating isn’t a lack of trust in God — it’s cooperating with the way he actually works throughout Scripture: plan your course wisely, walk it with intention, and trust him with the steps you can’t control. Don’t mistake drifting for patience. Plan your course this week, and let God direct where it actually leads.
Reflect
- Could you clearly state, in one sentence, what direction your relationship is currently headed and why — or has it mostly been drifting on convenience?
- Is there a conversation about intention or timeline you've been avoiding because clarity feels riskier than ambiguity?
- Where in this relationship have you confused waiting on God with simply avoiding a decision you're afraid to make?
A Prayer for Today
Lord, I confess I've let drifting feel like patience and avoidance feel like trust. I don't want to waste either of our years in a relationship neither of us has actually chosen on purpose. Give me courage to have the honest conversation about direction and timeline instead of hiding behind vague hope. Help me plan my course wisely, the way Proverbs describes, while still trusting you to direct the actual steps. Whatever the answer turns out to be, give me the strength to face it honestly rather than let ambiguity decide for me. In Jesus's name, amen.
Your Action Step
This week, have one direct conversation with your partner naming where you believe the relationship is headed and by when, instead of letting time decide for you.
by Rev Dunamis Okunowo | Sep 1, 2026 | Engaged & Dating
Reading Time: 5 minutesThe waiting room chairs are the stiff plastic kind, and you’ve been sitting in them for two hours since your fiancé’s mother was rushed in. He’s texted his sister three times and refilled his coffee twice, and neither of you has said much. Finally he reaches for your hand and says quietly, “Should we pray?” You realize, sitting there under the fluorescent lights, that in over a year of dating you’ve prayed for each other plenty — silently, separately, in the privacy of your own devotions — but you have almost never actually prayed together, out loud, in the same room. Tonight, of all nights, is the first time.
James wrote his letter to scattered, struggling believers dealing with real suffering, sickness, and sin in community — not abstract theology, but the practical question of how faith holds up under pressure. Near the end of the letter, he gets specific about what a healthy spiritual community actually does when someone is hurting.
“Confess your offenses to one another, and pray for one another, that you may be healed. The insistent prayer of a righteous person is powerfully effective.” (James 5:16)
Notice the two commands James pairs together: confess to one another, and pray for one another. He assumes both happen in relationship, not in isolation. For an engaged or dating couple, this text points to a spiritual practice that’s often quietly skipped: praying together, out loud, especially about hard or vulnerable things. Many Christian couples pray easily over meals — a quick “bless this food” — but rarely pray about the actual substance of their lives together: fear, conflict, family struggles, unmet longings. That’s a missed opportunity, because praying together does something private prayer alone doesn’t. It makes you spiritual witnesses to each other’s actual burdens, not just polite companions who happen to share a faith.
It’s also worth noticing that James places confession and prayer in the same breath, as though one naturally leads to the other. That pairing matters for a couple preparing for marriage, because the ability to pray together honestly is directly tied to the ability to be honest with each other in the first place. Couples who never practice confession — who default to smoothing over conflict rather than naming it, or who each privately carry disappointment without ever voicing it — usually find their shared prayer life stays shallow too, limited to safe, general requests because anything deeper would require admitting something uncomfortable out loud. Learning to pray together and learning to confess honestly to each other grow in tandem. You rarely get skilled at one without the other.
If you’ve avoided this, you’re not unusual. Praying out loud in front of someone else is genuinely vulnerable — there’s the awkwardness of not knowing what to say, the fear of sounding unspiritual compared to your partner, or simply never having been taught how. It’s worth naming plainly: it feels clumsy at first for almost everyone. Sincerity matters far more than eloquence here. James’s phrase “the insistent prayer of a righteous person is powerfully effective” is followed immediately by the example of Elijah — an ordinary human being who prayed fervently and saw real, tangible effect. Praying together isn’t a formality to check off. It’s a means God actually uses.
There’s also a cost to this practice that’s worth being honest about: praying together honestly will eventually surface things that need actual repentance between you — an unkind word, a broken promise, a flash of jealousy neither of you has named out loud. Praying honestly together requires being honest about failure first, which is its own quiet act of humility and trust-building long before you ever stand at the altar. A couple who can confess to each other and then pray together afterward has built something a couple who only ever apologizes and moves on has not.
If you’re not sure where to begin, it can help to borrow structure rather than waiting for inspiration to strike. Some couples find it easier to pray through a passage of Scripture together — reading a psalm out loud and then turning its words into a prayer for their own relationship — rather than starting from a blank page. Others keep a simple shared list, written down, of things they’re praying about together: a parent’s health, a job transition, a recurring temptation one of them is fighting. Having something concrete to return to takes the pressure off finding the exact right words and puts the focus back where it belongs — on actually bringing your real life to God together, however plainly you say it.
This matters as much for engaged couples planning a wedding as for any other season, maybe more. It’s easy to assume that because you’re actively involved in premarital classes, choosing readings for the ceremony, or even asking a pastor to officiate, your spiritual life together is automatically healthy. But none of that necessarily includes the two of you actually praying together outside of a public or ceremonial setting. A couple can plan an entirely Christian wedding day — hymns, Scripture readings, a pastor’s blessing — and still reach the altar having prayed together out loud, privately, only a handful of times. The wedding day isn’t where this habit gets built. It has to be built in the ordinary weeks leading up to it, in a living room or a car or, as this couple discovered, a waiting room neither of them chose to be in.
Start smaller than the hospital waiting room forced this couple to start. Try a two-minute nightly check-in prayer — not a performance, just naming one thing you’re grateful for and one thing you’re worried about, then praying about both, out loud, together. Or pick one real concern each week — a job interview, a hard conversation with a parent, a financial decision — and pray over it specifically instead of defaulting to generic blessings. That hospital-room couple, once they stumbled through their first out-loud prayer together, kept doing it afterward, even about small things, because they’d discovered something they hadn’t expected: praying together didn’t just ask God for help, it made them feel like they were actually facing life together instead of alongside each other.
The habit built now, however awkward it feels at first, becomes the backbone of a marriage that will face far harder rooms than a hospital waiting area. Don’t wait for a crisis to have your first out-loud prayer together. Start this week, on an ordinary night, with something small and real.
Reflect
- Have you and your partner ever prayed together out loud about something real, or has your prayer life stayed mostly private and parallel?
- What makes you hesitant to pray out loud in front of your partner — self-consciousness, fear of sounding unspiritual, or simply never being taught how?
- Is there something happening in your life right now that you haven't asked your partner to pray with you about, and why not?
A Prayer for Today
Father, forgive me for treating prayer with my partner as optional or awkward instead of essential. I want more than parallel faith — I want us to actually kneel together, confess honestly, and carry each other's burdens the way James describes. Teach me to pray out loud without pretense, to be vulnerable about what I actually need prayer for, and to take my partner's struggles as seriously as my own. Make our prayer life together a real source of healing, not just a formality before meals. Start that tonight, however clumsy it feels. In Jesus's name, amen.
Your Action Step
This week, pray together out loud at least three times about something specific and real — not just a generic blessing — even if it feels awkward at first.
by Rev Dunamis Okunowo | Aug 31, 2026 | Engaged & Dating
Reading Time: 5 minutesIt’s 11:40 p.m. and the wedding budget spreadsheet is still open on the laptop between you, the cursor blinking in a cell neither of you wants to fill in first. The venue costs more than either of you expected, which means something else has to shrink — the guest list, the honeymoon, the flowers nobody will remember in five years. You’ve moved numbers around for an hour, and every version feels like a trade-off between two things you both want. Somewhere in the frustration, your fiancée sets down her phone and asks a different question than the one you’ve been arguing about: “What are we actually building this budget — and this marriage — around?”
Jesus said this in the middle of the Sermon on the Mount, right after telling a crowd of ordinary, financially anxious people not to worry about food, clothing, or tomorrow — the exact kinds of pressures that show up in a dating or engaged relationship’s budget, calendar, and long-term plans. His solution to anxious striving wasn’t “try harder to balance everything.” It was to reorder what gets sought first.
“But seek first God’s Kingdom, and his righteousness; and all these things will be given to you as well.” (Matthew 6:33)
“Seek first” doesn’t mean seek only, and it doesn’t mean exclude career, wedding planning, or family from your attention. It means sequence and priority. Everything else in this passage — what you’ll eat, what you’ll wear, what tomorrow holds — is real and matters, but it isn’t meant to be sought first. God’s kingdom, his rule and his righteousness, is meant to govern above your own comfort, ambition, and image.
Here’s why that matters so specifically for a couple who’s dating or engaged: it’s tempting, understandably, to treat the relationship itself as the highest good — the thing you organize your whole life around, the source of your security and identity. But when a relationship is asked to be the ultimate priority, it becomes fragile, because it’s being asked to bear a weight only God was ever meant to bear: your sense of worth, your security, your meaning. A relationship can’t hold that weight forever without cracking. But when God’s kingdom is legitimately first for both individuals — not just in theory, but in how you actually spend your time and money — the relationship becomes something you build together underneath a shared, greater priority, instead of two individuals locked in a quiet tug-of-war between competing “firsts”: career versus relationship versus family of origin versus personal ambition.
Notice, too, what Jesus promises: “these things will be given to you as well.” That’s not a prosperity guarantee that seeking God first means an easy budget or a stress-free wedding. It’s an assurance that when priorities are rightly ordered, the practical concerns — what to eat, what to wear, how to spend — find their proper, non-anxious place in your life, rather than driving every decision you make as a couple.
So ask honestly: does your calendar reflect that God’s kingdom is actually first, or has wedding planning quietly occupied the priority that worship, prayer, and service used to hold in your individual lives? Does your budget reflect stewardship and generosity, or has the wedding itself become something you’re both, without quite noticing, worshiping?
It’s worth being honest, too, about how subtly this shift usually happens. Almost no engaged couple sits down and decides on purpose to demote God’s kingdom. It happens by a thousand small substitutions — the small group you used to attend together quietly becomes something you’ll get back to after the wedding, the tithe check gets smaller because the deposit for the venue is due, the evening you used to spend serving at church gets absorbed by cake tastings and seating charts. None of those choices is sinful in isolation. The danger is cumulative: a season can slip by where the relationship, and the wedding that celebrates it, has quietly become the actual center of gravity, while God’s kingdom becomes something you’ll return to a state of things calm down eventually. Naming that pattern honestly, before the wedding rather than after, is itself an act of seeking him first.
Go back to that spreadsheet moment. Instead of the question “what can we afford,” the couple starts asking a different one together: “what does faithfulness look like with what we actually have?” That single shift changes the conversation. Maybe it means committing to tithe from wedding gifts instead of treating them as pure windfall. Maybe it means trimming the guest list, not because you have to, but because starting the marriage without debt matters more to both of you than an impressive event. Maybe it simply means pausing to pray over the spreadsheet together before either of you touches another number — not as a formality, but as an actual act of seeking God’s kingdom in a decision that, left alone, would just be two people negotiating for what they each want.
This principle extends well beyond the wedding budget, too. It applies to how you’ll decide where to live after marriage, how you’ll spend your Saturdays, whether one of you will pursue a demanding career track that leaves little room for church involvement or family. Every one of those decisions is, underneath the practical details, an answer to the question of what actually governs your life together. Couples who wait until after the wedding to ask that question usually find the patterns they built during engagement — treating the relationship itself, or comfort, or ambition as the unspoken priority — are far harder to unlearn once they’ve calcified into a marriage’s daily rhythm. Better to practice reordering your priorities now, while the stakes of any single decision are still relatively small, than to try to retrain years of habit once children, mortgages, and careers raise those stakes considerably.
A relationship anchored under God’s kingdom, rather than competing for the top spot in your life, will hold steady long after the wedding budget is forgotten and the flowers have wilted. Seek him first this week — in the small decisions, not just the big ones — and watch what settles into its rightful place underneath that.
Reflect
- If someone looked at your calendar and your spending this month, would they conclude that God's kingdom is actually first in your life, or that your relationship (or wedding) has quietly taken that place?
- What specific worry about money, timing, or having enough is currently driving your decisions instead of trust in God's provision?
- What would change about your wedding planning or dating life this week if you deliberately sought God's kingdom first in it, rather than fitting him in around it?
A Prayer for Today
Lord, I don't want our relationship to quietly become the thing I worship instead of you. Show me where anxiety about money, timing, or the future is driving our decisions instead of trust in your provision. Help us seek your kingdom first — not as a spiritual afterthought squeezed in around wedding planning, but as the actual priority that shapes our calendar, our budget, and our choices. Teach us that putting you first isn't a threat to our relationship but the very thing that will hold it steady. Give us the courage to reorder what needs reordering this week. In Jesus's name, amen.
Your Action Step
This week, before making your next wedding-planning or financial decision, pause together and pray specifically that God's kingdom, not comfort or image, would shape the choice.
by Rev Dunamis Okunowo | Aug 30, 2026 | Engaged & Dating
Reading Time: 5 minutesYou’re standing in the rope aisle of the hardware store at nine at night, three weeks before the wedding, trying to figure out how to hang string lights across the backyard for the reception. You test a single cord and it feels flimsy under the weight of the bulbs, so the guy behind the counter hands you a length of braided rope instead. “Single strand snaps under weight,” he says. “Braided holds. More fibers, more friction, harder to break.” You buy the braided rope. Your fiancé jokes it should have been your engagement gift. You laugh, but standing in that aisle, something else occurs to you: neither of you had thought yet about what your own relationship is actually braided from.
Ecclesiastes is the most unflinchingly honest book in the Bible about the limits of human effort, written by “the Preacher” — traditionally understood as Solomon — reflecting on a life spent testing what actually holds up under weight: wealth, wisdom, pleasure, achievement. In chapter 4, he turns from lone achievement to companionship, arguing that two are better than one because they can help each other up when one falls. Then he adds a third strand.
“If a man prevails against him who is alone, two shall withstand him; and a threefold cord is not quickly broken.” (Ecclesiastes 4:12)
Read in its immediate context, Ecclesiastes 4 is commending companionship and mutual support in general — two people helping each other outwork the risks of going it alone — without naming God as the third strand directly. Reading God as the unnamed third strand is a longstanding, popular devotional application rather than the text’s stated point, and it’s a good one — just worth knowing the difference between what the verse says and how it’s often applied.
Two is already better than one — Solomon spent the verses before this on that truth: two can help each other up, keep each other warm, defend each other. But he doesn’t stop at two. He adds a third strand precisely because two people, however devoted, are still limited — two finite people, two tempers, two blind spots, two sets of unmet needs on a hard day. A two-strand relationship holds up fine under normal weight. This proverb envisions something stronger still: three strands, woven together, able to withstand what two alone cannot.
Applied to a relationship, that third strand is God himself — not as a vague spiritual add-on, but as an active third party actually woven into the daily life of the relationship. Think about the physics of a braided cord for a moment: it isn’t stronger merely because it has more mass. It’s stronger because of multiplied friction — each strand supports the others, distributing tension across all three so no single strand bears the full load alone. For a couple, this means that when conflict pulls painfully in one direction, the third strand — shared surrender to God — keeps the whole cord from snapping open even when one person is at their weakest, most tired, or most hurt.
It’s worth pausing on why Solomon reaches for three strands rather than simply saying more is always better. A cord could theoretically be four strands, or ten. He picks three deliberately, because three is the minimum needed to change the entire structure of the bond — two strands twisted together can still be pried apart with enough force at a single point, but a third strand woven through the other two distributes any pulling force across the whole cord instead of concentrating it at one weak spot. That’s not just poetic; it’s how braided rope actually behaves under load. A relationship without God at the center isn’t just missing a nice extra — it’s missing the very thing that keeps a single hard pull from unraveling the whole bond at once.
But here’s where many well-meaning Christian couples miss the point: it isn’t enough for both people to individually believe in God. That’s two separate strands running parallel, not one cord braided together. Parallel faith looks like two individuals who each pray privately, each attend church, each read Scripture on their own time — admirable, but not yet woven. Braided faith looks different: praying about the relationship together, out loud; submitting real decisions to God together instead of just deciding and asking for his blessing afterward; letting Scripture arbitrate disagreements rather than only personal preference; seeking wise counsel together when you’re stuck. The braid isn’t automatic just because both people believe. It has to be woven, decision by decision, into how you actually relate to each other.
This is especially important to establish before the wedding, because the habits you practice now are the habits you’ll default to when marriage brings heavier weight. A couple who has only ever negotiated decisions between themselves will keep doing exactly that after the vows, just with higher stakes — a mortgage instead of a rent split, a child’s wellbeing instead of a seating chart. A couple who has practiced bringing God actively into decisions while dating will have already built the reflex to do the same when the decision is enormous: a job loss, a diagnosis, a wayward child years down the road. The cord doesn’t get braided instantly at the altar. It gets braided in all the small, unglamorous decisions made while you’re still just dating or engaged, deciding together, on purpose, to make God the third strand rather than an afterthought.
This week, when a real decision comes up between you — maybe the wedding budget, maybe a disagreement about where to live, maybe how to handle a strained family relationship — resist the instinct to simply negotiate it out between the two of you like it’s a transaction. Pause. Pray about it together, out loud, before either of you makes up your mind. Say it plainly to each other: “Let’s not decide this as just the two of us.” It will feel unfamiliar at first, maybe even a little vulnerable, especially if you’re used to hashing things out privately in your own head before bringing your position to the table. But that’s exactly the muscle this proverb is describing — the difference between a relationship that can be pulled apart under enough pressure and one that has genuinely invited a third strand strong enough to hold when you can’t hold each other up anymore.
The cord being woven now, in this dating or engaged season, is what will hold when marriage brings weight neither of you can carry alone. Don’t wait for the wedding day to start braiding it in. Start with the next hard decision you face this week, and let it be genuinely, practically three strands instead of two.
Reflect
- Right now, is your faith running parallel alongside your relationship, or is it actually braided into how you make decisions together? What's one recent decision that shows which it is?
- What would it look like this week to pray about something specific in your relationship together, out loud, instead of separately?
- When conflict pulls hard in one direction, do you currently have a third strand to fall back on, or does the whole weight rest on just the two of you?
A Prayer for Today
God, thank you for wanting to be part of our relationship, not just a witness to it. I confess we've sometimes let our faith run parallel instead of woven together — believing separately instead of building together. Teach us what it actually looks like to invite you into our decisions, our conflicts, our finances, our future, instead of only bringing you in when we're desperate. Make us a cord of three strands, so that when pressure comes, and I know it will, we don't snap because we tried to hold everything with just the two of us. Braid your Spirit into the ordinary decisions of this week. In Jesus's name, amen.
Your Action Step
This week, choose one upcoming decision (wedding budget, a family conflict, a job move) and pray about it together out loud before either of you decides anything alone.
