“Marriage is a dying institution and something I will never be associated with.” Those were the words of Hollywood actress Cameron Diaz, and she wasn’t joking. In an interview, she went on to say that we shouldn’t live our lives in relationships based on old traditions that don’t suit our world any longer. Then there’s George Clooney, who told reporters, “I keep telling everyone I’m never going to get married. I’m never going to have children. But people just don’t believe me.” Similarly, Adam Levine from Maroon 5 put it bluntly: “If you don’t get married, you can’t get divorced.” And yet, what do these three celebrities all have in common? All three of them are married today.
So what changed? The answer is simple: they met someone. And the moment they did, every carefully constructed reason they had went out the window. That’s how it works. Nobody has ever been argued into loving someone. When you meet the right person, everything changes.
In the Gospel of John, we find a story about a woman who had her categories firmly fixed. She shows up at a well in the middle of the day, which in the ancient world meant she was avoiding people. She had been married five times and was currently living with a man who wasn’t her husband. She knew what the neighbors thought of her.
But then a Jewish rabbi sits down at the well and asks her for a drink of water. By all cultural norms this was shocking, because Jewish men did not speak to Samaritan women. But this rabbi didn’t seem to care about their rules. They talked about water, worship, and the coming Messiah. And then He said something that completely unraveled her categories. He said: “I who speak to you am the Messiah.” He showed her that He somehow knew about the five marriages, and He knew about the man she was living with now. He showed her that He knew it all, and yet, He didn’t reject her.
The woman left her water jar at the well and ran back to the town she had been hiding from, saying: “Come, see a man who told me everything I ever did.” What changed? She had met someone.
In our culture, a lot of people keep God at a distance for the same reason those celebrities kept marriage at a distance. They have their reasons: pain, hypocrisy, unanswered prayers, or churches that burned them. And yet, I have seen so many people whose categories fall apart, not from encountering a perfect argument, but from encountering a perfect person. Everything changes when they meet the risen Christ. Not because they earned it, but because God’s grace met them through faith. That is exactly what happened to me. I spent years knowing about God without really knowing Him. I had the theology. I had the answers. But it wasn’t until I actually encountered Christ personally that everything I thought I had figured out about life got rearranged. Not because I heard a better argument, but because I met someone.
Those celebrities changed because they met someone. So did she, and so did I, and so can you.
