Answers to your questions about life, religion and the Bible
More on cohabitation
Dear Father Paul: Your answer recently regarding couples cohabiting together failed to cover my special situation.
I am a woman nearing 60 whose husband passed away nearly five years ago.
Since then I have become somewhat “attached” to his best friend who is divorced and lives in a nearby state. We do love each other and would like to get married, however, there is a problem. If I remarry, I will lose all of the generous “surviving widow benefits” from my deceased husband’s employer, including health insurance and a nice pension which I depend on to live.
We both know what the Bible says about unmarried couples living together. But is there any way that God would justify us living together and not getting married because of the special circumstances I have described? I am lonely and don’t want to die alone. — No Name Please.
Dear No Name: I am so sorry for your loss. You sound like a very special and precious lady.
Believe me when I say that I have deep compassion for your circumstances. My own (now deceased) mother, some years ago found herself in your exact situation. I agonized for her situation then, as I do for your situation now. More on her later.
Indeed, the Bible does prohibit couples living together outside of marriage. But God has a very good reason each time he says “Thou Shall Not” in his word, the Bible. He’s not some grumpy old man that enjoys saying “no” all of the time. Strange as it may sound, he says, “Thou Shall Not” for our benefit, not his. As a loving and compassionate heavenly parent, God knows the future for us whichever roads we choose in life. He knows that pain is very often the result when we take our road rather than his. We might say, “Hey, what’s the harm?” But God, who knows the future, says … “Don’t! I don’t want to see you get hurt.”
The really sad thing that I have seen so many times in my decades of ministry is that, when people insist on walking their own roads of disobedience to God, and bad things inevitably happen, they often blame God. My how that must break God’s heart.
Back to my mom. In 1978 my (retired) father died. Luckily mom was left with very generous U.S. government benefits from my Dad’s Navy (WW II) partial disability pension and a full retirement pension from the U.S. Postal Service. Mom was a “people person” of the highest magnitude, and within a couple of years, serious loneliness and depression set in.
Then she was reconnected to an old friend of her and my dad ‘s named LeeRoy whose wife had recently died. The two nearly 70 year-olds fell in love, and wanted to get married. But, like you, they discovered that Federal Law effectively provided the loss of all of my dad’s death benefits if his widow remarried. Getting married would be very costly. But they could keep everything if they just “lived together” without getting married.
They asked me what I thought and I told them what God says in the Bible and why … but I said that it was their decision.
I then asked them the main question: “Do you have the faith to trust God to provide for you if you choose to obey Gods word and get married?” They chose to get married and they indeed lost all of her benefits. Somehow, though, all of their needs, and then some, were met for the next 13 years.
Then LeeRoy died and mom was left with nothing but a small Social Security check. What now?
Well, here is the “end of the story.” In the early days of his presidency, in the early 1990’s, President Clinton proposed, and Congress passed into law, a bill providing that spouses of deceased Federal employees and military veterans with service connected disabilities “could keep 100 percent” of their spouse’s death benefits upon remarriage. But that’s not all. It further provided full retroactivity back to the time of death! Mom soon got a really, really big check … may God be praised!
This Psalm 37:25 (New Living Translation) quote from King David speaks directly to your situation. “Once I was young, and now I am old. Yet I have never seen the godly abandoned or their children begging for bread.”
Do you have a question? Send your question to me at paulmassey@earthlink.net and I will try to answer your question in the paper.
Father Paul Massey is pastor emeritus of Church of the Holy Cross in Fayetteville, Georgia where lonely and hurting people are most welcome. See www.holycrosschurch.wordpress.com for more information, directions and service times.
