How to Find a Good Husband

We spent Memorial Day Weekend in the mountains with a throng of beautiful college students—ministry volunteers from across the state who’d packed up their hand-me-down cars to gather before a particularly busy, holy season for our mission. It’s an annual trip we take as a part of my husband’s ministry job, a trip we’ve been taking since we ourselves were college kids, 15 years ago. Back then, we called it “Find a Wife Weekend” and with good reason— Christian hotties from other colleges all descending on the same property for 3 nights of worship and play and stolen glances.

We love college kids; loved being college kids— vibrant creatures shimmering with spirit and desire. All weekend, they stayed up too late and ate whatever they wanted without consequence and some of them probably fell in love with each other, as they should. Much has changed in the 15 years since I was a college girl pining for the attention of a college boy, but the pining has held fast. I remember the butterflies in my stomach upon seeing Dave playing frisbee golf with his friends, the sharpening of my self-awareness when I knew he was near. Now we take our babies, who are closer in age to college kids than we are (I’m nauseous typing that), and observe the vitality of these gorgeous young people from the outskirts with sleepy smiles.

Desire is thick in a crowd like this one: desire to be noticed, to meet the eye of your crush from across the lawn, to throw oneself into the wild descent of love and be met there by the one to whom you’re willing to give all of yourself. It is a good and worthy and godly desire, but it’s risky if rushed. I know the thrill of falling in love. I know, too, the temptation to get the “falling” part over with and settle down already — to put the cart before the horse, attaching my heart to someone who may check some visible boxes (single, “Christian”, good-looking, charismatic) but someone ultimately unworthy of the weight and wonder of my whole self.

On the drive home, I thought of these young women: how they must be thinking about the young men who may or may not be thinking about them, too. I thought about their desire to be seen, spoken to, chosen, and how that desire could cause them to throw themselves into something other than the love God intends to mark their just-beginning lives. Some of them will. They’ll marry boys who seem fine but whose character proves lacking over time. They’ll buy into the idea that if the guy (boy) just has a solid 5-year plan, if he’s earning a degree with high-earning potential and is involved with the right organizations and is charming or funny enough that he’s a good enough bet. “He’s a really good guy,” they’ve said, or heard said, about him. But being a “good guy” isn’t the mark of a godly man, nor is it a criterion for a biblical husband. Setting your bar at “good guy” for the person with whom you will become one is risky, dangerous even.

To be a truly good (read godly, “Biblical”, Christ-like) husband, a man must be marked by something deeper, better than the current middle-class American standard of “goodness”. It needn’t be much more—it isn’t complicated, not a laundry list of character traits. To some, this will seem reductive and foolish. But to the young women with the desire to marry and the mental space to really consider the weight of this choice, here’s what I’d say, even though you didn’t ask. Here’s what to look for. Here’s how to find a good husband: examine his sacrifice.

The Scriptures have a few things about romantic love and marriage — namely that its chief end is the glory of God and that it is meant to be a relationship marked by mutual and total self-giving love. A woman is called to be one thing within a marriage and a man is called to be another: like Christ. Here’s how Paul puts it in Ephesians 5 (italics mine):

Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish. In the same way husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church, because we are members of his body. “Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church. However, let each one of you love his wife as himself, and let the wife see that she respects her husband.

So here’s what we have: According to the scriptures, a good husband will:

1. Love his wife with total self-sacrifice

2. Nourish and cherish his wife as he’d nourish and cherish his own well-being

3. Leave what he knows in order to establish a love in the mystery of gospel love

A good husband will be a man who is able to say no to himself in order to say yes to others. He will count others as more important than himself. He will be willing to sacrifice his own preferences, plans, and comfort in pursuit of the vast mystery of the gospel—he will be doing this already, with or without you. Examine his sacrifice: what is he sacrificing? Who is he sacrificing for? He should be sacrificing his own comfort, time, money, for his friends, his family, and also for people who “don’t deserve” it — classmates or coworkers, people who aren’t like him, people for whom service isn’t advantageous for him. Sacrifice that’s given with the intent to eventually increase his own comfort doesn’t count: in reality, that isn’t sacrifice as much as it is strategy.

I’ll reiterate that he should already be practicing sacrifice to be worthy of your life. These qualities don’t materialize at the moment of matrimony: these are character traits that take years to cultivate. So, if your guy isn’t already actively cultivating these traits, take note (or break up). Please don’t give your life to a man who hasn’t begun this process. He isn’t ready to build a gospel-centered life. A sacrificial, loving heart can still be cultivated, but The Holy Spirit (not a wife) must be the initiator of this kind of character. You want a husband who’s following Jesus because that’s what he’s chosen, not because it’s how you’ve trained him. Try to see past the charisma, the ambition, the stunning smile and that perfectly youthful body. Try to see with the eyes of God, who looks upon the heart. That, after all, is what will build your life.

I feel a little cringey about sharing this (and my husband is going to hate this, sorry!), but I want to be as helpful as I can. And I know that concepts like this one can easily be inflated in the reader’s imagination. When I say “find a man who loves sacrificially”, a youthful mind may envision a guy who’s performing sacrifice rather than practicing the quiet, unseen discipline of self-giving love. This isn’t all bad, especially for young people — sometimes we’ve gotta figure out obedience loudly and in embarrassing ways before it really penetrates our souls. But don’t confuse the big, flashy sacrifices for a character marked by sacrificial love.

In hopes to paint a more realistic picture, here’s what it looks like in my home, in my marriage to a very good man:

I wake alone in bed on a Saturday morning, the room already filled with sunlight. I hear my three children playing downstairs and the sound of a whisk in a metal bowl. My husband is making French toast. He’s been sick all week, fighting off some springtime virus that’s made everything he’s done (which is much) much harder, much less comfortable.

I am pregnant with our fourth child and unthinkably tired. Stunningly tired. But life continues making her demands, sick or not, pregnant or not, so we’ve carried on: working and writing, pick-ups and drop-offs, baseball games and bedtimes.

All week, I’ve caught glimpses of the crack in my husband’s energy, usually steady and sturdy. But each time that I’ve offered to help clean up the dishes after bedtime or sit outside our two-year-old’s bedroom (the only way she’ll fall asleep), he’s responded this way: “Nope. Pregnant trumps sick,” and has sent me off to bed.

This morning, waking early with our children and making them a beautiful breakfast even though it hurts to swallow, is just one of a thousand ways my husband has faithfully obeyed the call to “give himself up” for me, for us. One of a thousand unglamorous, unseen, often un-thanked sacrifices he makes because of love, yes, but also because of his conscious choice to live in accordance with what God calls good and beautiful — a choice he made long before he knew my name, long before we named the children God gave to us.

I think of all the women searching for a husband, longing for a person with whom to build a life. I think of the image they must hold in the quiet imaginations of their hearts, what “the one” will look like, how he’ll arrive. I think of the image I held of “a good husband” before I met the real-life person who’d become my very good husband. The imagined husband was different from the real one. My imagined husband had more money, more to say. But thanks be to God, who created this man, this very good man, whose heart has been long set on what is good and true and beautiful.

Sister, look for a man like this: a man who’s already cultivating the character of Christ with or without your prompting. In itself, it’s enough to build an entire life of love.