Inside Story: Taiwan
Unequally Yoked
By Chang Zeng-Mei
I didn’t want to marry my husband because I was raised a Seventh-day Adventist and he belonged to another Christian denomination in southern Taiwan. But our parents wanted us to get married, and we had to obey them.
Image © Pacific Press
So, I told my future husband, Wu Ming-Huang, “We can get married, but I will not change my religion.” He didn’t have a problem with that.
But then we started to discuss the wedding. I wanted it to be held in an Adventist church, but he said, “No! I am the husband, so it should be in my church.” I tried to find a compromise. “Let’s have the wedding outside then, not in any church,” I said. “But an Adventist pastor must officiate the wedding.”
We argued back and forth. Finally, I said, “If it is not an Adventist pastor, then I will not marry you.” He asked his mother for advice, and she gave permission for an Adventist pastor. But she had secret plans. She thought that I would join her faith after the wedding. She also wanted me to change her son, who drank.
I remained uncomfortable with the idea of marrying outside my faith, and I told Ming-Huang. But by that point the whole village knew about the wedding. If we called it off, we would lose face. Ming-Huang became an Adventist so he wouldn’t lose face. A month before the wedding, he took Bible studies and was baptized. I’ll never forget the day. He wept as he came out of the water because he wanted to get married but he didn’t want to leave his old life of drinking.
Ming-Huang was a beaten man. He lost a great deal of self-esteem by marrying me. During the first seven months of our marriage, I also fed him healthy food and taught him how to live a healthy lifestyle. Our neighbors noticed that he wasn’t the same. “You’re a new man,” they said.
Ming-Huang, however, didn’t want to be a new man. After our daughter was born, he returned to drinking.
Ten years passed, and we had a second daughter. We had many conflicts over faith. One day it was too much, and I took the two children, our baby and 10-year-old girl, to the home of friends. I wanted my husband to be alone in the house and to get a taste for what divorce would be like.
Ming-Huang didn’t want a divorce. He looked for me for three days and, when he found me, changed his ways. He truly became a new man.
Today, he is a caring husband and father. He also is a church elder. However, I wouldn’t follow this “missionary” path again. I married him because I thought I could change him with God’s help. But the Bible is right when it says, “Do not be unequally yoked” (1 Cor: 6:14; NKJV). It’s better to marry a spouse of your own faith. Solomon, the world’s wisest man, learned the lesson the hard way. Me, too.
It is true marrying out of our SDA faith brings a lot of conflict if the other person is not converted to Christ. The other person should be led to Christ, ‘fall in love’/grow in love with Jesus for themselves, then ‘fall in love’/grow in love with you. If the person does not love Jesus, he/she will feel you are trying to force religion on them. Some even got baptized just to get marry, then the war starts at home.
I think the Lord is saying something to me.
This is true. But in my case, I was a Sunday keeper before I married my husband. When we first met, I did not know he was an Adventist, and I didn’t really know anything about the SDA beliefs; the small town where I grew up didn’t even have an Adventist church. My husband became Adventist at age 11 when a traveling pastor visited his village in El Salvador and nearly the entire village was converted. But he hadn’t been attending when we first met. After we had been married a couple years he began attending Spanish SDA services and I came with him, but I needed a translator. I attended both Sabbath and Sunday services for a while, but as I learned more I started Bible studies with one of the elders, who introduced us to an English speaking pastor and his wife. I took a full course of studies on Adventist beliefs with the pastor’s wife, and by the time we had been married about 5 years I decided to get re-baptized as an Adventist and we joined the English speaking church. (I was originally baptized as a Baptist.) As the first Adventist in my family, it’s been difficult at times. My mother especially felt I was abandoning everything she taught me. I told her it’s just that I learned so much more, but she still doesn’t really understand.
So as my own life shows, even though it’s usually not best to be yoked to those of different faith, with God’s leading it is possible for an unbelieving spouse or one of different faith as I was to accept the full truths of the Bible as it is written. I have been Adventist now for about 16 years, and I’ve never regretted my decision. I thank God every day for leading me even when I didn’t realize what He was doing.