I don't know why but I started writing my wedding vows the other day. Being a single guy, that's kind of strange, even for an old fashioned romantic like me :) It's difficult to explain why I wanted to start writing them (romantic thoughts are often inexplicable) but once I started writing them, I couldn't stop. Once I sat down with pen and paper to write them, my mind suddenly began to envision what it would be like to someday stand in front of a girl that I'm hopelessly in love with and vow to her the kind of man I want to be and the kind of life I want to live. And thinking about it brought a new question to mind. Should I try to be that man even now? Would she even care that even before I knew her, just the thought of knowing that I would one day stand before God and her and vow to be the kind of man who's worthy of the love of a girl like her, gave me the resolve to do those things even before meeting her?

Now, I'm not planning on sharing the vows that I've written. I don't plan on sharing them with anyone until the day I finally get to share them with everyone. I do what to talk about them however, and how a single guy like me could think it was a good idea to start writing them. I'm not trying to convince everyone that they should do the same, I'm simply trying to convey the mentality behind why a person would want to do something like that.

Having lived in many different places, (the jumbled cities of third world Cambodia, and the solitude of the woods of Minnesota) I've considered myself an astute observer of human nature, of men especially. So often men are a jumble of contradictions. I have seen men do crazy things for love, make themselves fools and sacrifice all their comforts and pleasures to go after the person they love. But then, very quickly, once they've gotten what they had fought so hard to attain, they immediately begin to let it go, reverting back to the original nature which initially caused love to be a foreign thing to them.

I don't want to live my life that way, but so often I do. I make heroic strides toward being a better man and living life to the full, and then I somehow forget and go back to my original nature. The Apostle Paul once said:

"I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do."

That's why I first loved the idea of beginning to write down my wedding vows. I needed something that would give me reminders of the man I wanted to be, so I could remember to fight the good fight during those times when I really don't feel like it. I don't know if that makes sense. I hope it does. And I do hope that you can see a similar need in yourself as well, a need for reminding yourself to fight the good fight for those things that are really worth fighting for.