Marriages Fail When They Do Not Know This by Pastor Mildred Kingsley-Okonkwo: MP3 Download & Sermon Notes

Glass Balls and Rubber Balls

People ask how a marriage, a family, and a ministry can all be sustained at once, and the honest answer is that balance in the sense of keeping everything at the same level all the time is not really possible. What works instead is learning to juggle, and knowing which balls are glass and which are rubber. Glass balls are the things you cannot afford to drop — your relationship with God, your family, the things only you can do. Rubber balls can bounce and cause some friction if they fall, but nothing is destroyed, and someone else can pick them back up.

Spending time with your spouse, being intimate with your spouse, is a glass ball. Church responsibilities, by contrast, can often be delegated to trained people around you. With children, the answer is not trying to be with them every hour but choosing quality over quantity — traveling together where possible, keeping daily contact, protecting a handful of non-negotiable rituals that make them feel prioritised even from a distance.

From the Streets to the Pulpit

I was not raised in the church. I saw life as too short not to do everything with full passion — including the wrong things. I was on drugs young, carried a weapon in secondary school, and went to university purely for the extracurricular life, not the degree. My eldest brother got saved before the rest of the family and, along with his friends, simply kept praying for me for years, even though I gave my parents constant grief.

Eventually I went to stay with him, attending church without really paying attention — mostly noticing the girls. During a men's program, when the call went out for volunteers for prayer band, choir, and other groups, all of which assumed some existing relationship with God, I raised my hand for the "road show" — handing out flyers on the street — thinking it required nothing spiritual. Everyone assumed that because I'd volunteered, I must already be saved, and began congratulating and hugging me. I kept trying to correct them, but the moment had already begun pulling me forward. I eventually gave my life to Christ for real while leading someone else in the sinner's prayer, and knew instantly, through an inward witness, that I would spend my life preaching. That was almost thirty years ago, and I've done nothing else since.

Growing Into Love, Not Falling Into It

We knew each other in secondary school but never once spoke in six years — he was notorious, I was the "street and narrow" type, entirely uninterested in a bad boy. We reconnected a decade later, in the dark, at a gathering, and what struck him first wasn't how I looked but how I sounded — my responses, my sense of humor. He found out I was a Christian, already in a serious relationship, and for a long stretch simply became a friend. I friend-zoned him completely; he was, at that point, a brother in the Lord I talked to about my actual boyfriend, a doctor training in the UK.

That relationship ended after years together — not through betrayal, but through a quiet, deliberate act of obedience. In prayer, I felt God ask me to let go of the thing I held most dear, and was led to the story of the woman at the well. I ended the relationship, and asked God for a sign: I asked my now-husband, then just a trusted friend, whether a pastor would marry me. He said no — and that confirmed it.

Let God make you an offer. You never really know what you need. We didn't fall in love — we grew in love, over time, after both of us were free of other relationships. Attraction to a gift, a voice, a manner isn't the same as wanting to marry someone; it just means you want to know them. People get disappointed in marriage because they married an idea of a person, not the person — the version they saw on a stage or in a single context, rather than who that person actually is at home.

Character Over Chemistry

Marriage works best when you become the right person rather than only searching for the right person, because you cannot make a decision beyond your own level of discernment — you attract who you are, not simply who you want. Beyond that, know what to actually look for:

• Character, not appearance, money, or how someone looks alongside you socially.
• Whether they are in Christ, if that matters to you, and whether you are genuinely compatible — do you actually enjoy each other's company?
• Family background — not as a disqualifier, but as information. People often reflect where they came from unless they've done the work to become the exception. Watch whether someone is mirroring where they came from, or mirroring where they say they want to go.
• How they handle pressure, anger, and their own family — how they treat their siblings and parents is a preview of how they will eventually treat you.

Everyone has an idea of "normal," shaped by their own upbringing — and when two people come together, they have to consciously build a new normal rather than default to either person's old one.

Keeping the Romance Deliberate

Anyone can move from purely emotional love to intentional love, and that shift is what actually makes a marriage work over decades. Small deliberate acts sustain it: weekly time set aside for rest and care, remembering what the other person needs even during exhausting travel schedules, arranging surprises, showing up for each other in small physical ways. None of this requires wealth to begin — the acts of attentiveness matter more than the scale of them.

Believing Marriage Can Actually Work

Many people, inside the church and outside it, believe marriages are simply set up to fail. The real issue is that people with strong marriages are often quiet about it, while broken ones are loud, so the loud stories shape what people believe is normal. We have faced real hardships together — extended financial hardship, years of delayed childbirth, in-law tension — and none of those things break a marriage by themselves. What matters is whether you stand together with God through it, or use each hardship as the excuse to walk away.

Helping Couples Through Infidelity

When a couple comes to us after infidelity, we don't rush them back together. We first work with each person individually, because each one needs to heal separately — the betrayed partner carries grief and sometimes physical symptoms of the shock, and the partner who strayed carries guilt and shame that has to be worked through honestly, not simply apologized away. Only after that individual work do we move to working on the marriage itself, because infidelity is usually a symptom, not the root problem — sometimes it signals someone quietly trying to exit the marriage, sometimes it's a cry for attention, sometimes it's something else entirely. Every case needs its own process; there is no single formula, and three days of fasting and a mutual apology is not, by itself, a plan.

Some of those couples don't end up with the marriage they had before — they end up with a better one, because now they understand each other's triggers and pitfalls in a way they never did before the crisis.

Praying to See Clearly

For anyone unsure whether the person they are dating is God's will for their life: God, please bypass my emotions and do what is best for me. It is rarely that people cannot recognise a good person — it's that their emotions are actively pressing in, making it hard to think straight even when God has already made the direction clear. That single prayer, prayed honestly and repeatedly, has been one of the most effective tools we have seen in giving people the clarity and the strength to actually follow what they already know.