"Hey, how does this one sound, Honey: 'For he is our peace, who hath made both one…'?"

Tripp, my new husband, looked up from the Sunday paper with a patient smile. For days I'd been searching through our recently united spiritual-book collection for the perfect quote for our wedding announcements.

"I thought we'd decided on Kahlil Gibran: 'The hand of life contains your hearts … '"
"I don't know; I just never got the right vibe from the part that says, 'Let there be spaces in your togetherness.'"

"Where did you get this 'peace' thing?"

"It's from the Bible."

"The Bible?"

I might as well have suggested Aesop's Fables as a resource. Tripp and I were New Age seekers, who'd known when we met we were soul mates. In meditation, we'd even had visions of our past lives that reinforced our feeling that we truly belonged together.

Friends and family tried to put the brakes on our relationship. After all, I had two daughters from my first marriage, and Tripp had little history of responsibility.

Nevertheless, after three intense, inseparable months, against everyone's advice, we eloped and were married at sunset on the California coast by an innkeeper who dutifully intoned Eastern spiritual passages we'd put together. With no church background, when we'd began feeling the need for God in our lives, it was to the East we had turned.

That's why Tripp was skeptical as he read the Bible passage. After reflecting, he said simply, "Well, if it sounds good to you, it sounds good to me."

I loved the spiritual feeling of the Bible verse, just as I treasured my crystal collection, or the pictures of various spiritual masters arrayed on our meditation altar.

A picture of Jesus was there, too. Tripp and I thought of Jesus as one of the great teachers. Believing that all paths lead to the same God, we felt Christians were misguided and narrow-minded. Being more "spiritually advanced," we understood Jesus to be a more highly evolved being who had tried to show us our own divinity. When Jesus said, "I and the Father are one," He was actually trying to show us that we are all gods. Tripp and I wanted more than anything to achieve our divine potential, delighting in the freedom to choose from a vast smorgasbord of New Age ideas and practices to blend into our own unique belief system.

Our discipline paid off. Using positive affirmation, we started with nothing and within four years had become quite well off. By contributing 10 percent to Eastern spiritual organizations, we enjoyed the benefits of New Age tithing: giving so that more will be returned. We now had five children and enjoyed a reputation in our community as a wholesome, happy, successful family. Yet there was a flaw in this picture of perfection: My husband and I -- each seemingly in harmony with the universe -- could not achieve harmony in our marriage.

We argued about everything. No amount of money, success or achievement made it easier for us to get along, and believing in our own divinity only made matters worse. How could two gods ever live happily under the same roof?

The New Age religion had taught me nothing about submission or compromise; instead, it had assured me of my right to be happy and to use any means I needed to change unpleasant realities. I decided I had made a mistake -- Tripp was not my soul mate after all.

Before I could take any action, God intervened. On the radio one morning, I heard about a conference designed to give strength to marriages. In a last-ditch effort to save ours, I signed us up.

Despite many bitter words on our way to the conference, by some miracle Tripp and I did not turn back. At the first night's session we learned how God's plan for marriage differed from the world's.

For the first time, I realized that Satan is not a myth. My New Age beliefs had no reasonable explanation for the evil and destruction that was glaringly apparent in the world around me. Nor could they explain why two people who loved each other could not coexist peacefully.

Like a tide, the bitterness I felt toward my husband began to slowly recede. We learned that God cares about us and wants us to "have peace with [Him] through our Lord Jesus Christ" (Romans 5:1). We also learned that sin had separated us from God: "For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God" (Romans 3:23). I was not divine, after all! No wonder my life had never worked. Even our best efforts were inadequate to bridge the gap between man and God. But "Christ died for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring [us] to God" (1 Peter 3:18).

"To all who received Him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God" (John 1:12). I had never heard anything like this before. Jesus was more than a spiritual Master! I prayed silently, confessing that I was a sinner and asking Jesus to become my Lord and Savior. Through my tears, I looked and saw my husband crying, too. With no previous exposure to Christianity, we were not sure what had happened to us, but we knew something had changed.

Once we were home, Tripp and I became avid Bible readers, and so realized we had been born again (John 3:3). We threw away our New Age books, tapes, pictures and idols. Gone as well were our beliefs in astrology, reincarnation and pantheism.

We found a church based on God's Word and entered there as babes, not as the highly evolved spiritual beings we had once thought ourselves to be.

As our children, parents and friends saw our relationship being healed, their hearts softened. One by one, our children put their faith in Jesus.

Seventeen years have passed since then. Tripp and I are still the same strong-willed people. We have walked through peak experiences and valleys of grief, but we have walked together.

Although we still have areas of disagreement, they no longer threaten our commitment or our love. Each of us has learned to live in submission to the other, and to our Heavenly Father. "We love because he first loved us" (1 John 4:19).