I’ve been spending a lot of time with my two-year old granddaughter, and boy does this little girl loves to talk! She starts when she wakes up and doesn’t stop until she’s asleep.
This morning, as I was taking her to school (Mothers Day Out), she was talking non-stop. So to give my ears a rest, I turned on some music and turned up the volume. But she would not be deterred. She promptly told me it was too loud and to turn it off!
Many years ago, I was in Paris as part of a mission trip. While there, we had some free time and a group of us went to the Louvre. The Louvre houses some of the most famous art work in the world. Pieces like the Venus de Milo and and the statue of the winged, headless angel called Winged Victory.
But of all the artwork in the Louvre, the one I wanted to see the most was Leonardo da Vinci’s painting, the Mona Lisa. I had seen pictures of the Mona Lisa all my life, and now I was finally going to see it for myself!
As a pastoral counselor, I’m expected to draw on Scripture and good clinical practices in order to help couples improve their marriage. But the truth is, you can find great nuggets of marital wisdom in a variety of places. The other day, I found one of those nuggets of marital wisdom on my iTunes playlist.
In my last post, Why So Serious, I talked about taking part in a funeral for a lady in our church. She had lived to be ninety-three and was married to the same man for seventy-two years. A mere two weeks after her funeral, we were holding another funeral for her ninety-four year old husband, who died just nine days after her.
I recently took part in a funeral for a lady in our church who died at the age of ninety-three. Living to the age of ninety-three is remarkable in and of itself, but what was even more remarkable was that she and her husband (who is ninety-four years old) had been married for seventy-two years! As a marriage counselor, that makes these two my heroes!
What is it that helps a marriage stay together for seventy-two years?
Wife: “Don’t forget we’re going to my parents this weekend to help them with that project.”
Husband: “What project?”
Wife: “Remember, they’re redoing their living room, and we have to help them move all the furniture and repaint.”
Husband: “You didn’t tell me we were doing that this weekend!”
Wife: “Yes I did. I told you Wednesday, when we were coming home from church.”
Husband: “I didn’t think you were talking about this weekend!”
Wife: “I swear you have a selective memory. You only remember what you want to remember!”
Sound familiar? The particulars of the conversation may be different, but most of us have experienced similar conversations.
My wife and I recently returned home from a five day trip to Washington D.C. Actually, if you include a day to drive there and a day to drive back, it was more like a three day trip to D.C.
After three days of walking over 13 miles to see the iconic sites, and two days of traffic laden driving, we were glad to be home. After unpacking, my wife sat in her chair and I sat in mine, enjoying a very boring evening of quietly surfing social media.
If you read stuff on marriage (including my stuff), you can easily walk away thinking that a good marriage is one where you and your spouse are regularly:
Glory days are defined as “times in the past that are regarded as being better than the present.”
Glory days can be that winning pass of the high school championship, that time we were big on campus and had the hot date, or that carefree summer we spent at the beach with friends. Whatever they may be, we all have glory days in the past that seem better than the present.
As a married couple, you have glory days. Maybe it was when you were dating and everything was fresh and new. Maybe it was the excitement of your wedding day. Maybe it was the early days of marriage when hope and passion were always high.
But what if those glory days now seem like a distant memory? What if those glory days have been replaced with marital conflict, parenting demands, financial pressure, and work stress. What if the days of passion have changed from “I can’t beat them off with a stick” to “I want to beat them up with a stick?”
I often tell people that marriage can be like a bull ride. Here’s what I mean by that…
In the beginning, when the bull rider gets on the bull, they look good, feel confident, and are surrounded by a lot of supporters. Those supporters speak words of encouragement, slap them on the back, and tell them, “You can do this!”
All this is like a bride and groom on their wedding day.
Before you misinterpret the title of this post, let me explain. This post is not about making love to two other people at the same time. It’s about making love to one person for a very long time. Wait… that didn’t sound right either. Let me start again.
There are 3 ways of displaying love to your spouse….not to be confused with what Dr. Gary Chapman describes as the 5 Love Languages. (All of a sudden, love is starting to sound a lot like math.) Anyway, as I was saying, the three ways of love are: