When asked, “What would you be willing to do for your spouse?” most of us are quick to profess how we would lay down our life for our spouse. We would step in front of a gunman’s bullet. We would shield them from the blast of a terrorist’s pipe bomb. We would put ourselves between them and an angry herd of parent eating toddlers. (Ok, maybe not that last one.)
It’s Christmas morning 2016, and I’m up early. Not because there are children clambering to open presents, but because I received the gift of a sinus infection and my head couldn’t take being horizontal any longer.
Actually, the days of clambering and chaos on Christmas morning are gone for my wife and me. We are now moving into the quiet Christmas years.
In my last Normal Marriage post, I talked about the fishy smell that occurs in marriage when you run away from something you know you need to do. In that post, we talked about how to avoid that fishy smell.
But what if you didn’t get the post in time and your marriage already smells fishy? How do you remove the smell?
Even if you’re not particularly religious, you’re probably familiar with the biblical story of Jonah.
Jonah was a guy who didn’t want to do what God wanted him to do. God wanted Jonah to go to the Ninevites (the ruthless and bloody enemy of his people) and encourage them to change their ways and turn to God. It would be like God asking you to go to ISIS to tell them, “God loves you and you need to convert to Christianity.”
Jonah didn’t want this suicide mission, because Jonah hated the Ninevites and didn’t want God to go easy on them. So Jonah ran.
Have you ever wished you could change your marriage? Maybe you were at odds with your spouse or maybe your marriage had just become mundane and predictable. Whatever it was, you didn’t like the way things were and you wished you could change things.
In a TED Talk entitled “The 3 A’s of Awesome,” Neil Pasricha tells of a time when his life needed a change. A difficult economy had cost him his job, his best friend had committed suicide and his marriage was falling apart.
Ok, confession time. When I was a teenager, I got stuck parking. I’m not talking about parking your car in a parking spot at Walmart. I’m talking about getting stuck on some deserted back road because I wanted to “spend some time” with a girl.
I will avoid the details to spare myself the painful self-disclosure, but I remember that feeling of being stuck. My first thought was, “This is no big deal. I’ll just get out and rock the car a little.” When that didn’t work, I thought, “Ok. I just need a little traction.” So I put rocks, limbs, and anything I could find under the rear wheels to give me some traction. Then I got behind the car to push, telling my girlfriend to give it some gas. Those of you who are smarter than me can guess what happened next. I was bathed in a hail of mud, rocks, and sticks…but the car remained stuck.
If you’ve ever been disappointed, you know how easy it is for disappointment to derail you.
I see this with my grandchildren. They always have a list of things they want: “I want to go outside and play.” “I want to go out to eat pizza.” “I want to rent a movie.” “I want a snack.” “I want to spend the night.” If something gets in the way of what they want, it can throw them into a funk from which they have a hard time recovering.
But it’s not just children who struggle with disappointment.
We’ve all had our share of bad photos. Think back to your fashion-questionable high school days, or those family portraits that looked more like the Adams Family than a happy family. It’s safe to say we all have pictures we would like to delete from the archives.
The other day, I came across The 50 Weirdest Engagement Portraits Of All Time. It’s just what it says…50 very weird engagement photos. They are painful to look at and they leave you asking, “What were they thinking?”
All this got me wondering, “What would pictures of my marriage look like over the years?”
Computer viruses are maddening. When a virus gets into your computer, it changes the way your computer operates. All of a sudden the computer doesn’t work as smoothly as it use to. It gets sluggish, acts erratically and sometimes just shuts down.
Marriages, like computers, are susceptible to viruses that can effect the health and operation of the marriage. Here’s how it works…
