Expectations. We all have expectations before we get married. We have expectations about what marriage will be like. We have expectations about how our spouse will act. We have expectations that tend to become the standard by which we measure and evaluate the quality of our marriage. We expect things like…
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.
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.
We’re in the middle of some crazy weather patterns. It’s in the lower 80’s one day, and then the lower 30’s the next. It’s like going through all the seasons in the span of a week or two.
Marriages go through seasons, and each season requires something different from spouses. To have a long and happy marriage, you must learn to navigate seven seasons…
Gravity is an essential part of life. Without it, things would drift away into space. Likewise, gravity is an essential part of marriage. Without marital gravity, spouses begin to drift apart. And if they drift too far apart, it can bring an end to the marriage.
In my last post, I talked about four things you needed to increase your marital gravity. They were four things that would help draw you closer to one another and keep you from drifting apart. (Check out my last post, “Is Your Marriage Approaching Zero Gravity – Part 1.”)
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.
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.