What I Wish I Knew About Marriage
♣ ♣ ♣ ♣ – ♣ ♣ ♣ ♣
Thanks for joining us today!
Welcome to the 5th installment in the Embattled Spirit series:
What I Wish I’d known . . .
Read the first message HERE
<<>
<>>
WHAT I WISH I’D KNOWN ABOUT
MARRIAGE
1) Old Wounds aka baggage
No matter how much we love or dislike mom and dad, and no matter how perfectly or poorly they parented us, we likely left home with wounds. They’re called (surprise) mother wounds and father wounds. We naturally assimilated their perspective on the world, family, and home.
When I was twenty, I wish I understood that my home environment growing up (good or bad) would become my norm against which to compare my marital interactions and child rearing. Change takes effort.
2) Power Comes …in DEATH
No, no, I’m neither suicidal nor homicidal. No worries. I’m simply reiterating how marriage is a covenant, divinely established. And it is sacred: entitled to veneration …or respect by association with divinity or divine things; holy. ←Awesome!
Marriage is worth fighting for. Guarding. Worth all your effort. Any marital relationship built on a non-covenanted foundation can’t compete with the real McCoy. And a true sacred-covenant marriage means someone has to die.
When I was twenty, I didn’t understand death. But I can tell you now, marriage is the ultimate act of dying–to yourself–to help the other person become all they were created to be. When only one spouse dies to self, you reap injustice. When both partners die ← that’s a power that cannot be stopped.
3) Blinding Sex by design
Everyone wants the purest, newest, best, hottest & freshest. Who wouldn’t? Our rabidly and overtly sex-obsessed culture, however, has apparently lost the value of delayed gratification and commitment. This grieves me. False beliefs have blinded us to the spiritual reality of 2-becoming-1 <LINK. Each encounter of this sort forms a soul bond so tight that it’s blinding.
<>
When I was twenty, I had no clue that when I consummated my marriage, that was the beginning of my blindness. IN A GOOD WAY! This enabled me to overlook my husband’s minor shortcomings and cleave to his strengths.
4) the go-to Guy crucial to survival
Frankly, I have no idea how any couple can have a thriving marriage, much less survive marriage, without having something bigger and greater to turn to when life gets tough. And it inevitably gets tough.
2011 STATISTICS:
Marriage rate: 6.8 per 1,000 total population
Divorce rate: 3.6 per 1,000 population (44 reporting States and D.C.)< –this implies there are more divorces to report. Link
What does this mean? Per year, for every 2 weddings, there is 1 divorce. Incidentally, since 2000, the number of divorces has dropped! BUT the number of marriages has dropped even lower during that time span. I’ll let you speculate what’s going on there. Link
Whether we admit it or not, most of us qualify as the walking wounded (emotionally). When we hold on to our emotional hurts, over time we end up with less and less real love to give our spouse. When we hit emotional bankruptcy, we enter crisis/survival mode ←I’ll do whatever it takes to save ME.
<>
UNLESS . . . we have a Go-to Guy.
This “Guy” needs to be bigger than me, wiser, patient, pure, whole, stable, unselfish all the time, must love me unconditionally and possess healing capabilities. He needs to be Divine and Perfect.
God heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds. Ps. 147:3
God sent out His word and healed them, and delivered them from their destruction. Ps. 107:20
<>
Have you met this go-to Guy?
The Way of the Embattled Spirit
