Make-a-change Monday~Marriage Menders



To keep your marriage brimming,
With love in the loving cup,
Whenever you’re wrong, admit it,
Whenever you’re right, shut up.
~Ogden Nash, Marriage Lines: Notes of a Student Husband

Such a simple poem, but so hard to do! No one can get under our skin quite like the one we live with every day, wake up with every morning, go to bed with every night, pay bills with…you know. And Satan loves to keep us too busy to really communicate, so things we thought we said, we might not have; things we do say may not come across the right way. Yep, that can be marriage sometimes.

Busy has been the state of our household this summer, so communication has suffered. It seems like sometimes it’s easier not to say anything at all than “start” something. We have found ourselves going to bed too late, getting up earlier than we’d like, with too much to do, and not enough time to do it in.

I think as couples we often forget we are a team—two individuals with the same goals in mind. Really! Don’t we forget sometimes that we both want to enjoy some fun; we both want the best for our kids; we both want to get the bills paid with a little money left over; we both want to go on a great summer vacation. Why is it so hard to remember we are working together toward the same goals?

I think it all comes down to the word “love.” 

If you look up the word “love” in the dictionary, here’s what you get:

***

love |ləv|nounan intense feeling of deep affection babies fill parents with intense feelings of love their love for their country.• a deep romantic or sexual attachment to someone it was love at first sight they were both in love with her we were slowly falling in love.• ( Love) a personified figure of love, often represented as Cupid.• a great interest and pleasure in something his love for football we share a love of music.• affectionate greetings conveyed to someone on one’s behalf.• a formula for ending an affectionate letter take care, lots of love, Judy.a person or thing that one loves she was the love of his life 
***

Cupid? Really? 
Now here’s just a little the Bible says about love:

So A)”>we have come to know and to believe the love that God has for us. B)”>God is love, and C)”>whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him.
 (1 John 4:16 ESV)


And then there’s the little matter of the greatest commandments: 

And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: D)”>‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment E)”>greater than these.”
(Mark 12:30-31 ESV)

Now go back and read today’s prescription verses from what we know as the love chapter of the Bible. If God is love, we can substitute his name every time the word “love” appears: 

[God] is patient and kind; [God] does not envy or boast; [God] is not arrogant or rude; [God] does not insist on his own way; [God] is not irritable or resentful; [God] does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. [God] bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. 

Kind of opens your eyes doesn’t it? If God is love, reading these verses in this way makes me realize how much he really must love us—his children. 

Now comes the hard part. If we are to love our neighbors (and our spouse) as ourselves as God commands us, and we are to love God with everything we have, should we not strive to put our own name as a substitution for the word “love?” Get your steel toed boots on people…this one hurts: 

_____________ is patient and kind;
______________does not envy or boast;
_______________is not arrogant or rude; 
_______________does not insist on his or her own way; 
_______________is not irritable or resentful; {OUCH!}
______________does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with truth. 
_____________bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

What easy marriages we would all have if we could fill in those blanks with our name! Unfortunately, we are human. But so was Jesus. I don’t believe God would express such a genuine love for us if we were not capable of it as well. Easy? No. Worth trying? YES!

Maybe for the {make-a-change} Monday, we could just take one blank at a time…

From my heart, 
Celeste

Comments

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