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“For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. This is a great mystery, but I speak concerning Christ and the church."

Ephesians 5: 31-32 

In today’s society, where the focus on self is thrust upon us in almost every facet of life, the idea of becoming one with another is hard to grasp. To be one with another means that we let go of our selfish ambitions and become a new creation with our spouse with a single purpose; to walk with our Lord and to bring Him glory though our union.

It has taken Will and I quite a few years to really understand what this means. I think that we both understood that when we got married we were meshing two personalities into a relationship, but neither of us quite grasped what it looked like to live a Christian marriage.

The first few years of or marriage were really good; as many marriages seem to be. But once the thrill wore off, and our old selfish natures started to creep back in and we started to go through a really rough patch in our marriage. We had big fights frequently; over big things and not such big things. During this time I kept asking myself, "what had happened to the beautiful marriage where we got along so well?"

For years we battled each other, not realizing that we were seeing each other as the enemy and failing to love each other as the Bible called us to. We went to Christian marriage counseling, which usually wrapped up with us fighting and driving home in separate cars. I remember one weekend when we attended Family Life’s 'Weekend to Remember' and had one of our most epic fights to date. It was when I was sitting on the floor of the hotel bathroom, crying out to God to help us, that I saw how broken our marriage was.

We were going through the motions of loving each other, but we were failing to grasp that in order to truly love each other, we had to put God first and love Him. When we both started to do this, He transformed our marriage into a beautiful relationship where we care deeply for one another and love each other more than the day we were married. This didn’t happen overnight and took a lot of commitment to not give up on our marriage, no matter how bad things got. We were both committed to staying married, and during the hardest times, when I found myself thinking life would be easier just to give up, I kept my eyes on God and the commitment that I had made to him, as well as to Will, to stay married.

We certainly don’t have a perfect marriage and still have arguments occasionally, but I have noticed that these happen more when we aren’t spending daily time with the Lord, studying His Word, and in prayer and scripture memorization. When we are both intentional about putting God first, our love blossoms like the sweet flower it is, and when we let the business of day-to-day life take over, our marriage withers. We have also learned that we have to be intentional about putting our marriage first. Our hectic schedules of work and raising young kids can make it easy to let our marriage take a back seat, but we have found that when we do this, we start to drift apart. However, when we are intentional and fight against the pressures of this world in order to spend time with one another, we have discovered that we are recharged and more in-tune.

We hope that if you are reading this, and it resonates with you, that you and your spouse will set aside some time for your marriage and join us for Marriage Matters!  We strongly believe that whether you have been married 1 year, 60 years, or any number in between, that any marriage can benefit from bring intentional in putting God first and making time for each other.