I have been married 36 years. A long time ago a friend of mine gave me a piece of advice about marriage. He was about ten years older than me and I considered him a sort of mentor. He had been married several years and was the father of six at the time. I was going through the initial rocky, should I say ‘adaptations’, to married life and I considered my friend's marriage ideal. One day as he was advising me, I told him, “You don’t understand, your have an perfect marriage!”, to which he replied, “We worked at it!”
That statement took me out of the ‘Hollywood’ idea of marriage which proclaims that ‘love’ (the emotional mushy version) is all that’s needed to make a marriage work. The problem is that that kind of love is an emotion. By nature, emotions are fickle and like the sea, can be affected by anything that moves the current such as a look, a sight, a sound, a word, an impression, the weather, or like Ebenezer Scrooge says, by an upset stomach due to something we ate. In my view, love is a conscious choice that we make daily. How do we work at a marriage? By making sure that this ‘love’ overcomes each and every health, financial, and logistical condition which life seems to throw at us. If it’s real love, it can overcome and it will! In this concept, the “Hollywood’ definition of love is out of the race. It is recorded that a certain man named John used to teach his followers that ‘God is love!’. Which God was he talking about? He was talking about the God of the Jews, the One that came to them at Mt Sinai. Moses records that this God remembers our bad deeds for three or four generations but that he remembers our good deeds for thousands of generations to come (Ex 34:6-7). In essence, The bad deeds He remembers during the time of our possible influence on our descendants, and the good deeds, the times we act sacrificially and unselfishly; the times we think more of the other than of ourselves; the times we go under in order to preserve peace; those He remembers for thousands of generations. I think that is a perfect lesson to apply to marriages and relationships: REMEMBER THE GOOD FOR A LONG LONG TIME, BUT REMEMBER THE BAD ONLY FOR A LITTLE WHILE .What about the ugly?: NEVER!
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