Imagine with me for a moment you want to practice something different in your marriage. Imagine you decided to work on your selfhood, becoming the best you that you can be by committing daily to the growth process and dedicating yourself to the freedom, the maturity, and the welfare of your spouse. Imagine if you stopped focusing on what doesn’t work in your marriage and focused on your marital strengths, embracing yourself and your spouse as two powerful people with competencies to build a beautiful union. Imagine how delightful your marriage would become if you celebrated one another’s differences instead of trying to conform your spouse to your image of how he or she should be. Imagine what it would look like to create the type of marriage that is rich with sexual passion because your understanding of sexuality has matured past fear of intimacy into being freely naked and unashamed. Lastly, imagine a marriage with two fully self-differentiated and healthy individuals nourishing and cherishing one another the way Christ does His bride.
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I have discovered the most profound truth you could ever realize and incorporate into your heart is—Jesus loves you. This trust is vital because many couples find they marry for love, and for the feelings of love, without realizing they are already loved. In Christ’s secure love, we lack nothing; we have a solid attachment even when our spouse doesn’t seem solid. When we fully open our hearts to the truth of God’s lavish gift giving, love being the greatest of these gifts, then we can truly base our marriage relationship on love and desire instead of need and desperation.
Once we know we are loved, we can develop a healthy sense of self. It is vital to grow a healthy self in order to have a healthy marriage. Two healthy “I’s” create the greatest possibility of becoming a healthy “we.” If any of us want a better marriage, we have to be committed to the personal growth process. Marriage is an invitation to open our minds to think new thoughts about marriage and open our hearts to allow God’s truth to shape our beliefs. Whatever the state of your marriage, it can grow. It only takes one willing person to change the dynamics in a marriage. You can be the spark that lights the fire of your own marriage.
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Ron and I married when we were eighteen years old. We were six months away from having our first son, madly in love were told by my parents that we would never make it. On the first day together as husband and wife, we walked hand in hand on the shores of the Oregon Coast. Eventually we settled on a big piece of sandy driftwood. Listening to the wave’s crash on the shore and the blue-sky melt into the blue water, our hearts calm and warm with the newness of marriage, we openly shared our deep desire not to play games and to love each other well. The safety we felt led us to take personal responsibility for the choices we had made. We wanted to give each other permission to have a fresh start. Holding hands, we asked each other for forgiveness, committed our marriage to the Lord, and prayed together. We asked Him to help two teenagers, who didn’t know the first thing about marriage, how to make a great new one—we wanted to create a marriage that would last.
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