Making Marriage Great

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.

Ron and I were determined to make a marriage worth being a part of, so we decided on a simple yet challenging goal for our marriage. Our dream was to make our marriage a reflection of God’s love for us. If we miss the good news that God loves us with understanding, compassion and grace then we have missed the story. He hears the cries of His people and after forty years of marriage, we have both done our share of crying out to the Lord. We cried out to God to fulfill the goal of our marriage as being a reflection of God’s love, even when we didn’t particularly feel loving toward one another. Thankfully, God listens and teaches us what we do not know—how to truly love one another.

Thought Bomb: For you—what does a great marriage look, feel, and sound like?