If your marriage isn’t in trouble or hasn’t been, consider yourself incredibly blessed. Most couples go through some really bad stuff at some point. And the “bad stuff” has led to divorce more times than not, with Christians divorcing at the same rate as non-Christians. If you’ve already been through a divorce, you’ve experienced the bad stuff.
How can you avoid this awful, painful experience? (or how can you avoid it again?)
“If you ever consider divorce you will always have to consider divorce,” my first mentor told me. He said “Take it off the table. Remove it as an option. Don’t use the word. Don’t even acknowledge it as a possibility. Instead of spending your energy deciding ‘where the line is’ (e.g. how bad does it have to get before you’d split up), spend it on solving your issues. And you do that best by trying to change yourself, not each other.”
Being a “car guy”, I came up with this analogy….
What if the car you have right now were the ONLY car you could ever have? What if there was a law that said you could never swap your car for another one? Ever. Or ever again.
How much time would you spend on the internet looking at other people’s cars? Why would you envy the shiny new models? It would do nothing but frustrate you.
And how would you treat your current, “for the rest of your life” car? Wouldn’t you be a little more inclined to make the sacrifice and service it? To give it what it needs? To really take care of it?
You might even find yourself being pretty proud of it after a few years. You could have a classic, if you’ll just nurture it and give it TLC!
Cars that were manufactured 40 or 50 years ago were pretty homogeneous when they rolled off the assembly line, just like brides and grooms on their wedding day.
But years later, precious few of those cars remain intact. Those that are cared for and preserved become more and more unique as the years go by. And their owners feel happier each year they didn’t yield to the temptation to “trade ‘er in”.
So it will be for you if you forget about ever getting _____(the “d” word) and make your marriage work!