Next to having a meaningful relationship with the Lord,
having a meaningful relationship with your spouse is life's biggest effort.
That's why people give up so easily.

This thought was going through my head yesterday morning after Hunter and I had a "discussion" ok, we had a tiff. Gasp!!!! I will say, though, that it was a rather healthy fight. I confronted him about something that hurt my feelings. I said my piece, he said his piece, I cried, we apologized and we overcame it. I'm not saying that we will never fight again about that very thing, because we will, but it just really made think "Man, marriage can be hard work sometimes."

It made me think about how many people don't think it's worth it to make a marriage work and how easily and quickly they call it quits. It made me think about couples who are currently struggling and think they know how to "fix" it, the only thing is, they can't see the future and the consequences that take place further down the road.

It also makes me so angry when couples KNOW they need counseling, but are either too prideful or choose to be ignorant and not get help. I don't know much about marriage, seeing as how I'm a rookie, but I do know that divorce and neglect of marriage doesn't just hurt the couple; it hurts everyone surrounded by that couple. EVERYONE. There is not a day that goes by that my heart doesn't feel deep aching pain since my sister and brother-in-law divorced almost two years ago. Do I think their marriage could have been salvaged? Hell yes. Every marriage can be salvaged, especially when you cry out for help from our Father who longs to fix our broken hearts.

I'm not going to dissect people's marriages and pretend like I know where everyone goes wrong, but I will say that I am very aware that marriage is an effort. And when you love someone, even if you feel like you have "fallen out of love", I can never imagine deciding that person is not worth fighting for, no matter how crappy the situation has gotten.

It doesn't take much to fall into pride in a marriage and begin to love conditionally. We think all has failed and everything seems hopeless. We become disgusted with each other, we grow to no longer know each other, we feel sorry for ourselves, we feel like there's something we're missing out on, we think we hold each other back, we lose our tolerance. We can never reason in our minds how he or she deserves to be given another chance or deserves to be forgiven or how the marriage deserves to remain. How about what our Father did for us? What if after all those thousands of years of the promise He made us, He just said "You know what? You people disgust me. I'm not saving you. You don't deserve My Son." After all, we are pretty disgusting with our actions and with our attitudes when it boils down to it. Give me one good reason why God shouldn't have turned his back on us- given up on us- divorced us as His people? But He saved us anyways, and yet we still fail and we still sin and we still do crap that never deserves to be forgiven. And He still loves us unconditionally.

God honors those who repent and those who make every effort to stay together. He honors the marriages that want to honor Him. It saddens me how many people take their marriage out of God's Hands and into their own hands. God never said we can save ourselves.