Yesterday, I was reminded of something in our Covenant small group (our married couples group). We are currently going over biblical principles of how to build a strong marriage. Let me digress for a second…
I have been telling the single people in our church that getting married is the easy part but building a strong marriage takes a lot of hard work. You can ask anyone who has been married more than 5 years and they will tell you that working towards a good marriage is not an easy task. So, for all of you single people out there… the dream of getting married might be alive and well, but remember the reality of hard work in a marriage.
Now back to my point…
We broke up into groups of 4’s (2 couples) to discuss the bible study. On the bible study sheet, we had to graph our marriage experience (x-axis = elapsed time; y-axis = marriage contentment). Then Christina brought up something that enlightened me. We were talking about how married couples start off well in their marriage because everything is new and fresh (honeymoon stage). Then almost inevitably we all go through low points in our marriage. But then, if we continue to persevere and commit to working on the marriage then we will see the graph go upward. The enlightening statement from my sweetie was, “The great part of this is that once you persevere through the low points, you will in fact go higher in your marriage contentment than when you first started.” I was like, “Wow! Good point.”
She ended up drawing a graph on top of her bible study sheet. It was pretty cool seeing her draw this graph and then explain things the way that she did… it was inspiring! I had to take a picture of it. So here it is:
As we were driving home, we concluded that we are on our way up on that graph. Thank God because some of those low points were hard.