When a couple first meets they need no one to tell them how to pursue or how to respond to their desired mate. The knowledge and the desire are there. Within marriage, we as humans have the tendency to drift toward laziness, and when this enters our marital relationship, it can be very damaging.

No matter how solid your relationship with God is and no matter how healthy your marriage is, none of us is invincible.  We all need fortification around our marriages.  We all need to sharpen our forgiveness tools.  We all need to check ourselves daily in order to keep sin from making a home in our marriage relationships.  It is worth the time and money to invest in your marriage.

One of the themes we have been looking at in these posts is how our families have played a significant role in shaping who we are. It is such a profound phenomenon that our families even influence how we interpret Scripture.  The familial patterns we have learned provide lenses through which we see the world and process input, even Biblical input. These may be good lenses or they may be bad, but they will nonetheless color how we see things. Because this is true, it is important to do all you can to address it head on.

It was a beautiful day, and I was enjoying being out with my wife, my son Chris, and my daughter-in-law Lindsay. As we walked along, something came across my radar, and I reflexively made a sarcastic joke about it. Lindsay stopped in her tracks and said, “Now I get it.” A quick-witted, sarcastic humor was one of those things I had passed on to my son. This was part of our regular banter, and the apple had not fallen far from the tree.