Most of the time we are working with struggling marriages and I often blog about struggling marriages. It’s a welcome relief to do some premarital mentoring sometimes. One of our fellow mentors once said, “It’s nice to be able to help people who want to be together.”

A premarital program that we truly enjoy doing and believe is excellent is Before “I Do” by Jason Krafsky. The program is very Biblically-based but the scriptures are presented using the Message translation that someone who is new Christian or a Seeker won’t be overwhelmed. It’s also written in a style that 20-somethings are likely to enjoy.

The material is so good I think it would be great to use with couples who have been married awhile but didn’t have marriage mentoring or much pastoral teaching before they got married to give them a better foundation.

What premarital materials have you found that are particularly helpful? If you are married, did you get some premarital help? If you did, what was helpful? If you didn’t, what did you wish you had had?

Jesus said in Matthew 19:4-6, “Haven’t you read,” he replied, “that at the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female,’ and said, ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh’? So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.”

As I listen to people talk about marriage I often get the impression that they see the parent/child relationship as a higher priority and more permanent relationship than  marriage. I especially get this sense when people say things like, “I tried to make my marriage work but it just wasn’t meant to be. I guess because my spouse ________ (fill in the blank with drugs, alcohol, sex, etc. ) but at least I still have my kids.” I often wonder how quick those same people would give up on a child of theirs who had a major life issue such as drugs, or alcohol, or porn addiction, or if they just didn’t like their child.

I often observe parents who will run their schedule or their budget to the max to make sure their children are involved in whatever sports, music lessons, and on and on, and yet when it comes to their spouse they have trouble scheduling a regular date night, or a weekend away, or marriage counseling. There just doesn’t seem to be enough time or money or energy.

We are not one flesh with our children and when they are gone, it is back to husband and wife until death do us part. I have read was that the best thing for the children is for Mom and Dad to love one another and have a strong marriage.

In your opinion, which one is the higher priority and permanent relationship – husband and wife, or parent and child?

What have you experienced that works to keep the priority in balance?

One of my goals for having this website and blog was that when people call me in a marital crisis, or when people are searching the web for resources for their own or a friend’s marital crisis, they can get a lot of information in a hurry.

Here are two links on the blog for those needing information quickly:

Marriage Crisis

Helpful Info on Blog

Another thing to do is to look under our Tags to see which ones might most apply. Ones like Separation, Hope, or Affairs. (For those just learning about blogs if you click on a tag, it will link to all the posts that we have done on those subjects.)

A new resource that I have just found is the Facebook Page 1/2 Marathon Challenge from Christian Marriage Bloggers Association. It is packed full of dozens of bloggers who champion marriage. Many have their own websites with a myriad of resources to help relationships.

I am seeing lots of bloggers that I have never been exposed to before sharing some great ideas about good marriages and struggling marriages. Many have wonderful testimonies of their own healed marriages. It’s well worth browsing through them for resources and hope.

As you study what we have I would be interested in what you feel is most helpful to you. If there are some subjects that you really want to know about that we haven’t covered or questions that you are seeking answers for please let us know. We don’t have all the answers, but there are many ministries and organizations who may and we can help point you to them.

Sometimes when I am talking to a person who is separated from their spouse, especially if things are not going well, they will ask something like, “Why should I even fight for my marriage? My spouse doesn’t seem to care.”.

Here are some of the reasons I continued to fight for my marriage even when it was obvious Sharon wanted out and others were telling me to give up because it was “done”.

The first reason was my commitment before God at our wedding. When I said for better or worse till death do us part I really meant it. I decided that having Sharon want out of our marriage was the “for worse part” but I wanted to please God by not giving up.

Another reason that I continued to fight was for Sharon’s benefit. Everything I knew about her was that she was a woman of her word and a woman of integrity. She was a person that very much wanted to live up to her word by paying her bills on time and making appointments on time and fulfilling other promises. She had also said during our dating time that for her marriage was for life. Although at that moment she wanted out of our marriage, I didn’t believe that in her heart-of-hearts that was truly what she wanted in the long term.

I often thought that if a friend drove me to dinner and when he got out of the car to go into the restaurant he told me, “I sometimes drink too much at dinner so I am giving you my keys and do not give them back to me if I am not sober”, then we went to dinner and he got drunk what would I do when he started ranting and raving to give him his car keys back? Would I act upon what my sober friend had told me and keep the keys or what my drunk friend was asking me to do – to give him the keys?

For many years everything that Sharon had told me made me believe that to her marriage was for life, so I chose to not give her a dissolution although in the short run that is what she wanted.

I continued to fight on behalf of our children. Almost every statistic I read showed that children whose parents divorced had more struggles in life. I had watched children close to us go through their parents’ divorce and I didn’t want them to have that experience. I also wanted to give my children an example of not giving up on marriage when things got tough.

I also fought on my own behalf. On the major things in life I don’t tend to quit easily, so there was just something deep inside of me that wouldn’t quit. I have made mistakes in life before but I did not want part of my legacy to be divorce. Yes, I will admit, I also didn’t want to be lonely divorced guy and I wanted to get back to having sex with my wife.

The more I heard testimonies of reconciled marriages, the more I had hope that we could be one. I am so thankful that Jesus gave me the strength not to quit, and Sharon and my kids now thank me for not giving up.

At the end of the wedding ceremony often the pastor will say something like, “By God’s authority and the authority invested in me by the State of            , I pronounce you man and wife.”

In my mind, if you are married in a religious ceremony there are really two marriages and two sets of rules to live by if you ever decide to get out of the marriage. One marriage is the spiritual marriage where God makes the two one flesh. It seems to me that you should think long and hard about what His word says about dissolving a marriage. I acknowledge that many trained Godly theologians will have different views on some situations, but it is certainly a decision that deserves much prayer, thought, and Biblical study. You will be living with the consequences of your choice for the rest of your life.

The second marriage is when it comes to the legalities if you want to get out of the relationship. That part falls under the rules of whatever state has jurisdiction. And those rules may or may not line up with God’s principles. This second marriage is a pretty unique kind of contract because in a no-fault divorce state the defendant always loses. If you have a contract with a builder to build a house, or with your employer to work, for examples, and something goes wrong, you can file a lawsuit to enforce the contract. You may win, you may lose, you may have a partial victory. You won’t know until the court rules.

If your spouse files for divorce and never retracts their divorce petition and continues to pursue it, sooner or later you will be divorced whether you want to be or not. Now the outcome of who gets what money and who has what rights and responsibilities for the children is unknown at the start but will  be decided by a judge at the end. The ultimate outcome is that you will still be divorced even if it was your spouse who broke the marriage contract by cheating with someone else.

Like Mike McManus from Marriage Savers often said, “It is easier for my wife of 40-some years to get out of our marriage than it is to get out of a car loan.”

I was just at a wedding this past weekend. In his sermon the pastor mentioned that marriage is a covenant not a contract. He mentioned that contracts are based on distrust and covenants are based on trust. I think he is right. When you think of a contract – like maybe your car loan or your mortgage – think how many clauses are in there in case someone does not live up to their obligations. Covenants in the Old Testament were extremely serious and most were considered binding for life, regardless of circumstances.

What are your thoughts about marriage being a covenant or a contract?

I had several major types of hopelessness to overcome during our separation. The first level of hopelessness was “What is the point of living if I am not with my wife and children?”. I never attempted suicide, but there were many days I just couldn’t see the point in life if we got divorced. I finally wrestled to a place with God where I realized that married or divorced, life was worth living and had meaning and purpose. I started telling myself that any day not in front of a divorce judge was a good day.

The second level of hopelessness was “Does God really heal marriages today?”.  If I reflected vary long on marriages that I knew in my family, church, friends, and public figures I could get very depressed when I realized how many couples had struggled and then gotten divorced.  The track record for healed marriages didn’t look too  good and statistically there are a lot of divorces. At least the day I got my cancer diagnosis the doctor had told me that for my type of cancer there was about a 98% cure rate. That was a much better rate than most couples.

Eventually I started meeting people along the way who had reconciled their marriages. I began reading testimonies of healed marriages and seeing testimonies of reconciliations on various videos. I started to realize that God really does heal marriages.

The third level of hopelessness was “Will God heal our marriage?”.  When I started hearing other testimonies of healed marriages I started to have a glimmer of hope that ours might heal. The big turn was when Sharon agreed to attend a one day PAIRS workshop led by our counselor Jeff Williams. By the end of the day Sharon and I had connected enough that I had high confidence that Jesus was turning things around for us. The more we practiced the skills we learned that day the more confidence I had, and when she agreed to live together again I was thrilled and knew that our marriage was on the road to even greater healing.

If you are separated what of the three areas of hopelessness are you battling with the most now? If one of your friends is separated what can you do to encourage them as they walk through their hopelessness?

The Christian Marriage Bloggers Association  has challenged those who blog about marriage to post for 13 straight days. I thought that was good inspiration to get back to blogging. Since I may have some new readers the next few days I thought I would start Day 1 with reintroducing myself.

My wife, Sharon, and I will be married 27 years this December. We have  23-year-old twins, Matthew and Sarah, who have graduated college and are employed in the agricultural and aviation industries and living in Nebraska and Kansas, so we are empty nesters on our farm in Ohio.

In our 17 and 18th years of marriage, while we were homeschooling our children, we went through a 16-month separation. Our brief story is that we dated about a year in our mid-twenties and then got married. At about the end of the first year of marriage we were struggling so much with communicating to each other that we got counseling. In our third year of marriage I was diagnosed with testicular cancer and went through two surgeries and chemo. And by God’s grace we had healthy twins the next year.

Because of all the intensity of surviving cancer and having twins shortly after, we buried our poor communication and conflict resolution skills for many years until it all culminated in our separation. During that time I became very depressed and eventually spent a month at Meier Clinic, a Christian outpatient therapy center. Later, Sharon told me that she was getting a divorce. She had lost hope. I told her that I would not sign a voluntary dissolution because Jesus said, “Let no man put asunder what God had joined together.” Thankfully Sharon never filed any paperwork.

Eventually as a last ditch effort, Sharon agreed to attend a one-day PAIRS seminar with me. With Jesus’s help over the next two months we learned how to use communication tools and deal with our issues. Since then we have had more training in communication skills, life and marriage coaching and created a ministry called Stubborn Pursuits. We came up with the name because I stubbornly pursued God and Sharon and she stubbornly pursued God. That all helped heal our wounds and brokenness and led to our reconciliation.

I started this blog as a place to share resources for couples in crisis and to offer hope and help for struggling couples or couples who want to help struggling couples. I also wanted to post things that are helpful for enriching any marriage, or for people who are considering marriage or are engaged.

I am a farmer so I can be very sporadic with my blogging. Sometimes I blog quite a bit, but  then I get working in the fields and don’t blog much at all. This challenge is inspiring me to  get back on track with it. I hope you find some helpful resources on our blog.

If you go to this Facebook page you can see what many other marriage bloggers are sharing during this 13-day challenge.