To those of us who are Christians, grace is truly an amazing thing. It is the favor that God gives us, apart from anything we do, that allows us to experience fellowship with the God who created us. Despite the fact that we are sinful creatures, utterly and completely depraved and devoid of any goodness whatsoever, Christ reaches down into the miry clay-filled pit, the pit wherein we would otherwise prefer to wallow, and pulls us out, cleans us up, and places us at the right hand of … [Read more...]
Six ways to be a friend to your husband
In his book The Four Loves, C.S. Lewis explores the nature of love from a Biblical perspective using the four Greek words for love – storge (affection), phileo (friendship), eros (romance), and agape (unconditional love) – as a foundation. He shows that ‘love’ is far more complicated than most of us think, and a simple term like ‘God is love’ can have lots of nuances as the various ways His creatures ‘love’ each other are manifested and explored. The lesson here and elsewhere is, when the … [Read more...]
Five ways to make your home a haven
We all know the stereotypes – ‘ball and chain,’ ‘old lady,’ the bartender telling the guys, “you don’t have to go home but you can’t stay here,” as if the bar were the ultimate guy haven, a place where nobody judges you and ‘everybody knows your name.’ After all, everybody KNOWS no guy in his right mind wants to go home to his wife, right? The roughly half of marriages that end in divorce is highly publicized, and the sheer unadulterated misery that the other 50% must go through is the stuff of … [Read more...]
Those Everyday Days
From the monumental day we say our wedding vows in front of God and all the people in our lives, our journeys together are generally marked by the big things – anniversaries, births, vacation trips, and even the tragic events that inevitably come our way. If each marriage had a road map of its own, they are the towns that lay along the road from the beginning to the time that death do us part. But, in between all those, between those landmark events, the ‘towns’ along our marriage path, lie … [Read more...]
Five Things Kids Should See From Every Marriage
From the time our children leave their mother’s womb and take their very first breath, they need stuff from us. It starts with the most basic needs – sustenance, warmth, shelter – and, at least according to friends of ours with older children, apparently never really ends (although I’m hoping that isn’t true – when my wife and I eventually retire to the Caymans we aren’t taking ANY of them with us!). It all happens in stages, of course. They need basic sustenance for a while, then they need … [Read more...]