Wow! After being remarried to my husband for almost six years now (divorced from each other for six years prior to that), I am still AMAZED at the miracle Christ worked in our lives. Don't ever say,"That will never happen to me" because that very statement can come back to haunt you if it truly is your mindset. My husband (a Confessional Lutheran blogger too) and I both had that attitude about our marriage, especially when we would witness another marriage breaking up or showing MAJOR signs of distress. We were best friends and had God at the center of our marriage, so we thought. HOWEVER, after the birth of our son, signs of distress in our marriage began to surface more and more. After about three years of growing more and more distant with each other, he moved out, followed with a divorce about ten months later. You see, we didn't take the necessary preventative measures to protect our marriage which led to disaster.
To make a very long and painful story short, we took six years to work through the EXTREMELY DEEP hurt with the help of our pastor and other Christian counselors. With our family by our side, we were remarried to EACH other on Easter Sunday!! That only happened through the grace of God and God alone!!!
Christ took all of that pain and turned it into a deeper love for Him and for each other as well as for our family! Do we have a perfect marriage and family? No, absolutely not. We are sinners saved by His grace, and each day we walk in His TRUTH and GRACE together. We are the BEST of friends again and enjoy being together as a couple and family, all praise and glory to God. And to add, we take the preventative measures now to protect our marriage and family. What are some of those measures, you ask? Well, I will save that for another post. For now, I just pray that you will be encouraged to make Christ first and love your mate as Christ has commanded each of us married people in the Bible. By the way, throughout those long six years of reconciliation, Christ always seemed to encourage me to never give up on our marriage. In that timespan, I counted that I must have encountered around eighty couples who were having difficulties in their marriages (some separated and some divorced for various reasons) but who reconciled!! Wow, God can do the impossible!!
"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. Therefore, what God has joined together, let man not separate." Matthew 19: 4 - 6
Lucy tearing through the little Connecticut town and countryside on the lawn mower loaned to the Ricardos by the Ramseys, their next door neighbors, brings back a memory of my "riding lawn mower" days in my early teens!! Oh my!! Though this redhead didn't damage any prize winning tulips or landscape, she did hurt her pride! I can only imagine what my dad must have thought when he saw his "little girl" (of 13 years) stuck in the grape arbor because she couldn't reach the shift to put the lawnmower back into drive! He probably thought, "Oh here she goes again! How will I get her out of this one?"
