Recently Sharon and I took a road trip to Tucson. All those hours of uninterrupted conversation were wonderful. As I look back at that trip, I am grateful to God for the gift of my wife. Not everyone has a wife who is also their best friend. A recent cartoon showed two characters in a bar. One turns to the other and asks, "So Fred, how's married life changed you?" His friend replied, "Well, I'm not my own worst enemy anymore."
Cynical, yes. But anyone who's been married for more than a couple weeks knows it is hard work and often heart breaking. What many couples never get to is that season of great joy and deep satisfaction that comes from living all those years together and working through the rough times.
During the worst season in our marriage, we both decided it had to be easier to work through all our "stuff" than to start over and live with the impact a divorce would have on us, our children and our friends.
So we made the decision to begin the hard work of allowing God to make changes in each of us. That decision, and the literally hundreds of subsequent and related decisions, usually involved what the apostle Paul described in his letter to the Christians at Philippi: "Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others." It was difficult. It was painful. It took longer than we hoped it would. But that decision, and the hundreds of subsequent decisions, is what brought us to this season of great joy and deep satisfaction.
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