A personal reflection about marriage

Sunday, 15. March 2009 by Renee Ellison

Every person arrives at marriage with a fully developed hard-drive which ya ain’t gonna change.  It takes at least 15 years of marriage before you discover that is what you are dealing with…a hard drive.  No rewiring manual.  So if ya can’t CHANGE it, you have to switch marital strategies in your brain and heart to UNDERSTAND it, adjust and adapt.

We all enter marriage blissfully thinking, “At last, I’ve hand picked someone who will understand me, for days without end, and will emotionally nourish me, sigh…oh bliss.”  But what we find out somewhere into the marriage, is what God intended it for all along.  It was HE who hand-picked the idea of marriage, for HIS purposes, not ours.  Marriage is really God’s crash course in learning how to understand and ardently love someone ELSE…to mature into godlikeness.  It is a steep drive up a long hill to learn to be selfless.  It is a graduate course in maturity.  It is thoroughly and absolutely all about learning how to cherish another person, through thick and thin… ending with even their old age incontinence.  Whew!

The great key to marriage is to constantly look at life throuh your mate’s point of view.  Solves almost all problems.  Understanding WHY the person is responding/acting that way leads to tendernesses galore.