Think a minute…Someone said: “Marriage is like getting a phone call at midnight: first you get a ring, then you wake up!” One man said, “My wife went from hard-to-get—to hard-to-handle—to hard-to-take.” But a woman observed: “A husband expects his wife to be perfect, but to understand why he is not.”
Our problem is that when marriage does not give us total happiness like we expected, many of us blame our spouse, or even marriage itself. But if you’re not a happy person before you get married, you will not be happy afterwards either! In marriage, two people bring together not only their good qualities, but also their problems and weaknesses. So married life can become double trouble if we come into it with wrong, unrealistic expectations. But when we learn how to blend our two personalities and pasts, our love and joy together is more than doubled. Remember: “In the word wedding, the ‘we’ comes before the ‘I’.”
Our big mistake is thinking that if we change our spouse or outward circumstances, it will solve our marriage problem, along with our other problems. So, we get a better job, more money, a nicer house, even move to another city. The problem is this: “Wherever you go, there you are.” Even if we get a different wife or husband, the person we are inside remains the same. Until we stop blaming our wife or husband, or our outward circumstances, and we ourselves start to change, our marriage and life cannot change either.
The wise writer C.S. Lewis put it this way: “No clever arrangement of bad eggs ever made a good omelet.” A good omelet only comes from good eggs. And a good, satisfying marriage can only come from two people who love, accept, and care as much about the other person’s needs as their own. “A marriage can be made in heaven, but the maintenance work is done on earth.”
I cannot change my mate’s personality and character, and neither can you change yours. But if you ask Jesus to start changing you first, then after your wife or husband sees you growing better as a person and partner, they will likely want to start changing and growing with you. Won’t you be the first one in your marriage to pray this life-changing prayer: “Lord, please start changing my marriage into the close, happy one I know you created it to be—and start by changing me.”Just think a minute…