Thursdays are trash days. My husband is the one that has taken on the responsibility of taking out the trash for the duration of our marriage. It’s just what he’s always done. There are some duties we share that some couples may not: we both...
Words. They are a necessity in life. From the time the alarm clock sounds in the morning, until it is set again in the evening, we use words. Our words help us navigate life, express our basic needs, and articulate our heart’s deepest desires. Whether...
Paul’s teachings in Ephesians 5:21-33 are often presented as a recipe for a good marriage, however, several parts of this passage can be easily misunderstood and/or misapplied. When this happens, many couples can find themselves disappointed and disillusioned with each other. ...
When Randy and I were asked to write about adventure, we thought, “what could we possibly say about it to be of any help?” There was no grand plan in the beginning of our marriage to have “adventure” in our life. Like romance in our...
God’s design for all marriages is that they would be a grand adventure, working toward a shared purpose worthy of the entire lives of each spouse. The challenge for spouses is to discover what this will look like for their own marriage. What is the...
My husband and I met in student ministry when we were 12 years old and started dating when we were 16 and 17 years old. We had amazing marital counseling during our engagement and managed, by God’s grace and protection, to practice purity our entire...
As an essential aspect of oneness, marital intimacy tends to be emblematic of the overall health of a marriage. Sadly, this area is most often marked by brokenness and bitterness instead of the power and enjoyment that God means it for. If we are to...
It had been one of those days. You know the one…the house is a wreck, the kids aren’t getting along, you haven’t showered or even finished the half bagel you started to eat at breakfast. And then you look at the time and realize it’s...
This weekend, Chris Curtis taught on redemption in marriage from Ephesians 5:31-33. In this passage, Paul explains that marriage is not about us but about illustrating the relationship between God and His people. Marriage is not characterized by emotion or duty, as our culture teaches, but...
In December of this year, my husband and I will celebrate our 10th wedding anniversary. We were just 24 and 25 years old when we married. After ten months of dating, six months of engagement, four premarital counseling sessions through our church, two books on...
Marriage is the practice of oneness between two people, and that oneness is made even more profound by the uniqueness that sets each gender apart from the other – a controversial subject, but also an important one. In a time when the lines between genders...
As a young married couple, we didn’t receive much teaching or training in regard to marriage, especially a godly marriage. Our pre-marital counseling was provided by a grad student at our college campus, who at the outset explained that he had never had a girlfriend,...
While oneness is a lofty and mysterious spiritual truth, it is lived out in practical ways. What follows is a list of acts that destroy oneness in our marriages and then a number of actions by which we may promote oneness between our spouses and...
What is marriage? How are we meant to define it? The world around us offers many answers to these questions, making the truth about it less and less clear. The institution of marriage itself seems broken within our culture, leading some to reject it outright....
I’ve been married for 26 years now. I used to think that our sex life would be forever broken; broken because of misconceptions we both had from our childhood and broken because of sexual mistakes we each made, separately and together. Sex was...