Simple Marriage #1
We all know that marriage is not simple, but here are some simple ideas we can practice to help strengthen our connection with each other.
The other day an unknown-to-me symbol lit up on the dashboard of my car, telling me that I needed to pay attention to something. My problem was that I didn’t know what the “something” was; the symbol was foreign to me. So I dug through my glove box for the manual, hoping I would find some insight there. Good news, I did! And I figured out what I needed to do to solve the problem. During this shelter-at-home time in the midst of COVID-19, we’ve all spent a lot of time together. Probably some good and some not so good! Maybe at times we’ve felt an indicator light pop up telling us to “pay attention” to our marriages, but we didn’t actually know what to pay attention to. Or maybe we’ve wished there was a manual for marriage, similar to my car manual, so we could just “fix it”. (Insert hysterical laughter here.)
The whole idea behind this section in Wellspring’s Good News is to provide our marriages with some ideas, questions or good media, not to “fix” us, but to help us to know what to pay attention to, to connect and to have some fun within marriage. We hope you’ll take these ideas and use them however they fit your marriage. For example, while date nights are an amazing idea, for David and I, they are a lost cause. By the time we hit evening, we’re just plain tired and can’t give our marriage or the other person the “paying attention” needed. So, we do our “date nights” on Saturday mornings over a breakfast burrito and cups of coffee. Find what fits for your marriage and do that.
So here are a few “paying attention” questions you could ask each other this week:
If you could experience being any other person for 24 hours, who would you pick and why?
If you could change into any animal for 24 hours, what would it be and why?
Who was your childhood hero or heroine and why?
If you could live in another country, which would you pick and why?
(Here’s a timely one:) What kind of year has this been for you?
Fun Starter: Need a little laughter together? Check out Tim Hawkins at https://timhawkins.net/blogs/video. These are short videos from his site, but you could also look him up on YouTube for longer ones. (Oh, and by the way, he’s “child-friendly”, just in case you have little ears listening!) Blessings on us all as we “pay attention” to our marriages!
