How to Keep from Breaking Faith

First, let me get you to read an article by my friend and brother Ron Carlson.  This is a great article about the simple ways marriages can be made strong and unbreakable.  While you’re at it, you might want to subscribe to Grace Centered Magazine.  Lots of wholesome, helpful articles.

Let me add something to the above article.  I have found that if I can get couples to read and practice the characteristics of love found in 1 Corinthians 13:4-7, they can get their marriage off the rocks.  I require that they read it to each other each evening before bedtime…one reads it to the other in turn…and then pray for God’s help in practicing these characteristics.  It hasn’t failed yet.  There you have it…free marriage counseling!

The Disappearance of Stacy Peterson

This is Stacy Peterson.  Attractive woman.  But what’s the matter with this picture? A 19 year old woman marries a man in his late 40s who’s been married three times before and whose last wife, who feared for her life, drowned in a bathtub. If your answer is “everything,” then you and I are seeing this debacle the same way.

As I listened to the news this morning a flock of questions took flight through my mind. What causes ordinarily responsible people to lose touch with reality? How could she think that this man was a good marriage prospect? Even if he was, shouldn’t she have checked him out more thoroughly? Didn’t she know about the bizarre death of his third wife?  Did her parents/family/friends/confidants warn her about marrying a man twice her age? What was she thinking? Was she thinking at all?

Now, four years later, this young mother has gone missing under suspicious circumstances and is probably decomposing in a shallow grave in some woods. How horrible is that?

I like Joe Muir’s words to young women quoted in Wendy Shalit’s blog Girls Gone Mild he writes:

I…want to encourage each of you to never, ever settle for second best in a relationship, as you deserve the best. It is far better to not be in a relationship, wishing you were in one, than to actually be in one, wishing you weren’t. Be willing, I pray you, to be single for the rest of your life, if that’s what it takes to not settle for second best; as that would be far better than marrying a man who cannot love you.

Amen.