Jump Start Your Marriage (2 page)

Desire is an essential building block in the setting and achieving of goals. Motivational speaker and author Brian Tracy writes: “You must have an intense, burning desire for your particular goal…The intensity of your personal desire will determine the amount of energy and determination you put behind any goal you set for yourself.”

In his classic bestseller
Think and Grow Rich
, Napoleon Hill wrote: “Truly, ‘thoughts are things,’ and powerful things at that, when they are mixed with definiteness of purpose, persistence, and a burning desire
for their translation into riches, or other material objects.”

             
Hill was writing mainly of material riches and financial achievement, yet his words could be applied to marriage as well. What you think about in relation to your marriage will have a tremendous impact on the outcome of your marriage. If you believe that your marriage is destined for misery and failure, then this will likely be its outcome, barring a mind-blowing miracle from Heaven!

             
Marriage is too important, however, to force it to wait for a miracle on the order of God parting the Red Sea or a fluke like winning the lottery! To make your marriage improve, you must ignite and fuel a burning desire for it to improve.

             
In the last chapter, we considered the importance of hope and the foundation for that hope, namely your faith in the power and goodness of God. In this chapter, we look at the fuel necessary for you to fulfill
your
part in the equation.

             
God does not reward laziness. It’s not enough
to
content ourselves with the knowledge that God wants goodness for us and then to sit back and wait for it to happen. We will likely be waiting a long time. We must do
our
part, for God almost always chooses to work
through
people. Working through willing people is what gives God His greatest pleasure. And working through you is how God wants to improve your marriage.

             
Do you want your marriage to improve and ultimately succeed? Do you really? Does your life reflect that?

             
For years, I wished I would lose weight and I was disappointed that I kept gaining. I would tell people that I was “working on it,” but truthfully losing weight was a wish. It wasn’t really a goal. It certainly wasn’t backed by any fervent desire.

             
My strong desires were to
drink Coca-Cola, enjoy greasy foods, and consume lots of ice cream
!
Dairy Queen Blizzards
were (and are)
a personal favorite! My desire was to “eat, drink, and be merry,” not to lose weight. And my waistline showed it.

             
As of this writing, I’m still not where I should be in my weight. Old habits die hard and I have a long way to go. But I can honestly report that I’m headed in the right direction. I’ve cut back on a lot of my guilty pleasures. I’m exercising more. And I’m taking my health a whole lot more seriously than before. As a result, I’m shedding my excess weight – slowly, but surely.

             
Let’s take this common sense principle to our marriage. Do you have a desire to improve your marriage? Or do you instead desire to continue to do the same things that have contributed to putting your marriage in the place it is presently?

             
In my case, there were certain things I did for my wife and with my wife early in my marriage that I stopped doing later on, and the result was that my marriage showed the effects of that neglect.

             
Think carefully about what you used to do to get the attention of your spouse and win his or her heart, and contrast that with what you do
now
. One of the reasons for the change is the change in desire.

             
How high on the priority scale is your marriage? How much do you desire to make your spouse happy and fulfilled? How much do you desire a happy marriage?

             
The answers to the above questions are seen in your attitudes and actions, not simply in your words.

             
It’s critical, therefore, that you develop and then fuel an intense, burning desire for a happy marriage. That you purchased this e-book is indicative that you’re off to a good start, but it’s just that….a start.

             
Some things you can do to cultivate a desire for a great marriage include, but are by no means limited to, the following:


      
Make a list of those things that you want to be a part of your marriage. Write them down. Offer them to God in prayer. Read over them each day.


      
Find pictures of happy, joyous couples. Put them around you and let those images burn into your conscious mind of what you want in your home. The great motivator Zig Ziglar says that, when he wanted to lose weight, he cut out a picture of a man with the physique he wanted and kept that image in front of him until he had that same physique!


      
Hang out with married couples that you respect and admire. Role models are great motivations.


      
Begin investing time and money into your marriage. We generally care about what we invest in. By contrast, it’s very tough for our mind to conjure up interest in something into which we are unwilling to put any effort, time, or resources.

One of the reasons many hurting and failing marriages never get better is because the parties never move from the finger-pointing stage. You will never move forward in your marriage, so long as you’re blaming all the world’s problems or all
your
problems on your spouse.

A marriage involves two people. Biblically speaking, that means a marriage involves two sinners coming together and living together in close, intimate proximity for the rest of their lives. It’s absolutely true that your spouse has done some things (perhaps many things) to hurt you and your marriage. More than a few spouses act as if their partner is 100 percent to blame and the only reason they’re not emanating perfection is because heaven called to say their halo is on back order! 

In a marriage, neither spouse is sinless. Neither spouse is without fault.
N
either spouse can credibly claim
total
innocence.

It’s absolutely true that, in many marriages, one spouse is more at fault than the other. I’m not disputing this. In some cases, only
one
spouse has cheated or only one spouse has become manipulative or abusive. And let me quickly say that, in some cases (such as domestic violence and spousal abuse), separation is not only preferable, but essential.
[1]

I’m not arguing that spouses are always
equally
at fault. I’m simply stating that, whatever the balance or percentage, both spouses are at fault to at least
some
extent. And, for this reason, it’s incumbent on the one reading this e-book to make the first move. That’s leadership.

Regardless of who is most at fault, remember that God is the ultimate Judge. He will settle all accounts in the end. You are not responsible for dispensing justice to your spouse. You are responsible for doing your part. It’s therefore time to take responsibility for your situation and realize that God wants to work through you to make the marriage better.

In his book
Goals! How To Get Everything You Want – Faster Than You Ever Thought Possible
, Brian Tracy tells how he had an epiphany at the age of 21. Broke and miserable, Tracy wrote: “I suddenly realized that everything that would happen to me for the rest of my life was going to be up to me. No one else was ever going to help me. If I didn’t change, nothing else would change. I was responsible.”

That needs to be your realization with respect to your marriage. While it’s possible that God may separately work on your spouse, you’re not called to wait passively and let God do all His work through other people. You are alive to serve Him, and He wants to use you from within your present situation.

If you’ve followed the steps thus far, you have chosen to believe that, with God’s help, your marriage can and will get better. You’ve begun to cultivate a burning desire for your marriage to indeed get better. And you realize that you must take responsibility for your marriage and present yourself to God as a willing instrument to do His will through you.

Now, it’s time to dream and to set some goals.

Here’s your assignment: Get a 3 x 5 card. Put
in writing the kind of marriage you want to have.
Describe how you want to feel about your spouse, how you want your spouse to feel about you, and the kind of home life you want. If your first draft takes a page or two, no problem. But, for the sake of being able to clearly get your mind around the vision, it’s best to edit it down to where you can fit it on one side of a simple index card.

Brian Tracy recommends that we write all our goals in the present tense, so yours may read something like this: “I love my spouse with all my heart and he/she loves me. We enjoy each other’s company
. We
ar
e happy to be around each other. We
communicate effectively, and can’t get enough of each other physically. I look forward to many more years of happiness together.”

             
Writing goals in the present tense may feel awkward at first, and may strike
some
as disingenuous. It would only be dishonest if you told people that this was your present reality, if indeed it wasn’t. But to imagine a bright future on paper is not being dishonest.

             
If this strikes you as New Age hocus-pocus, then let me be quick to add that the
exercise I’m suggesting is more than
simply writing down a vision
. You are writing out your vision of what you want your marriage to be, and then…

             
You are
to give that vision to God
in prayer. To make this especially powerful, you should carry your index card with you every day. And several times a day, you should take out your index card and read it to God as your prayer request. Say something like this:

“Dear God,

Thank you for loving me. Thank you for sending Jesus to die for me. I thank you and praise your name for all the wonderful gifts and blessings you’ve given me, including the opportunity to marry and enjoy life with another person. I want to please you, God, in every way, and I want to have the marriage you want me to have. With that in mind, I offer you this vision of what I would like my marriage to look like in the near future….”

And then read your index card vision out loud to God in prayer.

Close your prayer with the words of Jesus: “Not my will, but thy will be done.” And really mean it.

Do this several times each day. Pray it with the knowledge that God hears your prayer, that He loves you, and that He wants you to be happy. Thank Him for loving you, for hearing you, and for taking your request to His heart.

I can’t promise that God will agree with everything you write. But I
can
promise that, if you’ve given your heart to Christ
[2]
and if you’re truly praying in His name (as the Bible teaches), He will take your petition and will work with you to give you the desires of your heart.

He may change your heart. He has a tendency to do that, at times. You may find that, five or six weeks into the exercise, you have to re-write your prayer, because it no longer reflects your exact sentiments. That’s okay. That’s God working on you. Let Him do His work.

Ask God to give you a vision for your marriage.
Fix that vision in your mind, give it to the Lord sincerely in prayer, and start moving toward it.

Not only must you have a vision in mind, you must also determine your starting point. F
or this, you need to realistic and brutally honest. Don’t try to mislead yourself or God.

Measured against your ideal vision, where is your marriage falling short? Get a clear sense of these shortcomings. Write them down. If, for example, you envision a marriage that’s largely free of anxiety and conflict, but you find yourself bickering with your spouse every day and occasionally yelling at the top of your lungs at each other, then be honest about this.

If you’re in a sexless marriage, write that down too. Whatever is wrong with your marriage, put it down. This is your starting point. It’s where you’re at right now, but it’s NOT where you will be in the future. The future belongs to God.

If you’ve done this exercise, you have written down an ideal vision of where you want your marriage to be and you’ve also written down a thoroughly candid description of the present state of your marriage.

When Ronald Reagan signed the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday into law, he said that Dr. King’s greatness was that he sought to “narrow the gap between idealism and reality.” That’s now your job.

When a person starts a business, he or she draws up a business plan. This consists of the entrepreneur’s objectives and specifically how he or she intends to achieve those objectives. In this case, you need to clearly define your vision of an ideal marriage, honestly assess your present marriage, and then develop realistic and incremental goals to make your vision a reality.

You need to take the present reality and start moving it toward the ideal vision. How? Through prayer, goal-setting, hard work, patience, persistence, and more prayer.