Marriage and Family Life Reading PlanSample

Accept Your Mate Unconditionally

If you accept your mate only in part, you can love him or her only in part. That’s why unconditionally accepting your mate is so important.

While serving aboard a gunboat in Vietnam, Dave Roever was holding a phosphorus grenade some six inches from his face when a sniper’s bullet ignited the explosive. The first time he saw himself after the explosion, he says he saw a monster, not a human being.“ I was alone in the way the souls in hell must feel alone,” he wrote.

When he returned to the states, he feared how his young bride, Brenda, would react. He had just watched a wife tell another burn victim that she wanted a divorce. But when Brenda walked in, she kissed him on what was left of his face, smiled, and said, “Welcome home,

Davey! I love you.”

That’s what marriage is all about. Marriage is another person being committed enough to you to accept the real you, scars and all. It means two people working together to heal their deepest wounds. It means following the example of God in our marriage, “He will again have compassion on us, and will subdue our iniquities. You will cast all our sins into the depths of the sea.”