True North: LIVE Free In MarriageSample

Now that you have a better understanding of God’s design for marriage, let us look at how we can begin to improve it. The five key points that we will explore during the next five days came from a combination of my wife’s and my personal experience, and observation from dozens of other couples that we have mentored and counseled.

One day my wife, Amy, asked, “I wonder why some of the couples we work with flourish and some of them plateau?” From that question, we began to examine our own story of recovery and the recovery of dozens of other couples. What we found was pretty amazing and, frankly, pretty simple.

Each of the couples that were thriving had these five traits in common: Prayer, Community, Church, Reading, and Serving. We are going to cover each one individually over the next five days. Without question, the first one is the most important: PRAYER!

Getting an exact number for the official divorce rate is difficult, but we know it is somewhere between 35% to 46%. Unfortunately, we also know that being a Christian and going to church is not the ultimate fix. There are dozens of factors that affect divorce rates: age, income, race, careers, family influence, etc. Yet none of these have a significant impact as it pertains to decreasing the divorce rate.

With all of the measurable indicators, only PRAYER made a significant difference in the divorce rate. If there is a “silver bullet” for marriage it is simply this: pray together regularly. Couples who report praying together regularly had a less than 2% divorce rate! That’s right, praying together regularly gives you a 98% chance of making it. I will gladly take those odds.

Take a moment and ask God: “Have I taken prayer seriously? Am I even praying with my spouse? If not, why?”