Category: Marriage

Faith and Love

“Wherefore I also, after I heard of your faith in the Lord Jesus, and love unto all the saints,” – Ephesians‬ ‭1:15‬ ‭KJV‬‬

What are you planting?

Your Life Speaks

This scripture from the Bible has stood out to me because of something that Paul says. While writing this letter to the church at Ephesus, he says that their faith  and their love are what he heard about. I’ve been thinking about this the last couple of days and I wonder if the same could be said of us. 

Your life speaks...what is it saying? #youspeakvolumes #livelife Click To Tweet

Does our faith speak? Does our love speak? They should speak to those around us. Our lives should be filled with faith and love. Everyone wants to make an impact, but how does real impact happen? 

Paul said that their faith and their love is what impacted him. The same should be said of our faith and love. One area that our faith and love can be seen is in our marriages. 

 

Faith in Your Marriage

 

Faith in your marriage can look like persevering  through hard times. It’s not always that you have to be on the brink of divorce for you to have faith in your marriage. Faith can look like praying for your marriage in the morning. It can also look like having peace in your day to day. Faith in your marriage can look like believing for a consistent date night. The point is that having faith in and for your marriage is more than waiting until your about to file for divorce. 

 

Love In Your Marriage

 

How does love in your marriage look? Do you picture it as your favorite rom-com movie? Or does it look like a relationship that you saw as a child?

 

Love in your marriage is two parts; how you give love and how you receive love. You need to know both. Does love look like handwritten letters or exotic vacations or even sitting on the couch watching your favorite show. 

 

So what does love look like for your marriage and what do you do to maintain it? Love has to continue to grow and develop. It’s a living part of your marriage and has to be treated as such. There are some practical things you can you like praying together, date nights, vacations together and communication are a way to get started. 

 

Building the faith and love in your marriage is what will speak to those around us.  Like Paul wrote to the believers in Ephesians ,their faith and love are what spoke to Paul. Your faith and love will also speak. 

 

Discussion Question:

What do you want your faith and love to say?

Consider that Quality Time in your marriage is more important than the Quantity of Time

We all would like to be able to get more time for the things that matter. What I’ve learned is that we all have the same 24 hours in a day. How to spend them is up to us. So everything can’t be about the quantity of time. We don’t have the ability to get more hours into our day. The difference is the quality of the time we do have. 

Your Most Valuable Asset


What is your most valuable thing that you have? Is it  money or the resources that you have at your disposal? Most of us know that time is the most valuable asset we have. How does this play into our relationships with our spouse?

I’m learning more and more that I have to be intentional with my time. I’ve had those moments where I sat down to do some work or read and ended up watching videos on YouTube or Netflix for  2 hours! 

I’ve also done this same thing when I wanted to spend time with my wife. The funny or ironic part is that my primary love language is Quality Time.  I’ve had moments when I wanted to spend time with my wife and we end up being in the same room together but not really connected. 

With my passion to  become a successful writer, balancing  my time can be challenging. I have a tendency to allow my time to be consumed by other things.

We all have the same 24hrs. How we spend them shows what we value Click To Tweet

Can We Get More Time?


We all would like to be able to get more time for the things that matter. What I’ve learned is that we all have the same 24 hours in a day. How to spend them is up to us. So everything can’t be about the quantity of time. We don’t have the ability to get more hours into our day. The difference is the quality of the time we do have. 

For a person like me whose love language is Quality Time, I can’t add more hours into my 24 hour day to spend with my wife. What I can do is make sure that we’re getting the most out of the time that we spend together. So it truly is Quality over Quantity. Especially when it comes to our spouses. We can think that that more time together will fix everything. How do we make sure we’re getting the most out of time together?

 

  1. Get Rid of Distractions

 

You don’t realize how much of your time is being wasted until you actually start to track your time. We waste time doing the things that we know we’re not supposed to do. Checking emails is one area where we can waste time. We check emails at work, we check them at home and pretty much everywhere in between. The key to quality time is to get rid of the distractions. 

 

  1. Be present

 

This goes right along with getting rid of the distractions. There are a lot of moments in my life where I’m in the room but not present. This can be true for a lot of men and that may be a stereotype. It doesn’t matter if it’s true or a stereotype, we have to do better at being in the moment. 

Our spouses need us to be present, as well as our children. Each relationship that we value needs us to be present. 

 

Doing just these two things will get us started with improving the quality of the time we have. 

Discussion Question:

In what areas can you make quality time more of a priority?

Dream Foundation

“There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: The fear of failure.” – Paulo Coelho

What’s your dream? When was the last time someone asked you about your dream? When did you ask yourself about your dream? Most of us haven’t even asked ourselves about our dreams, let alone how we would answer that question if someone asked us.

Dream Again
Most of our dreams remain dreams and we never take action because of a number of reasons. The biggest one is fear.

Don’t let fear keep you from moving forward Click To Tweet

Fear can manifest itself in a number of different ways. Fear can look like procrastination when we find ourselves coming up against the same hurdle over and over. That’s just one example. We overcome fear by having a solid foundation to our dreams. What makes up a solid foundation?

1. Habits

Our habits make us who we are. No matter what you want to achieve in life, it’s your habits that will hinder or help you. Your habits determine your life. If you want to have a strong relationship with God, then you need to have a habit of prayer and Bible study. Do you want to be a good husband? Then you need to have a habit of continually working on your marriage. Our habits can determine so many things about us. They can also be changed to that we can chase the dreams on the inside of us.

2. Attitude

As much as our habits determine where our life is headed, our attitude is just as important. Our attitude is related to our outlook on life. Sometimes life happens where there is a job loss or some other unexpected setback. Those things happen. How we handle it and how we choose to see it, is determined by our attitude. We can control our attitude. That’s the power of the human mind.

3. Rest

Rest is more than the number of hours that you sleep. It is more about giving your body a chance to let go of the stresses of the day. It’s about giving your mind time to calm down. That’s why prayer and meditation are so important. It’s having time to quiet down and find peace before you move on to the next thing.

This list doesn’t include everything, but the things listed above are some essentials to seeing our dreams come to past in our lives. Can we achieve our dreams? Absolutely, but it will come at a price. The price of changing what we do now to doing what is needed to achieve our dreams.

Discussion Question:

What dream do you have?