• Apologetics
  
• Arts Ministry
  
• Children's Ministry
  
• Evangelism
  
• Pastors
  
• Worship
  

Two Chances - Slim and None
by Norman and Ann Bales
All About Families


Send this page to a friend

A lady called a marriage counselor and asked if she could make an appointment for her husband. The counselor said, "Don't you mean to say you want to come together?" The lady on the other end of the telephone said, "No, I just want you to see my husband."

The counselor insisted, "Usually when there's a marriage difficulty, both parties contribute to the problem, so I really need to see both of you." The lady on the telephone wasn't about to buy into the counselor's suggestion. She said, "The only thing wrong with our marriage is my husband's behavior. If you'll just get him straightened out, we won't have any problems."

The woman had two chances of getting her husband into therapy - slim and none. While it's a rare thing for someone to blatantly insist that the problems of a troubled marriage rests with the other spouse, most people do think the lion's share of blame belongs to someone else.

A woman once gave her counselor a laundry list of grievances against her husband. After listening to the entire story, the counselor asked, "And what have you done to harm this marriage?" She didn't hesitate to give an answer. She said, "I was too good to him." It seems like many of us have "I" trouble. We clearly see faults in other people, but we are blind to our own.

Most of us feel some kind of inadequacy, incompleteness or insufficiency when we enter marriage. That's normal. God recognized Adam's deficiency in the Garden of Eden. According to Genesis 2:18 "The LORD God said, 'It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.'" Problems occur in marriage when we expect our spouses to flawlessly provide every biological, emotional and relational need. We forget that our spouses married us with the same kind of expectation.

Married couples often run into trouble when a husband feels cheated because his wife fails to measure up to all his expectations. By the same token his wife is just as frustrated for the same reasons. Instead of recognizing and correcting their own flaws, they complain about the things the other spouse does or does not do.

Somehow that vicious cycle has to be broken if a marriage has any chance of succeeding. The Bible offers the only solution to the kind of "I" trouble that's sending 1 out of 2 marriages into the divorce court. "Each of you should not look to your own interests, but also to the interests of others" (Philippians 2:4).

Send this page to a friend: