It’s the week of Thanksgiving, a time time when many of us pause to think of the many things that we are thankful for. I have to say, at the top of my list has to be my wife.
As a couple, we are coming out of a season of heavy praying. Looking across our family, we have been praying for new jobs, for successful relocations, for adoption approvals, for sold homes, for fledgling ministries and healing. It seems that every aspect of our lives has been in flux. It has been an incredible season of communing with God and receiving many answered prayers. I could expound upon any of the items listed above and speak of the supernatural responses from God. But for the purpose of this post, I really just want to focus on my wife of thirty-six years.
We’ve all heard the statistics that over 50% of marriages in our culture will end in divorce. I came across a new interesting statistic recently. Oddly, this is one that Dr. Phil shared on his show. He cited a study showing that only 1 out of 10,000 couples that pray together regularly will end in divorce. That’s a 99.97% success rate.
During this season which we’ve just endured, I’ve both prayed with my wife and for my wife. And I know that she has done the same for me. It’s hard to imagine feeling any closer to her than I do right now. But I have similar feelings for God at the same time.
We know that God created marriage and has a design for it that most of us have departed from to some degree. But God also created the concept of intimacy, which He intends to have with each of us as His creation. What I’m not sure I’ve appreciated in the past is how this same intimacy flows out of my relationship with Him and right into my relationship with her. In other words, the closer I become with my Creator, the closer I feel to my wife which He brought into my life. Likewise, the more thankful I am for Him, the more thankful I am to her.
It’s more than just a fuzzy feeling as well. We have experienced a tangible alignment of late that is not always present. Through praying together and for each other, God has given us each similar thoughts and solutions to the issues we’ve been facing. In the past several weeks, each of us has been faced individually with someone asking us advice on a very specific topic. In each case when that same question was asked to the other of us, we found ourselves providing nearly an identical answer or direction. I am convinced that was God speaking through each of us.We were aligned with each other, because we were first aligned with Him.
The holiday season can bring on tremendous amounts of marital distress. The added pressures of entertaining, dealing with extended family, jam-packed calendars and shopping can wear anyone’s nerves raw. This year, I’m going to keep my focus on God and maintaining the intimacy that I’ve had with Him of late. I will continue to pray for and with my wife trusting that intimacy will continue to overflow into our marriage. The resulting alignment should go a long way to overcoming the stresses the season brings.