And this is my prayer:
that your love may abound more and more
in knowledge and depth of insight.
(Philippians 1:19)

“It’s possible to be married to someone for 35 years and still not know them because you never take the time to explore the deepest recesses of their heart.” (Dr. David Jeremiah)

We’ve been talking for the past several weeks on the importance of “getting to know one another” as husband and wife. It seems funny to think that you could be married to someone and yet not know them. But as Dr Jeremiah suggested time living in the same house together doesn’t equal really knowing the deepest recesses of each other’s hearts. Life has a way of sliding us apart if we don’t make the conscientious effort to stay connected.

So often we hear the couples who are divorcing say, “We just grew apart. We didn’t have enough in common anymore.” And that can happen so easily in every marriage if we don’t work on growing together. There’s really no excuse for allowing this to happen. When we vow to love and cherish each other in our wedding vows, part of loving and cherishing is to continually stay connected with each other.

We dated our spouse before marriage which helped us to fall in love with them in the first place—why not date each other during marriage to stay in love? It really only makes sense!

And by dating we don’t mean just going somewhere together but never really talking WITH each other. Too often couples somewhere along the line start talking AT each other rather than WITH each other, listening to each other’s hearts.

We’ve given a variety of suggestions in our Marriage Messages for the past several weeks for how to stay connected in marriage. We’ve given you the “Top Ten Reasons to Date Your Spouse Frequently”, the “22 Minute Date Idea”, the “10 Second Kiss Idea”, and a list of resources to help you during your times of togetherness. Well, we’ve got another date idea that you may enjoy also.

We came across a “Movie Discussion Guide” (from www.SmartMarriages.com) to the movie, The Story of Us, starring Bruce Willis and Michelle Pfeiffer. The guide was written by Jana Staton and Lisa Hawkins and provides excellent discussion questions designed to give couples deeper insights into their relationship.

We’re going to use this same resource ourselves and have a few couples over New Years Eve to show the movie, go through the discussion questions (and then everyone will stay for games and fellowship). You may want to plan a similar time with a few couples that you know would enjoy a good movie AND a chance to learn more about marriage and more about each other.

If you’d like a copy of the discussion guide we can send it to you as a Word Document attachment. Just email a request and we’ll get it off to you right away.

We pray this will be a wonderful week in your marriage. Our love is with you as we work together to make our marriages strong, healthy and loving.

In Christ,
Steve and Cindy Wright

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