Fly, by Sara Groves

Musings on Marriage, for my children to think about for their future...

A large part of marriage is focusing on the positives. Looking for the good things about your spouse (it's all you see at the beginning, of course, but I'm talking about LATER), and majoring in those. Counting the blessings that come wrapped up in your spouse-package. Encouraging and praising for the things they're doing right. However, one of those things HAS to be faithfulness. Without that, it's not marriage. Marriage is a one-on-one thang. So another really big part of marriage is trying REALLY hard before you get engaged, to gauge the prospective person's character: Faithful? Trustworthy? Able to commit and stick with it? That's hard to figure out. But essential. Along with perseverance, responsibility, integrity, honesty, industriousness, devotion, and hey, hopefully a good sense of humor and fun.

And after the wedding, what about those other little things that could potentially annoy you? Laugh good-naturedly about them. Don't spend too much time on them. Cover them over with love and patience; pray about them if you like, but with a good measure of acceptance for any outcome of your prayers. Move right along to counting your blessings again.

Another thing: keep filling up your spouse's love bank. It's being drawn down constantly by life happening, and needs generous daily deposits to keep it nice and full of savings for when you're sick or away or in a bad mood or slip into temporary selfish insanity. As soon as possible after you've been the one drawing it down, get back to topping it up: do loving things, take care of a need or expressed desire, speak encouragingly, give tender touches, leave notes, share a chore that's not even yours, or whatever else works to communicate to your spouse how important they are to you, and how cherished, in the midst of the mundane and routine. It goes such a long way. You may not "want" to do something in particular at the moment, but you "want" to have a joyful, lifelong marriage, right? So actually, long-term, you "want" to do the loving thing NOW. It's good planning for your own happiness, not to mention your spouse and your children.

The end of the song "Fly" by Sara Groves, speaking of the loving things done for her by her husband:

Oh how the little things 
Strengthen my tiny wings 
Help me to take on the world 
When you love me there's nothing I wouldn't try 
I might even fly 

I found "Fly" set to the most romantic excerpts from The Princess Bride movie: 

It was funny to find these two favorites together!

Another interesting related thing - someone put the same song to their wedding video here.

The amazing thing about this video, as I realized watching it, is that the groom has no arms. The bride puts his wedding ring on a chain around his neck, the minister removes her veil, and they dance with only the bride's arms holding the groom! Wow. At first look I had just found it weird that he didn't dance with his arms around her! Teaches me a lesson!!! How quick we are to judge before we look for a good reason people are doing things! We need to remember we don't know the whole story.

My husband's calling, got to go! :-)

Posted via email from K's Café