When your neighbor’s house is flooded, the roof is blown away from a hurricane or gutted from a devastating fire, are you inclined to help them? Are you moved with compassion to serve them and pour all the effort you can into assisting them toward recovery?
If your answer to those questions is “yes,” then please consider the next set of seriously posed questions. Before reaching out a hand, would you first ask them their political persuasion or would you first consider their race or nationality? Perhaps you might contemplate their religion or sexual orientation…?
I doubt it. I think you would roll up your sleeves and get busy. Why? At the point of crisis these things do not divide us, rather we are united by the need in their lives. We are drawn by compassion with a desire to help alleviate their personal disaster or discomfort.
United by the need in their lives… That perceived need causes you and I to respond differently. That need reflects our heart to benevolently care for others, even though they may be radically different from us in numerous persuasions.
If it takes a crisis to unite the nation we live in, then perhaps what we need are ongoing, deliberate and strategically placed crises. But that just sounds heretical and down right awful doesn’t it?
How about this instead?
Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ Jesus
Before you were married, did anyone advise you that your marriage would need room for failure, forgiveness, loss, brokenness, disagreement, or even sin? If not, a full and honest disclosure was missed, and you may have entered into marriage a bit naïve or ill-advised. Marriages fail because we fail God, each other, and ourselves. We fail to love, we fail to honor, we fail to forgive, and we fail in keeping at bay our own personal struggles with selfishness. And that’s where prayer can come in.
In 
We seemed to have reached a desperate part of our meeting with a middle-aged couple pastoring a small church in New York. In tears, the wife declared, “We’re not intimate!” We asked what she meant by that statement. She said without hesitancy, “We don’t do fun things together; we don’t hold hands; we don’t sit close any longer; we rarely have sex; and our conversations have become predictable, boring, and too infrequent. It’s like we’ve taken a break from closeness, from our friendship…from intimacy.”
How does a couple stay sexually active when there are jobs, a family, household responsibilities, and civic commitments, along with children’s sports and school, and then local church involvement? All of these good things can rob us of intimacy as married couples and can even become priority over our sexual thoughts and desires. Sometimes life gets a hold of us, and all too often we’re too exhausted to take a hold of one other.
On your wedding day, you spoke something called vows that probably sounded something like this: For better or for worse; for richer or for poorer; in sickness and in health; ’til death do us part. Rarely do we imagine having to face such issues. But truth be told, we will face some of these things and, perhaps, already have. If you think about it, these vows prepare us for reality long before reality sets in; they help prepare us for inevitable disappointments in marriage.
Infidelity can affect all of our marriages because we can all be tempted. We are all potential vow-breakers. If we think it can’t happen to us, we can become sloppy and less guarded, not alert to the enemy’s schemes. In 
We sat down to interview Jon and Amy (names have been changed), a couple we have encountered who have a pain-filled story. With their permission, we are about to share with you their loss, brokenness, hope, and redemption.
If your goal was to tear apart your marriage, money arguments would certainly help. But marriage is not about me and mine; it’s about us and ours.
We will ask you to complete a budget in 
We made a major discovery early in our marriage. When it came to conflict, we could choose to “fight and argue,” or we could “pray and agree.” Disagreement is powerful, but agreement is even more powerful.
It astounds us to discover how many couples do not know why they are married. This is the question this chapter will probe—what is your mission together as a couple? For what reason(s) has God called you together into this union? Those who once were two have been called to move as one.
Prior to marriage, we spend hours communicating face to face and, when apart, by phone, text message, e-mail, and Facebook. We study one another and practice our listening skills to really hear each other’s hearts. We attempt to win the other through our attentiveness, our affirmation, our words of love, and our body language of acceptance. One couple told us communication was so easy and came so naturally to them that they could not understand what the big deal was about the subject of communication within marriage.
What happened? Were we faking it? Were we trying to expose only our good side? It was fun having our heads in the clouds and not needing to worry about all that could go wrong. Reality during engagement is different from reality during marriage, neither of which is necessarily good or bad. So, what’s the issue?
Healthy relationships bring happiness to our lives. They add fun, reduce stress, and decrease anxiety as we give love to and receive love from the people around us. The opposite is true of unhealthy relationships. They increase stress and anxiety in our lives. They bring broken hearts and spirits.
If we don’t maintain an awareness of our distinction from others (where one person ends and the other begins), we will be incapable of being who God has called us to be as a healthy individual. Instead, we will attempt to be who we think another desires us to become. If we do not set healthy boundaries for ourselves, we empower others to manipulate and control us to be who they selfishly want us to be (to meet their own personal needs) rather than who God has designed us to be. Oneness within a marriage relationship is never about control or manipulation but, rather, love that respects personal boundaries. Control and manipulation are about exercising power, while love is about freedom.
Steve Prokopchak 