He has plans for you greater than you could hope to comprehend. He wants to do things in and through your relationship, things that are eternal and lasting and supernatural. The larger story is that God has a magnificent plan for your marriage a story much greater than you could possibly imagine. Are they seeing the smaller story or the larger story? Jimmy Evans, in one of his Marriage Builder articles wrote, “The difference between a failing marriage and a successful marriage is the perspective toward it held by the husband and wife. It’s the way you respond to them or handle them. It’s the way you frame them in your mind. So the problem with your relationship is not the challenges you face. The first thing to do though is recognize that the challenges you have are the result of your fallen nature - you and your spouse. The same God who supernaturally brought you two together and joined you in the Covenant of marriage wants to help you turn your marriage into the love affair He wants it to be. We have the backing of heaven and the power of the Holy Spirit. I say that because a Believer is not a failure. You can start to operate at a higher level of love and affection.Īnd that’s especially true, if you’ve received God’s forgiveness in your life and know Him as your Lord and Master. No matter how dysfunctional your marriage may seem at the moment how distant you feel from your spouse or how much pain you've endured, you can decide today to change course.

The lesson is simply that: It is never too late to choice a new path to make your marriage work better or to turn a new page and start over. One of the points I often try to impress upon the people I speak with, is a lesson I learnt earlier in my marriage. To hear more from Zarrow, check out our Mentoring Moments podcast (Women at Work #11) here.The more I speak to couples about the challenges of married life, the more I am convinced that no marriage is unredeemable if couples are willing to drop the pride and put on a cloak of humility. We just have to grant ourselves (and each other) the room to let go of the things that really don’t work and embrace the mandate to try again. We get to be simultaneously buoyed by our experience and freed from the sand traps that were most likely getting too much of our attention. When we restart, we get the chance to shift our focus back to the big picture. It’s because the real opportunity is in what we do after we let go. And it’s not just because we want to avoid getting stuck in the sunk-cost fallacy. It’s in holding on too tightly to the poor product, with the mistaken notion that the best use of our energy is to work harder at making it better. The failure, though, isn’t in producing a weak piece of work. When it doesn’t go well, deciding to start over-rather than refining what we’ve just made-can feel like an admission of failure. Making something from nothing is never easy. That’s when it’s time to move on-often by going back to the start. There are moments, though, where the self-examination doesn’t continue to move us forward. They help us figure out what went wrong so that we can get it right the next time. That’s when self-assessments and post-mortems are essential. Other times, even when we’ve given it our best shot, we don’t deliver as well as we had hoped. Sometimes we get to be proud of the effort and the result. Then we execute the plan, navigating a million variables along the way. We prepare and plan, whether it’s over days or years. It’s a lesson that has come to me over and over as I have produced all kinds of things: websites, international conferences, teaching a class and hosting a radio show. What I didn’t realize (that Chris did) was that changing a piece here or a part there, wasn’t going to fix it. I got so lost in those components that I stopped seeing it as a whole. The first time, I was too busy focusing on all the details-the composition, the brush work and whether it actually looked like me. In doing it again, I found the cohesion that was missing before. Three hours later, I had produced the best piece I had made in the two years I had worked with her. Once I calmed down, I splashed some water on my face, took a deep breath and returned to class to start again. So I made a beeline to the ladies room and lost it in a graffiti-covered stall. I could feel myself about to burst into tears. Why didn’t she stop me and correct me along the way? Why did she want me to do again what had clearly been a failure? And why did she do this in front of the entire class? I was too rattled to ask her any of this.

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