The Seasons of Marriage

Pushed to Acknowledge the Seasons of My Marriage

I’m from Ohio and we have the great joy of experiencing all four seasons of the year. I must be honest and say I loved the “winter season” more as a child. I didn’t mind the cold, snowy days to play in outside, but as I have grown older, winter has become the season I love the least. As an adult, I would much rather be outside enjoying nature in the warmth of the sunshine. Now a days, I look for any reason to find a way to leave the cold and go south to the warmth. That being said, my husband and I have taken a cruise the last two Januarys.

This time away allows me to reflect on many things in my life. I found it really beneficial to deeply look at every aspect of my life. I must confess the reason for Jeffrey and I taking the first cruise (January 2018) was to take time out of our busy life and start to be purposeful about our marriage. Little did I realize just how much God was going to use our time to penetrate deep places in my heart and life.

The natural starting point was to look at our marriage and the point we were at in our lives and then evaluate it. So we booked this specific cruise because it was going south to the warmth, offered faith based marriage sessions with Christian leaders and was full of fun activities. That part made Jeffrey more open and receptive to going!

God didn’t want us to just do the surface look and that became obvious from the very first day. He pushed us deeper. The word “purposeful” kept rising to the surface during our time with each other, time with the other couples and even my personal reflection times. This helped me face the major issue I didn’t want to deal with; our marriage was changing!

Ready or not, I could invest in to it and have a great marriage or let it keep moving forward with no real direction. If you know me, I’m a first born and desire to have goals established in my life, so, I dug in and took inventory of the marriage I had now and what kind of marriage I honestly wanted for the future. I stopped myself from being so focused on my children and just looked deeply at the two of us. As I compiled all the evidence and data, I could see we were getting ready to jump into a major transition in our lives and marriage. How we would come through would depend on our commitment to God and our marriage.

I know there may be many ways you can look at seasons within marriage. Some choose to see seasons of their marriage in either one of two way only; our marriage in a very micro (like we are getting along, we are more like roommates or our marriage is in a good place) or macro (newly married, young married, married with kids and so on) views. But I would like to challenge you to love both the macro and micro forms of seasons of your marriage.

We will look at both here as we move forward. I hope you will join us as we learn to love the seasons of our marriages. Start your inventory today. Notice what season you seem to be in. Are you at home with the kids? Are your kids grown and beginning their own lives? Are they leaving the nest for the first time? Are you anticipating the arrival of grandchildren? or are you yet to be married and working through a season of singleness? There is stuff for everyone when we focus in on both macro and micro level of recognizing seasons. Upon recognizing where we are we can then cooperate with the season at hand and anticipate the season to come.