Does marriage really take a lot of work?

Marriage is a lot like a stock chart. It goes up, it goes down, it goes back up. The only thing you really care about is that it is trending in the right direction. People often say, oh, marriage takes a lot of work. It does not take work. It takes effort. You have to put time and energy and communication into the marriage. My wife and I sat the other night and talked for an hour, maybe more, just about our marriage, about what has been going on.

We are in a crazy season of life: a brand new baby who is six months old, a toddler, four other kids, homeschooling, and I am busy with the church. You have to talk. You have to communicate. You have to see eye to eye. You have to pray before you talk and ask God to bless your conversation. You have to pray together at the end of the day and pray for your marriage.

The number one thing is that we do not take our marriage for granted. Every day we pray for God to strengthen our marriage. The majority of the days of our life, we are praying at the end of the day that God would keep us together, that he would bless our marriage, that he would help us stay married. On top of that, we actively pray for the things we need to work on in the marriage, because there is always something.

There is a continual growth that happens in your life as a person, and a continual growth that happens in your marriage. But when your goal is Christ, you have the same goal. It is going to look different in your roles and in the things you do in the marriage, but the goal is fundamentally the same. Our goal individually is to become more like Christ, and since the two of us are knit together in marriage, our unified goal is to become more like Christ.