4 WriteStuff

There was something God put on my heart yesterday, that I was missing in my post… today, during my prayer walk, He reminded me…

As you know, I am visual… and the picture God put before me was a plate of food…

We like what we were raised on. Often that is not healthy, but it’s what we like. Changing that to healthy, requires practice.

I was reminded of that recently, when I went to a fast food restaurant that used to be my “goto place,” I ordered my old favorite, and threw it away. I have been eating health food, and I found that it just didn’t taste as good as I remembered.

That application applies to SO many areas of life, but today it was a visual for love.

As humans, we have such a warped sense of LOVE. Think about it, we learn love from our parents, who learned it from their parents, etc. If there is ANY dysfunction in the generations, we pass at least a bit of that along.

I was watching one of those crime dramas, and it showed a child, damaged by his/her parents faulty parenting. As parents, none of us is perfect.No matter how hard we try, there is undoubtedly a bit of ineffective parenting we pass along. I pray OFTEN that any poor traits passed along is healed by the Great Physician… However, as adult children, we are responsible to be proactive in seeking healing from any family dysfunction so that we don’t pass it along to our children… a cycle only ends when one generation refuses to stay on the merry-go-round.

If you think about it, if/when we learn an unhealthy way to love, that is what we crave. Often the word love is thrown around casually without the actions to back it up. We often desire or lust for something/someone… that is not love. True Love requires that we invest our heart, ourself, our time… a great love requires that we invest heavily in praying for our spouse and yes, that we pray for hearts to love and respect them like Jesus would have us love and respect them. Sometimes we come home to a mess and love is not the word that comes to mind. Love is a verb, it must be an action EVEN WHEN WE DON’T FEEL IT! Yes, actions speak louder than words… and the level of love and respect we show, even when we disagree, shows the depth of our love.

If you came from a family where love was conditional and only based on good behavior, that is an unnatural concept. BUT, unnatural does not always mean unhealthy when it comes to actions. We often need to learn a DIFFERENT way to love… a way to compromise, to be responsible to each other and not just self-serving.

Our children will learn what marriage looks like from our marriage. If we model a good one, that will be the standard they will consider normal – if we model a self-serving one, that will be the standard they consider normal. Imagine how much more productive their marriage will be if they have a good model rather than working to having to redefine normal.

The good news is that the Bible already defines a healthy marriage, and we don’t have to look far to find out what great looks like. The bad news is, that it takes work… but it IS worth it!