~Appreciate Your Spouse~Buoyancy in Marriage~Consult Your Partner~
~Dream Together Part One ~Dream Together Part Two~Empower Your Spouse~
~Have Fun With Your Spouse~Give to One Another~Honor Each Other~

Be Intentional

A Conscious Choice – Matt’s Thoughts

Jim Collins wrote a business book called Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap … And Others Don’t (HarperBusiness, 2001). Good to Great shows that greatness is not primarily a function of circumstance; but largely a matter of conscious choice and discipline.

In a healthy marriage, both the husband and the wife are intentional about improving the health of their marriage.

If you wanted to get healthier physically by toning your muscles and improving your digestion, but continued to sit on the couch and eat junk, then your health will not improve. The same goes for your marriage relationship.

A plan must be made, action must be taken, accountability should be in place and a regular check-up/evaluation brings it full circle.

Following through with positive choices can help your marriage shift from good to great.

Meet George Jetson; Jane his wife. – Laura’s Thoughts

Our kids have a couple of Jetsons cartoon DVDs (remember this?!), which are always good for a chuckle. The head of the household, George Jetson, complains that while during a particularly “busy” day at work, he actually has to reach up to push his button an entire three times, if you can possibly imagine this exhausting type of assignment. His wife, Jane, is a homemaker. She punches the family’s dinner menu order into her dinner machine thingy, and tada – and out comes dinner. Clean up after dinner happens with the push of another button and when she needs to vacuum? Well there’s a button she can push for that too. Their lives are about as simple and easy as a life can be, with robots and machines doing all of their work. (And yet, good grief, they still complain about having to push so many buttons. Are people – or um, cartoon characters – never content? Yes, I suppose that’s another post for another day.)

I think most of us would prefer life to be as simple and easy as possible. We plan to grow up and meet the man/woman of our dreams. We get married with plans to live happily ever after – the end.

My question would be:  What part of your “plan to live happily ever after” actually contains a plan?

Like the Jetsons, we’d like to push the “happily ever after” button in life and sit back and let the happiness happen. But a healthy marriage – a marriage full of the joy God intended – doesn’t just happen. You must each be intentional about working to create and maintain a healthy marriage.

Stop sitting on the couch eating the junk food of an unhealthy marriage (selfishness, pride, bitterness, laziness). Stop trying to push the easy button in life, waiting for that happily ever after picture you have of a healthy marriage to just fall into your lap. Stop waiting for your spouse to step up to the plate while you continue to grow more and more discontent.

Your happily ever after begins when you become intentional about being what God calls you to be as a husband or a wife.

Ladies, we know you’re reading here more often than the guys. ;)  We’d love husbands to read this article as well. If you feel so inclined please send the link to your husbands, or if it’s easier, we’ve created a downloadable article for you to quickly print off and share. Healthy Marriage Tips  from A to Z – Be Intentional