I'm currently reading...

Sacred Marriage by Gary Thomas.

I heard about it about 6 months ago and ordered it off Amazon. I started and stopped it for a few months, not really jumping into it until this week. And oh my goodness, it is so good. It's that kind of good where you have to kind of work to wrap your mind around what it's saying because it's not how you're used to thinking about something, but it's so worth the work because you want to develop that kind of thinking that the book is talking about.

If you haven't heard of it, the basic premise is "what if God designed marriage more to make us holy than to make us happy?".

Its the kind of book that I want to hurry up and finish so that I can read it over again and really get it. It's already all highlighted and marked up (because I seem to find it impossible to read a book like this without doing that) with so much good stuff.

I'm trying to let the idea that anything that happens in my marriage is an opportunity to grow spiritually, sink in. Happiness is not the ultimate goal, for when things are tough--whether it be a little argument or a marriage shattering decision, that is often when we have the biggest opportunity to grow in our relationship with God, which is the ultimate goal (and undoubtedly helps us to have a happy, healthy, long-lasting marriage).

And as this sinks in, I'm committed to making it actually play out in our lives.

The chapter I'm reading at the moment is on being a servant and serving one another within a marriage. It's a simple concept, but something I really needed to hear-when we're serving anyone, but in this case our spouse, we're imitating Jesus Christ, for he was the ultimate servant. (But this only counts if we're serving with a good spirit! :)) And trying to grow in likeness to Jesus Christ deepens our spirituality and relationship to God, which gives a much larger purpose to things like doing the dishes and laundry and cleaning the house than just doing housework. And when we're doing all these things, we're not only serving our spouse and imitating Christ, but we're also serving God. I tried to keep this in mind last night as I was doing the dishes after dinner.

There is so much more I could say about this book because it's all swirling around in my head right now, but it's still all jumbeled up together as I try to figure out how to make this a reality in my life and really get that the larger purpose to my marriage may just be to help Landon and I deepend our relationship with God and to show God to the world.

And plus, Gary Thomas says it SO much better than I do. Read the book. :)