James 4: 1-3 What causes fights and quarrels among you? Don’t they come from your desires that battle within you? You desire but do not have, so you kill. You covet but you cannot get what you want, so you quarrel and fight. You do not have because you do not ask God.

Married people are simply that. People who are married. People. Sinful, selfish, compassionate, kind, crazy and all the other adjectives we can come up with. When we take a good look at ourselves we see we fall short and when we use that same gaze on our spouse we see that they fall short as well. So what of it? What do we do? We look to God.

In the midst of our shortcomings He makes a way for us. God works in us to will and to act according to his good purposes. Philippians 2:13 Through our relationship with Jesus we see there is opportunity for more for our marriages. Maybe we did not see it modeled growing up and maybe the idea of a vibrant, fun, fulfilling marriage is foreign to us but God gives us His best and his definition of love is flawless. It is us, people, who tend to distort it. We have to trust that God’s ways are truly higher than our ways and when he asks us to serve our spouse and consider others better than ourselves, he is giving us an opportunity to live his best in our marriage. After all, He is good and Holy, He knows all.

The heart of the issue is making a choice to trust God’s plan for our marriage above our own plan and above our own emotions, wants and desires. “We need counseling,” you say? “we need to learn how to communicate better,” you say? Maybe. But there's more to it. When I got my masters in marriage and family therapy the majority of couples I counseled didn’t need counseling. They needed a heart transformation. They needed to decide if they wanted to be in their marriage. Once that decision is settled our creativity and our focus is on what it takes to make the marriage work. We operate with grace and compassion rather than judgment and a critical eye. Until our heart is focused on restoration and fighting for our marriage nothing will change. We can take as many classes on communication as our schedule permits and we can go to as much counseling as we can afford but when we haven’t gotten to the heart of the issue, we become saturated in information that does not have the power to transform our marriage. That’s when we are often left worse than we started. Hopeless.

We must get to the heart of the issue and often times the heart of it (the root) is tangled up deep down inside of us. It’s masked in hurt and deception, sometimes even hidden from our own awareness. God sees. He knows and he is waiting for us to ask Him. To reach out to him to restore what’s been lost, to allow Him to redeem what’s been abused. Are you willing to begin again and be vulnerable again, long enough to get to the heart of the issue? You may just find that marriage that was dead to you, come back to life as you do.