Over the past few years Monika and I have been reconnecting with old friends. Old as in, we’ve known each other for over 20 years, and old as in, we’re not young any more and we can’t afford to mess around with our family life.
As part of this sweet effort to reconnect, we recently clicked well with 2 families. One is local, in Ohrid (our home town), and one is in Croatia.
In both cases, we’ve been talking to both the husbands and the wives, and we realized that in both situations the dynamics are very similar: tense, distant, in survival mode.
But we’ve not been meant to just survive through life and marriage. God intended marriage as a blessing, as an enjoyment, as a community of a man and a woman aiming at growing in Christ and growing closer to one another.
We’ve been working with both families to encourage and equip them to start having constructive conversations, to practice reflective listening, to practice personal responsibility, and to look mostly on how each individual can contribute and serve the other. It has been a challenge, as we’re trained from early age to deflect responsibility and pin blame at everyone and everything…except on ourselves.
It’s painful to see how people that fell in love with one another years ago, are now struggling with simply talking to each other. It seems that all the unintended hurts, all brushing comments, those bitter moments of swallowed pride just to avoid adding oil to fire…eventually all that piles up…and the dam bursts.
We continue meeting with these couples, any time we can afford to spend the time. But juggling with all the engagements we cary as business owners, time is at a premium.
We hope to start working through the Art of Marriage, a book that CRU Macedonia recently translated. It’s amazing how our entire education system takes 12 years of our lives, and yet it fails to train us for the two crucial roles in life: marriage and parenting. We’re here to change that, and enable couples to build a marriage that reflects proper devotion.
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