Marriage

A while back I wrote about my trip to California. As an assignment to the conference I attended back then I was given a book to read called Sacred Marriage, by Gary Thomas. Despite the fact that I am not married, the book has been a very helpful read. I am passionate about helping people have fulfilling marriages and I hope some day to be married myself. I finished the book last night. As I flipped back through the pages I jotted down some quotes from the book. You’ve probably come across those books that begin each chapter with a famous quote or some kind of power phrase. I generally disregard them or skim over them quickly jumping to the content of the chapter. This time it was different. Thomas placed well researched power quotes that accurately described what he wanted to communicate in his chapter. Here are some of the memorable quotes. Feel free to share them with your spouse or your married friends:

Marriage is a long conversation, therefore we should seek to marry a friend (104).

Couples who give up on their marriage after only three years are like people who begin climbing the mountain and give up partway through, without ever reaching the top to enjoy the sights.

By all means marry. If you get a good wife, you’ll become happy. If you get a bad one, you’ll become a philosopher. –Socrates (11).

Marriage is the merciless revealer, the great white searchlight turned on the darkest places of human nature – Katherine Anne Porter (27).

Marriage requires a radical commitment to love our spouses as they are, while longing for them to become what they are not yet. Every marriage moves either toward enhancing one another’s glory or toward degrading each other –Dan Allender and Tremper Longman III (39).

If you treat a man as he is, he will stay as he is. But if you treat him as if he were what he ought to be and could be, he will become the bigger and better man –Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (39).

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars –Oscar Wilde (53).

We must never be naïve enough to think of marriage as a safe harbor from the Fall…. The deepest struggles of life will occur in the most primary relationship affected by the Fall: marriage –Dan Allender and Tremper Longman III (53).

Marriage is the operation by which a woman’s vanity and a man’s egotism are extracted without anesthetic –Helen Rowland (89).

One was never married, and that’s his hell; another is, and that’s his plague –Robert Burton—English Clergyman (127).

They dream in courtship, but in wedlock wake –Alexander Pope (127).

Because marriage, more than any other relationship, reflects God’s involvement with us and bears more potential to draw our hearts to heaven, it can more readily give us a taste of hell –Dan Allender and Tremper Longman III (127).

Merely being faithful to your spouse is quite a testimony in this society. But as you go beyond that to communicate love for your spouse in a consistent, creative, and uninhibited way, the world can’t help but notice. God will be honored –Gary and Betsy Ricucci (153).

Gifts of a loving Creator, our bodies are not barriers to grace. If we could truly accept this, then we would know God even in the ambiguous delights of our sexuality –Evelyn and James Whitehead (199).

We find God in the contact of our bodies, not just in the longing of our souls – Evelyn and James Whitehead (199).

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