Written in Iron Ink: Tending Marriage

Recently I was reading a book that cited this staggering statistic:

Couples, on average, spend a total of twelve minutes a week in meaningful conversation.

12 minutes

There aren’t enough emojis with bulging surprise eyes in the world for me to put in the space after I share this stat.

12 minutes may be skewed and you may be different.

However, it’s time to care about marriage, not just our own, but one another’s.

For too long we have existed on privacy island and it’s not working. We needone another. Your marriage, your neighbor’s marriage, my marriage needs you to care. We need accountability, encouragement, reality checks, free babysitting, someone to laugh with, someone to tell you when it’s time to apologize, someone to hug you and send you back in.

We are our best married selves, when we tend in this life.

We were meant to tend our own marriages but also to tend one another’s.

Our God tends to us. He came to earth for us. His Spirit resides in us. The Word is open to us. A God who tends does not leave us to our own devices. He gives us unique community far and wide to be real with, to open our hearts to, and to cheer on. Because our God tends, we can tend.

In today’s podcast, join in a fun and feisty chat about tending, with myself and Leah Heffner from Life Around the Coffee Cup. She doesn’t have easy answers, which I think we all appreciate. She does have loads of usable ideas and resources to keep the conversation going.

This podcast is more than twelve minutes…because we can spend more than twelve minutes on marriage today. We can do it!

There isn’t a checklist to relationships.

There isn’t an instruction manual for our spouse.

There isn’t a do-it-yourself guide for helping your friend love when it’s hard and when to tighten the boundary lines.

There is Jesus. There is the Word. There is the Church, community, and connection.

Let us tend…together.

Share ideas! How do you tend in your marriage or help tend a marriage around you?

PS- the book I was reading was What the Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast