WHY Did I Marry This Person?

There will come a season in every marriage when we ask ourselves, WHAT was I thinking?

The person we thought we grew to love, and married with hope and joy, is gone, replaced by...something. Something that, if we're honest, we can't say we even like, much less love.

This is past the "I don't like you but I still love you" stage.

This is bad. Really, really bad.

Or at least it seems so.

The fact is that people change over time, and in marriage we only see changes that too place within the context and timeline of our relationship. We didn't see what happened prior to that, and what we may have been told can never accurately convey what really happened.

Your spouse is not only different from the person that arrived to share life with you - he or she was different then from what existed a few years before.

So what made you think that marriage was static?

And what made you think that it might have been you that changed?

We like to think that we're just like we were at eighteen or thirty or whatever, but obviously, we're not.

But we still'sort of' think we are, because we have access to the continuum of events and growth that turned us into who we are today.

Maybe we've got insight and understanding, maybe we don't...but we still can see a chain of causality.

We may not be able to see that in our spouse.

But we have to trust that it's there, and we have to care, because regardless of the difficulty of the day...

Marriage is a promise.

For better.

And for worse.

And for standing in the gap to help make the worse...better.

By supporting the one we promised to love, and by changing ourselves.