Avoid Divorce By Getting Good Godly Counsel

...    Before You Fall In Love.

It always breaks my heart when a couple decides to call it quits on their marriage. So much goes through my head: "Where did things go wrong? When did things go wrong? Can it be fixed? Is there hope? What about the families?.....????"

Married in 1967...5 kids...still together.

I am convinced that most divorces can be prevented maybe not during the marriage but before the wedding. Few people, young and old alike, will listen to reason, counsel, advice when they are "in love". Family and friends who are not part of the whirlwind romance are much better suited to speak wisdom into the choice of a life partner. Once the hormones start raging, reason goes out the door.

It is important to knit a safety net long before this happens. Some people prefer courtship rather than dating for this very reason. The process of courtship requires a lot of relationships to be pure and in tact and Godly. Most families in our day are in different stages of brokenness. Courtship will do for those who are less broken. For the rest there is the safety net.

A safety net is simply a few people, two or three, to whom a person gives permission to candidly speak into this area of their life. The intention is to listen and seriously consider the advice, observation and counsel. - These counselors would be people who has shown their desire for your best interest in the past, knows you well and are honorable without any self-interest in your choices; A pastor or spiritual leader, a parent or grandparent or other family member or a good lifelong friend.

It goes without saying that a lot of praying or even prayer and fasting, to seek the will of God in the matter, is needed as well. Marriage counsel before the wedding is in my opinion one of the best ways to avoid divorce. That is if it is the kind of counselor that would ask the tough questions. Who controls the money? Would there be children? Who and how do you discipline, educate and raise the kids? What is your religious convictions? How important are they? What are the family's traditions? What and how are they to be incorporated into the new family? What are the expectations, honest expectations, of each person from themselves, their partner and Gods in this proposed marriage? 

It seems to me that truely special care in choosing a spouse, a life partner should take at least the same consideration and effort that we invest into choosing a career. If we truely expect to be married only once in a lifetime, would we not do this with a bit more care?

You may say: "What is the big deal? Everyone is getting divorced and remarried these days" The problem is that we do not live for ourselves. No man is an island. Whether we acknowledge it or not, our lives are tightly intertwined with the lives of other people. Our acts and re-actions spill over into their lives. If it was not so, funerals would have been unnecessary.

When marriage ends in divorce, it hurts not only the husband and wife, it rips a hole in the children, the parents, the friends, the extended families. If we truely understood the injury of divorce we would mourn every divorce as a death, as a great loss and do our utmost to help marriages work. We would do our utmost to choose the right spouse and be the right spouse and once we are married to work at it for the rest of our lives.

That said ladies, I am in no way, shape or form propagating staying in an abusive marriage. Please, please, please get help, get out and yes do it even with the children...... and that is another talk for another day.

~ Pictures in this section by:
   Licia Photography - Nelspruit/Pretoria
      072 470-2947.