Today Is Valentine’s Day

This is it!  Today is the day when we male members of the species attempt to atone for all our unromantic foolishness throughout the rest of the year.  Today is our grand opportunity to demonstrate we are not all self seeking, couch hugging, chip munching, sports obsessing slugs without a solitary romantic cell in our over-fed and under-disciplined bodies.  Yes, Valentine’s Day was created for male cavemen to rebound romantically.

Even in a crummy economy, Americans are expected to spend $18.6 billion on Valentine’s Day this year.  $1.6 billion will be spent on candy, $1.9 billion on flowers but the top prize goes to jewelry which accounts for $4.4 billion.  That doesn’t really surprise me since my wife’s love language is receiving gifts and her dialect is jewelry!  She subscribes to the theory that you can never have too much jewelry!

While sweet chocolates, soft roses and lots of bling always seem to be lady pleasers, there are often bonus points for creativity.  When it is obvious that we have rubbed more than two brain cells together to make February 14 all about her, she will generally respond enthusiastically.

 On more than one occasion I have broken the mold on Valentine’s Day and planned something totally unexpected.  One year I surprised my wife by transforming our living room into an intimate dining experience complete with black cloth and special lighting along with a meal I prepped myself.  Another year, my wife was flying back in on Valentine’s Day from providing care for my mother who was recovering from a serious automobile accident.  Unknown to her, I packed a bag with her most elegant dress and secured a room at an upscale airport hotel for the evening.  I arrived early enough to decorate the room prior to our arrival.

A freak ice storm just about spelled doom for one Valentine’s Day surprise.  I had planned for months to convert our garage into a Hawaiian beach including sand and a palm tree but when it appeared my wife would not be able to go to work and permit me to put everything in place for our winter luau I thought I was as cooked as a kalua pig!  Fortunately, a kind neighbor with a four wheel drive was able to transport her to work and allow me to go to work; albeit in the warmer confines of our Florida Room.  With a little imagination and a lot of decorating we drifted away to Waikiki for a couple of hours despite six inches of ice just outside the room.

Am I some kind of romantic genius?  Far from it!  I was the most pathetic excuse for a romantic when we married.  I was so incredibly pitiful that I proposed at McDonalds!  True story and it wasn’t even a good proposal at McDonalds!

My point, men, is that any of us can learn the heart and art of romance!  These precious ladies God has graciously given to us deserve no less February 14 and 364 other days of the year as well!

 

This post originally appeared as a column in The Daily Press on Valentine's Day 2013.

The Couple that Prays Together

“The couple that prays together stays together.”  It’s a well know cliché to most of us but is it true?  Was it ever true?  Is it still true?  Can it ever be true?  The divorce rate in our nation has many of us wondering if anything can stem the tide of the tsunami of marital breakup in our land.  Our disillusionment is furthered by the numerous divorces within the churches across the fruited plain.  Are Christian couples just as much at risk for divorce as non-Christian couples?  Some would suggest so.

Three decades observing couples whose marriages withstand or fail to withstand the often fierce winds of contemporary culture has provided me some insight into the permanence and impermanence of marriage.  Like most of my readers I have witnessed the dissolution of the marriages of close friends; many of whom were actively involved in church.  Most of them continued to express strong, if not robust theological convictions throughout and after the divorce.  Quite a number of them continued to attend church with about the same frequency after the marriage ended as before.  Many report their spiritual activities to be similar to the time prior to the divorce.

I mention these spiritual and theological markers to highlight the fact that all of these things and more failed on occasion to preclude a divorce.  Each of these practices certainly increases the likelihood that a marriage will not end in divorce as an ever expanding body of evidence shows but in the end divorce manages to penetrate each of these veils.  (A number of these factors and studies are cited in a recent op/ed column by Glenn Stanton at http://www.bpnews.net/bpnews.asp?id=34656 ).

As a pastor for sometime in multiple states and cultures, I am surprised by two things when it comes to divorce.  I am shocked that more non-Christian marriages do not end in divorce and I am shocked even more that so many Christian marriages do end in divorce.  Perhaps the reader is asking if I am some sort of fatalist who does not believe that there is any reliable force to keep divorce away from your door.  Let me assure you I am no fatalist.  I am a man of faith.

In my years of experience, I have noted one predictor of marital permanence which significantly supersedes all others.  It is collapsed into a single line: “The couple that prays together stays together.”  I’m not omniscient and have done no elaborate longitudinal studies on the subject but I cannot never recall a couple who consistently prayed with each other coming to my office to discuss divorce.  While I have conducted no empirical studies on this subject others have.  (A recent study, “The Couple that Prays Together: Race and Ethnicity, Religion, and Relationship Quality among Working-Age Adults” can be found at http://www.virginia.edu/marriageproject/pdfs/coupleprays.pdf )

If, indeed, praying couples keep the preying claws of divorce away why then do so few Christian couples consistently pray together.  As a man who failed miserably in this regard for years, I think I can offer some clues.  For one most of us never saw it modeled growing up.  Two, men often feel more vulnerable when praying with their wife than they are accustomed to.  Poor scheduling and discipline would be a third problem.  And no doubt the sins we refuse to forfeit would be a major reason why we don’t pray alone or with our mate.

I can offer no wiser counsel to any couple than to begin to pray together if you do not and if you do, keep it up!

This article originally appeared in The Daily Press.