Awhile ago, it seemed like I was bumping into articles about marriage and family all over (i.e., in my feedreader and articles 'shared' via Facebook).
Last spring, I wrote about how I generally disagree with the theory that the first year of marriage has to be hard.Over on Her.meneutics, there's a good article that echoes my thoughts about how every stage of marriage can and is good, even while it's healthy not to romanticize the challenge of learning how to love someone well. I especially appreciated the title: Just you wait - the idea that those "in the know" (people who have been married for awhile) should warn you only about the challenges of marriage without also sharing the wonders of it.
A good balance to the frustration of making marriage too hard is the problem of making marriage and family too much of an ideal. Taking pastoral counselling courses at Seminary had prepared me for the fact that marriage would have its challenges - and so when I got married that made me more able to deal with the hard things and more able to delight in the great things. Yet, nothing has really helped me handle how many Christians make family and marriage to be a type of unspoken ultimate goal for every Christian women. Two articles that I read address this really well: http://loturner.com/get-married-this-year-and-other-lies/ and http://thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/tgc/2012/08/28/worshiping-at-the-altar-of-family/.
Finding a good perspective on marriage and family, despite all the good Christians who are married, can often be hard. As the articles point out, there just seems to be so many ways that those of us who are married fall into the trap of thinking that we know what's best - either for other marrieds or non-marrieds :(
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