Married couples come to a Marriage Encounter Weekend looking for answers; hopefully, they “find” each other, in Christ, in a more profound and more open-hearted way.

Answers to the struggles they’re having in their marriages are difficult to find, and who do you ask, where do you find the solutions that are wise and tried and true? Do you spend $150/hour on a Christian Couples Therapist? Or perhaps you seek out your Pastor for marital counselling. All good options, and yet let’s try to apply the idea of Occam’s razor, which says that we need to look for the most straightforward answers first.

So as Believers, we are commanded to seek and to ask God (Matthew 7:7), so we go together to Jesus, and we go individually, and we invite others whom we trust to pray for us. If we don’t have 2-way communication with God personally, then we can seek the guidance of others who
know how to “hear God’s voice,” and they show us how. We ask Holy Spirit to reveal Himself to us, to fill us and to comfort and lead us into all truth.

We ask God to lead us and give us wisdom as we seek out people who have good Christian marriages that we know via our spiritual family and Christian community at large. Maybe we have been through a Marriage Encounter (ME) Weekend Retreat and can take advantage of
meeting with one of the couples who led the Weekend, or they can put us in touch with a group of ME couples who meet in your locale. These are excellent resources. Godly marriages, I like to say, aren’t so much developed via those who teach about this, more from being with mature couples who ”transfer” or impart their maturity to us. Joy-filled relationships are so vital as we strive to grow and mature emotionally. (Next blog, I’ll share about building love-bonded relationships that overcome fear-bonded contact with others, especially with loved-ones.

Marriage mentoring (and finding those that can help) is about a few different types of couples to seek:
– one example is those rare individuals who have Elder-level emotional maturity (can stay themselves under the extremes of life) imparting their joy and love to us couples who are ”downstream” from them, and we need not only their wisdom and experience, we need to catch their maturity!
– Another type is those who are in the same level of the stream with us, yet have the maturity that we seek (which we intuit from our experiences with them). They may need help in areas we can support them in (because of our strengths). There can sometimes be that mutual support or we can gain maturity from them in the area of their strength and then find another couple for other areas.

Figuring your levels of emotional maturity and the tasks of development that you need to work on to further develop is critical! I recommend this resource which you can get on Amazon Kindle ebook for $10 CDN. https://www.amazon.ca/Living-Heart-Jesus-Gave-You-ebook

This book contains a priceless set of charts that that will set you on a road of uncovering where you are ”stuck” emotionally and where and how you need to develop emotionally. 

May you travel well and with others, in Jesus!