What if your vision of marriage is shortsighted?  What if the end goal of the marriage relationship is better than you have imagined?  What if there is more to marriage than you anticipated? In this simple illustration, we’ll show you how God intends for marriage to be more than you could have imagined.

     Sometimes people that come for premarital counseling or meet us for the first time think we are faking our marriage relationship.  They don’t think it is attainable. How do I know this? We know because people have come to us after getting to know us and they tell us they thought we were fake in the beginning, but after hanging out with us and watching us interact, they have come to realize we are genuine and our relationship is as it appears.  Once again, we don’t have it all together. Kim and I have a sin nature like everyone else. It should also be said that we both believe without Christ in our marriage, that we would be divorced.

Marriage can be better than you think.  

     Here’s an illustration that will help you understand what I am talking about.  The Bible uses the illustration of being yoked together to illustrate what a marriage should be like (2 Corinthians 6:14).  I think it’s easy for us to read this and not really appreciate its meaning. Have you ever done something that you thought would be ordinary or even maybe mundane only to have the experience change your life in a dramatic way?  This happens to me from time to time. I think that always being in the learning mode contributes to the good that I learn.   

     I once went to a county fair and decided to watch the horse pulls since I’d never seen them before.  I noted that the horses weren’t whipped or mishandled – in fact, it was quite the opposite. There are strict rules in place so that doesn’t happen.  Also, I was surprised that when it came time to pull, the horses took on a whole new countenance and strutted to the position as if it was the highlight of their life.  They were flexing their muscles in anticipation of doing their best. Somehow they knew they were created to pull a heavy load and it is so clear that they really wanted to do this and were enjoying themselves.  

     I found myself sitting by a man who had just retired from horse pulling.  He was as colorful as he was knowledgeable about the subject. He was about as country as someone could be, wearing a pair of bibbed overalls and a baseball cap with some feed company logo.  He was so friendly and informative and I learned so much from him – he not only knew about the sport, but he also knew many of the participants pulling their horses. He explained that the way horse pulling works is that there are two horses hitched together into a team.  Each team gets a chance to pull the weighted sled 14 feet. The teams that do so graduate to the next round where they add more weight to the sled in a process of elimination. The team that can pull the most wins. 

      One team’s performance and this man’s comment led me to a learning experience that I will never forget.  The team started trying to pull the sled and did very poorly. One of the horses really strained and the other didn’t pull much at all.  It was obvious that it was a poor showing and consequently, the team failed to pull the weighted sled. The man next to me said, “That was a perfect team.”  I couldn’t understand what he meant because the results were so bad. I thought a perfect team would pull the load. He waited (like old men do) for me to ask what he meant.  When I did he said, “Yep, that was a perfect team. One horse wanted to pull and the other one wanted to let him.” It was a golden moment how his humor made something that was a failure sound like a win.  The reason I remember it so well is that I applied this illustration to a marriage in which two people have to pull together.  

But this story gets better! 

    The man told me that a 2,000 pound draft horse can pull about 8,000 pounds.  That’s four tons! He then said that two draft horses pulling together cannot pull twice as much as one (16,000 pounds).  It gets better – they can actually pull three times as much as one. The two draft horses that can each pull 8,000 pounds alone can pull 24,000 pounds working together.  I found this interesting and brings new meaning to pulling together.  

But wait, this story gets better still!   

     The horses are teaching us a very clear lesson in teamwork, but they still have more to say.  If the two horses that are pulling have been trained to pull with one another, they can’t just pull three times as much working together as they can by themselves.  The two trained horses can actually pull 32,000 pounds, which is a load four times the load either of the horses could pull by themselves.

Okay, this is what the blog is all about.  

     If we decide to pull together and allow God, our creator, the creator of marriage and the ultimate teacher to train us, we can pull much more than it would seem.  If you read this blog and try to be good or try to be like Kim and me, then I have failed to get my point across. The goal of this blog is for each of us to allow the God of all creation – the one who came and lived among us, died for us, rose from the grave to save us from our sin and defeat death – to have such a victory in our marriage that we are awestruck by His goodness and people around us are awestruck too.  In learning God’s way to do marriage, I believe we can be amazed at what our marriage can become.