By Kim Hawkins
A house is
not a home without family. What’s the point of a big spread of food, a beautifully
adorned tree with perfectly wrapped presents, without a family?
Now imagine
the home is not broken by divorce, but the marriage is so strained that the husband
and wife, if they speak to each other at all, are bitter, mean, and
resentful in all action, tone, and speech while leaving a trail of hurting
hearts.
There’s been
so much hard work and effort to make the home ready for a beautiful holiday and
many, mostly un-needed gifts (and all too often charged to a credit card) that
are under the tree.
The time,
energy, and expense that is already being spent on numbing oneself or trying to
fill the void could be spent to save the marriage.
I would venture to guess that any child from a
home life that’s suffering would not only understand but welcome much less for
the holidays in exchange for his/her parents getting professional help.
If your marriage is suffering, even
in the least, please read the article in the above link.
Here’s an
excerpt:
“Social scientists first
started studying marriages by observing them in action in the 1970s in response to a crisis: Married couples
were divorcing at unprecedented rates. Worried about the impact these divorces
would have on the children of the broken marriages, psychologists decided to
cast their scientific net on couples, bringing them into the lab to observe
them and determine what the ingredients of a healthy, lasting relationship
were.
Was each unhappy family unhappy in its own way, as
Tolstoy claimed, or did the
miserable marriages all share something toxic in common?”
"Love does not delight in evil but rejoices in truth. It always protects, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails."
1 Corinthians 13:6-8
