Just as there are seasons of life, there are seasons in marriage. As the anticipation of the wedding day and the excitement of starting a new life together fade, it can be shockingly easy to settle into a rhythm and begin to drift apart. You’ve likely set a course towards the future that you want to build together. But without regular check-ins to ensure you’re on track, your relationship, and therefore marriage, can soon begin to drift into waters you never imagined.
Maybe it’s the chaos of raising young kids or the pressures of life that leave you and your spouse feeling disconnected. Or after years of building a career and managing a home and its responsibilities, you look at your spouse and wonder what they are thinking or feeling, but you never have the time necessary to explore this together. And so, you just keep moving forward, trusting in your shared love and your commitment at the altar to sustain you.
As time goes by, you find yourself unsure of what to talk about or maybe you have frequent arguments that never see a conclusion. The heart-flutter feelings have long passed as you settle into a routine that revolves around your work calendar or the school year and holidays. You can’t remember the last time date night wasn’t takeout in front of the TV. The idea of vacation sounds good, but you can’t find the time to plan logistics. You know God’s design for marriage, but wonder how much your marriage reflects that original design. As the years stretch on, busy schedules take the place of meaningful connection until you’re left wondering how you ended up on a counselor’s couch after fifteen years of marriage. Does any of this resonate with you?
Here at College Park, we value healthy, thriving marriages that honor and glorify God. We want to provide the space for you to grow closer to your spouse and for your marriage to grow closer to God. The reality is that our surrounding culture, our own bent toward selfishness, and the devil himself all conspire to undermine God’s good design for marriage. Without intentional time as husband and wife to discuss important topics and plan for the future, drifting becomes the defining characteristic of your marriage. We want to help you combat that drift.
Grace Marriage can help. While the church often emphasizes premarital counseling and marriage crisis care, most marriages in the church are somewhere in between. By regularly giving time and attention to the health of your marriage, you can begin to grow closer together and your marriage will begin to resemble more of God’s original design.
At the four quarterly Grace Marriage classes, you will hear guided teaching from facilitators and have discussion time with other couples. These classes offer the unique opportunity to be alone with your spouse to talk through what you just heard in the teaching, and the workbook provides discussion topics that might not come up on a regular date night.
One couple who attended Grace Marriage shared, “It’s a small investment compared to the weight of the issue and how important it is to get marriage right because it reflects God’s relationship with us and it’s our primary witness as married couples to the world and to our children. And so, it’s a treasure in heaven to store up.” One of the aspects they valued most was the opportunity to “take stock of where [our] marriage is and redirect it towards what the Lord would have for it.”
They also shared how God can use this time to grow your marriage both individually and as a couple and reveal things that might need to change. “Going through this can bring [things] to the light but in a very loving and grace filled way. So, there is a lot of forgiveness that is baked into it,” they reflected.
This is the atmosphere that Grace Marriage provides: a place for spouses to be open and transparent even in the busyness and pressures of life. Will you join us for Grace Marriage?
