For a long time Paula and I have been burdened with the state of marriage in America. Not only have we seen young married people walk away from their marriage covenant, but what’s alarming is seeing people after 25, 27, 30, 35, 38, even 40 years walking away from a marriage that had been hell for so many years but they had put a happy face on.
In response to that, we’ve written a Live Event program that will be launching on April 30th here in Nashville. You can check out the MakingMarriageFunAgain.com web site to find out information and sign up.
The point of this blog, though, is not to let you know about that Live Event, but to let you know about the name, “Making Marriage Fun Again.” As a writer and a copywriter, as a person who has ideas that he wants to communicate, help that he wants to offer, I’ve worked hard over the years at writing titles and copy for books and articles that create an essence of what I think people need.
“Making Marriage Fun Again” isn’t just a clever title. And when you write titles to communicate your brand, your offering, your service, your organization’s mission, you need to understand that “cutesy” is not that important. Communicating the essence of what you’re trying to do in the fewest words, is. Creating energy and movement is important. Let me give you an example of why each word was chosen.
The title begins with the word, “making.” Making is important because that’s what we do. That is our task on the earth. That is what God has put us here to do; not to endure, but to make something of ourselves, make something of our lives. And when two people come together in a covenant of marriage, they are making something new. They are commencing on a brand new, not just venture, but a brand new family. A new family is formed and it is not yet made; it is formed. And there is a big difference between forming a thing and making a thing. “Making” is really important. So when you get married, you understand that’s a brief amount of time – courtship, dating, or whatever. But the being married; that’s the years, and the decades. That’s the ups and the downs, the apartments, the houses, and the moving across country. It’s the children and sickness and illness and fights and making up, and anniversaries, and Christmases, and putting things together, and mowing yards, and hello’s and good-byes, and deaths and births. That’s the making of the thing.
And maybe “making” is the most important word in this title. It shows action and something to put your hands to. Paula and I meet so many people who have just given up on making anything of their marriages
and even their own lives. When you are in the “making” mode, creating, innovating, working, fashioning, forming, decorating, planting, growing, then you are about a good thing.
So let me just stop here in this blog post today and ask you, “What are you making of yourself? What are you making of your life, of your marriage, of your opportunities, of your education? What are you making of the advantages that you’ve been given? What are you making of the help that’s been offered?”
Remember, you have no control over what you confront in a 24-hour period. But you are ultimately in control of what you make of it. If you don’t like what you’ve made so far of your marriage, you can make a brand new start – today! It only takes one of you – the husband or the wife – to choose.
Remember, we call God our Maker. We are the made. We were made by a Creator, so therefore we are creative; we’ve been commissioned to use the abilities and the life that we’ve been given. So make something beautiful. Make something bold. Make something that will endure and last.