Before You Plan Your Wedding...plan Your Marriage

1 If Only We Had Known Above all else, guard your heart, for it is the wellspring of life. -- Proverbs 4:23 A couple of summers ago, Erin and I were asked to take part in a wedding ceremony of a young couple we had counseled. I was to bring the message. Leading up to their wedding, I kept thinking about how people don't often remember the preacher's message, and I really wanted their day to be memorable. So, I thought long and hard about what to say -- and then a brilliant idea hit. The only piece of information I needed was the type of flower the bride was going to have in her bouquet. Erin, acting as my spy, secretly discovered she was using calla lilies. During the ceremony I talked about the beauty of the calla lilies in the bride's bouquet, and then I held up a packet of seeds (although I know lilies grow from bulbs!). "Your marriage is like this packet of seeds," I explained to the couple and their many guests. "You need some very important elements in order to grow the seeds of your relationship into a beautiful marriage bouquet." Everything was going perfectly until I came to the last point -- spending twenty minutes per day meeting your spouse's needs. Keep in mind that I was using a gardening metaphor, so to make my point, I confidently stated, "Much like fertilizer helps calla lilies grow strong and healthy, if you want a healthy marriage, you need to spend at least twenty minutes each day fertilizing each other." The church roared with laughter. To make matters worse, I had no idea what was so funny. The metaphor had made so much sense in my head that I never looked at my words from any other perspective. I think the groom realized I was clueless, so he joked, "Can we get on with the 'I dos' so I can begin my twenty minutes of fertilizing my wife?" I could have died. At least I got my wish. No one will ever forget my message! On the drive home from the reception, Erin and I talked about how much premarital training this young man and his bride-to-be had received in the months leading up to their wedding. You couldn't talk to them for more than a few minutes before it became obvious how well they knew themselves, each other, the basic building blocks of a great marriage, and where they wanted to take this new union of theirs. Erin and I were awed. We couldn't help but think,If only we had known, before we got married, what they already know! What a difference it would have made! Oh, to have been in their shoes at the beginning! Now don't get us wrong; we have a great marriage today -- after fifteen years of trial and error, much of it very painful! So as we watched these two become husband and wife, we marveled at how much they had already been empowered to create a strong and vibrant marriage. They had clearly been given the knowledge and the skills and the personal awareness to begin their years together on a very high note. As we talked about how happy and confident the bride and groom looked as they strolled out of the sanctuary together, I said, "You know, I'm kind of envious of them. I wish we would have had that!" Of course, Erin nodded in enthusiastic agreement. Which leads us to this book. One of our major hopes is that by the time you finish absorbing the material to follow, you will be ready to stand excitedly on a platform, about to say your vows, armed with a high level of knowledge and skills and self-awareness. You simply don't need to go through everything we did in order to build a terrific marriage. In great measure, this book contains what Erin and I wish we knew back then and lays out what we would do differently if we could do it all over. Of course, we also did a lot of things right! We want to highlight those things, too. We also draw upon our years of counseling premarital couples, tap intoSmalley, Greg is the author of 'Before You Plan Your Wedding...plan Your Marriage ', published 2008 under ISBN 9781416543541 and ISBN 1416543546.