So these are our Marriage Protectors or Gladiators. They look pretty fierce huh? These are our best friends from Canada who we plan a vacation with yearly or bi-yearly. And yes, we go on some sweet vacations together. We save up the whole year, we use airline points, and hotel points because being with THEM is JUST that IMPORTANT. It has actually become a non-negotiable to be with them yearly. Not just because we have found friends we truly love and adore, who love adventure, and an active lifestyle like we do, who will ride bikes up mountains that never end, and listen to my incessant complaining as we climb, who will play JUST DANCE with me in our room, and go to janky spas so we can save a couple bucks. These peopke ASK us the really hard questions about our marriage. The deep in the trenches, you-don't-want-to-answer-all-the-time questions. And these are the people that don't let us off the hook, EVER. God has truly blessed us with a couple we love doing life with. But more importantly who have committed to protect our marriage no matter what. These are the people who if we had an issue would stop EVERYTHING and come the thousands of miles to be with us, to cry with us, to speak truth to us, to love us beyond measure.
I encourage you to find your marriage protectors. Because marriage is HARD! It takes lots of work. And we need help making it work. We need people who will pray for us, who will commit to call us out, to ask us the hard questions, and to love us through it all. Those who will be intentional when we don't want to be.
Thank you Jenn and Sid for protecting our love and commitment first to our heavenly Father and then to each other.
Find people who you trust and who you get along with. It took a couple of years to build this bond with Jenn and Sid. But each time we are together we make our time intentional. We ask tough questions of our spouses and each other each day at dinner, sometimes we do breakfast and dinner. We all know going into this that we better be prepared to take off our masks and get real. Here are some of the questions we asked for this trip.
http://www.rd.com/advice/relationships/20-questions-every-married-couple-should-ask/2/