If you fail to cherish your wife in the difficult times, the damage done by those difficulties will be twice as bad and take three times as long to heal.

When you entered this relationship of marriage, you committed to keep moving toward your spouse. Any step back, any pause, any retreat, is an act of fraud. Learn to move toward the person God has given to you for the purpose of teaching you how to love.

Someone else's action can't dictate our response. God sent his Son into a world that hated him. If God had waited for the world to be worthy to receive him, his Son would never have come.

Yes, they think that. They regard the intention of loyalty to a partnership for mutual help, for the preservation of chastity, and for the transmission of life, as something lower than a storm of emotion.

None of us can live up to the law; all of us will break it. Marriage teaches us — indeed, it practically forces us — to learn to live by extending grace and forgiveness to people who have sinned against us. If I can learn to forgive and accept my imperfect spouse, I'll be well equipped to offer forgiveness outside my marriage. Forgiveness, I'm convinced, is so unnatural an act that it takes practice to perfect it.

But ask God to help you. Partner with him to build up and encourage the person with whom you've chosen to spend the rest of your life. Ask. "How can I love my spouse today like he [or she] has never been or ever will be loved?" When we focus on what we can do, it's amazing how little time we have left to become consumed by our disappointments.

If we take our faith seriously and make our way through a difficult marriage in pursuit of witnessing God's reconciling love for a sinful world, then a difficult marriage becomes part of our exercise to prepare us for heaven.

This is the reality of the human heart, the inevitability of two sinful people pledging to live together, with all their faults, for the rest of their lives.

What if your husband's faults are God's tools to shape you? What if the very thing that most bugs you about your man constitutes God's plan to teach you something new? Are you willing to accept that your marriage makeover — the process of moving a man — might begin with you?

I wouldn't be surprised if many marriages end in divorce largely because one or both partners are running from their own revealed weaknesses as much as they are running from something they can't tolerate in their spouse.

Honesty and love. — Frankness and truthfulness to myself and to the one I love. Truthful between two as one. You are part of my life, no pride, vanity, or anger involved.

Missionary zeal does not grow out of intellectual beliefs, nor out of theological arguments, but out of love. If I do not love a person I am not moved to help him by proofs that he is in need; if I do love him, I wait for no proof of a special need to urge me to help him.