"The family that prays together stays together." The old adage is more accurate than we realized. Multiple US surveys reveal that although the divorce rate for Christians is about the same as those outside the church, Christian couples that pray together have a divorce rate of less than one percent! In fact, it is the [...]
Childhood isn’t stress-free. Kids take tests, learn new information, change schools, change neighborhoods, get sick, get braces, encounter bullies, make new friends and occasionally get hurt by those friends. What helps kids emotionally navigate these kinds of challenges is resilience. The word resilience comes from the Latin verb – resilire – “to jump back.” In [...]
Marital drift happens even to the best of marriages. Though once deeply in love, busyness, the demands of work and family, and unresolved conflict can turn a couple into roommates. Fortunately, steps can be taken to prevent drift and put you relationship back into synch. Identifying drift is the first step then choosing to do something [...]
“Since we have such a huge crowd of men of faith watching us from the grandstands, let us strip off anything that slows us down or holds us back, and especially those sins that wrap themselves so tightly around our feet and trip us up; and let us run with patience the particular race that [...]
By the age of four it’s common for children to already be carrying emotional pain. By age eight, many have already found an escape behavior. On average, it takes fifteen years from the first involvement in an escape behavior to when that person hits bottom (i.e., powerless over the behavior; lacking the ability to stop.) Emotional pain [...]
What is self-control? Self-control is the ability to stop and think before acting. Self-control leads to good choices, which are the building blocks of self-esteem. NOTE: The determining factor of success is self-control, not self-esteem. Why is self-control important? Self-control gives your child a much better chance of making a good choice in a given [...]
When you’re having a disagreement with your spouse, you have two choices: You can respond or react. Reacting is a reflexive, defense mechanism that kicks in to protect our ego. We react because we sense that we are being misunderstood, dissed, criticized, corrected, or attacked. Reactions are typically impulsive (i.e., “shoot from the hip”) and [...]
It has been called by a variety of terms, such as "living together", "shacking up", "cohabitation,” "serial monogamy,” and "living in sin." By definition, cohabitation occurs when two unmarried people of the opposite sex live together before marriage. It is a halfway house, of sorts, for people who do not want the degree of personal [...]
Marital success or failure can now be predicted before the wedding day with 81 percent accuracy. The following is a seven-point checklist for preventing faulty mate selection. The decision to get married is made too quickly. It is a fact that choosing a mate for life is much more complex than the movies make it out to [...]
It’s getting harder by the day distinguishing Christians for non-Christians. This is particularly true in the area of divorce. Statistically, our failure rate for marriage is not significantly different from those outside of the faith. As a Christian counselor, nothing disturbs me more than to see a couple deliberately throw in the towel with little or no attempt [...]
