Beyond Ordinary: When a Good Marriage Just Isn't Good Enough by Justin Davis, Trisha Davis Read Free Book Online

surrounded the car, and I found myself ducking (as if one were going to hit me). As I ducked, a bird flew right into the windshield and splattered feathers, poop, and blood all over. Now Trisha cares deeply for animals. She cares even more deeply for animals that die a violent death right in front of us. She immediately started crying, and I panicked. In a moment of insanity, I simply turned on the windshield wipers. That only smeared what was on the windshield, and Trisha cried harder. I tried to use the windshield washer fluid to remove what residue I could, and we drove back to campus in silence.
    I bring this story up because it illustrates some moments we all face in our marriages: those moments when things beyond our control hit the windshields of our lives, when circumstances crash into our marriages and we don’t know what to do. In an effort to make our marriages better or to make our issues simply go away, we turn on the windshield wipers, which really only make matters worse. It is easy to offer simple solutions for marriages that attempt to merely wipe away what is visible.
    People are so much better at medicating symptoms of their marriage issues than at diagnosing and treating the root causes of marriage problems. We work on communicating better. We read books on anger management. We try to understand love languages. We listen to sermons on marriage. We go to marriage conferences. We try to wipe away all that is visibly wrong and fail to go deeper into the heart of our relationships. Yet we experience only incremental, inconsistent improvements in our marriages.
    And we do the same thing in our relationship with God. So often, we would rather have God medicate the pain in our hearts than do what it takes to bring complete healing to us. So we learn to live with spiritual illnesses while looking for ways to make ourselves feel better. We go to church. We sing the songs. We pray the prayers. We join small groups or Sunday school classes. We mayeven give regularly. Yet we experience only incremental, inconsistent growth in our relationship with God. We do a lot; we just change very little.
    The goal of this book is to move beyond the windshields of our marriages, to uncover the heart behind why the marriage you have maybe isn’t the marriage you desire. Trisha and I want to help you see that the marriage you have is perfectly positioned to become the marriage God has in mind.
    A lot of marriage resources focus on behavior modification. Communication. Anger management. Work/life balance. Money management. Improving your sex life. And we agree that these issues matter. It isn’t that they aren’t important issues to deal with, but most of the behaviors we struggle with are tied to broken parts of our hearts, and if we focus on the behaviors and not the root cause, we are not dealing with the issue, only smearing it around on the windshield. More information doesn’t guarantee heart transformation.
    We work really, really hard to improve our marriages by improving our behavior, and while these changes might last for a few weeks or a few months, we end up right back in the same rut. Even worse, we try really, really hard to improve our marriages by forcing our spouses to improve their behavior, and we end up frustrated and exhausted; and our spouses feel like they never do anything right.
    Those in ordinary marriages believe behavior modification will solve their problems, that spouses can behave their way to an improved marriage. But you can’t behave your way to an extraordinary marriage.
    God doesn’t want to improve your marriage; he wants to transform it. God doesn’t want to modify your behavior; he wants to change your heart. Extraordinary comes when you, as a husband or wife, invite God to change you .
    It is a dangerous prayer to pray— God, change me . You know why it’s dangerous? Because this is a prayer God will always answer.God longs to transform you. As much as you want to change your spouse,