PREVENTIVE MAINTENANCE

Most of the things we use in life require preventive maintenance if they are to continue to operate smoothly. My home requires painting every five to seven years, my automobile has a list of items for checking and changing every 7,500 miles, my lawn mower requires an oil change and a cleaning of the air filter after a certain number of hours of use, and even my physical health requires preventive maintenance. Recently I had a complete physical check up to make sure that I was not overlooking a health problem.

It is a good thing to do preventive maintenance on marriages also. Thirty years ago, my wife and I decided that we would do something every year that was intentionally designed to push our marriage in the direction of growth. Left alone, marriages will die, they do not grow. Marriages that grow do so because two people decide that their marriage will grow and then do things designed to make that growth happen.

Here are some of the things we have done across the years designed to push our marriage in the direction of growth: gotten therapy from a trained marriage counselor, enrolled in a marriage seminar, taken training to improve our communication skills, read a book together on marriage, and participated in a marriage support group.

This year we are going to do two things for our marriage and we would be thrilled if some of our readers would decide to accompany us on our journey:

We will be attending the International Marriage Enrichment Conference, July 8-10, in Fort Worth. During these two days, in addition to hearing wonderful inspirational speaker couples, we will choose four seminars from among 40 offerings on some aspect of marriage. This is a wonderful gathering of folk who are serious about having good marriages.

And then in the fall, we are going to focus on "The Affirming Marriage" while on a four-day Cruise to Cozumel - October 28 through November 1. As we would say in East Texas: "If you can’t light your fire on a cruise, you got wet kindlin’."

If you would like to have more information about either of the two above marriage events, go to my web site and contact me, or call me at my office, 903-938-0262.

If you have a good marriage, make sure that it stays good. Give it regular check ups and implement preventive maintenance rather than correcting break downs. An ounce of prevention is still worth more than a pound of cure. Remember! A marriage grows when two people are intentional about its growth!