• core values
    Communication,  connection,  family,  Marriage

    Five Important Core Values in Marriage

    When my husband and I first sat down to construct our core values, we struggled a bit. Our ideas about what made a marriage really great differed somewhat. My core values were more emotionally derived while his were more concrete and very detailed. In the end, we had around eleven, but of those, five have proven to be a source of real satisfaction in our relationship. In order to really hone a core values list, you and your spouse have to take some time to figure out what is really important to you. It is really easy to fall into the trap of just writing a list of what you…

  • marriage
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    How to Build a Marriage: His Needs, Her Needs

    Sometimes the over-consumption of books can lead one to mistake knowledge for wisdom. This was surely the case for me when we decided to attend a home group on the topic of marriage at our church, Harvest Cathedral, in Macon, Georgia.  We attended the group on the strength of our fondness for our pastors, Steve and Debbie Sawyer, though without any high expectations. I remember asking a fellow professor once how his marriage was. It was an appropriate question in the context of our conversation. His response was disarmingly honest. He called it, “functional”. I was still in the throes of our honeymoon at the time so I remember feeling…