Marriage - Are We Ready?
According to the late Pastor Tim Keller, the founder of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City, marriage is a long-term binding commitment created through a covenant. I like to look at it as two spiritually broken people coming together and attempting to create a perfect union. Unconsciously, we carry our past relational pain into our current relationships and as a result, we enter marriage emotionally damaged with the hopes that our partner will repair us and make us whole. Without God, we look to romance and relationships to satisfy our need for significance and we end up with a marriage that is spiritually disconnected. We impose our wish visions onto a relationship that can never be fulfilled by our partner. Women want to be loved, men want to be respected and, in our efforts to have those needs met, we allow fear to take over and manifest in anger, bitterness, anxiety & painful conflicts. In his book "This Momentary Marriage", Pastor John Piper reminds us that marriage is God's design, created to display His glory, not our own. Marriage is to make us holy, not happy.
Pre-Marital Counseling
Pre-marital counseling is like preventive medicine, a process taken for disease prevention. The word disease combines "dis" which means apart from or having a negative force and "ease" which means freedom from difficulty or hardship. Why do we take preventive measures to care for our body so that we can function at maximum capacity but we do not take such measures for our most precious relationship, our marriage?
Pastor Tim Keller states that all people come into marriage deeply flawed, selfish, and self-centered. Marriage brings us into conflict with our own self-centered nature and that of our partner. Being flawed individuals makes us fundamentally incompatible. Such variables create a recipe for conflict, destruction, and pain. The marital relationship tends to reveal what is inside of us, often times bringing out the worst in us, and rather than looking in the mirror, we blame our partner for our dysfunction. I am a SYMBIS (Saving Your Marriage Before It Starts) facilitator, utilizing the SYMBIS pre-marriage assessment tool, which is grounded in research, to flag and lower a couple's risk factors and optimize their combined strengths as a couple. It does this by assessing everything from psychological well-being to revealing how their combined personalities can be leveraged for optimal success. The SYMBIS Assessment is robust, personalized, and powerful.
Please note that the SYMBIS assessment is NOT a test in which a couple passes or fails, nor is it designed as a predictor of success or failure in marriage. It is a catalyst for personalized insight and exploring how a couple can leverage their unique combination of their personalities for lifelong love.
Why should I invest in SYMBIS?
SYMBIS is a research-based assessment that prepares you for the lifelong journey of marriage. This assessment can be utilized for those who are contemplating marriage, engaged and newly married. Marriage is a long-term investment of two imperfect people coming together to create a perfect union. Such a commitment is costly - financially, spiritually, mentally, and emotionally. The financial cost of marriage is significantly more in the long run than what I charge to help you both decide whether you are ready for such a commitment. How so?
The cost of a wedding can run thousands of dollars, and then add on the honeymoon, and the price tag is even higher. Current divorce rates range between 40-50% while 60% of second marriages fail. Participating in my pre-marital counseling services as a Certified SYMBIS Assessment Facilitator for 5 sessions (average) would cost you $875, a fraction of the cost of the average wedding or divorce. Still not sure? Unfamiliar with SYMBIS? Check out their website www.symbis.com to find out how valuable their marriage education program truly is.
Are you ready to set up your marriage for success? Contact me today at (719) 792-9237 or patricia@enduringheartscounseling.com to schedule a free 15-minute phone consultation for Pre-Marital Counseling in Colorado, New York, New Jersey, & Pennsylvania and let’s get you both prepared for the lifelong journey ahead.
