Happy 2016 everyone.  It was a great break and opportunity, to reflect, recharge, and refocus.  As I was going through what to post this week, I had a couple things kind of pop up and smack me in the face, leading me to this post.

To me Guarding your marriage, and guarding your loved one, is as DJ Khaled would put it, A Key to Success.

I won’t post the image here, but I saw a Facebook post last week that depicted the story line of an affair using stick people.  Everything started out great, you got married you had kids, one person went to work, one stayed home, a friend comes over for coffee, one thing leads to another, and shortly after there are divorce papers, child support and additional house payments.  All because someone else was there to listen and make the other person feel special.

It is your job in your marriage to make you spouse feel wanted, feel special, to feel appreciated.  If you are having problems at home, don’t talk to someone at work about the issues that isn’t your gender.  Problems and “friends” of the opposite sex, will cause you 99 more problems.  If your having problems, Facebook, Twitter, (Other social media site here), is not the place to air your dirty laundry.  This just opens the door for someone to come in and be the sympathy card.  Cheating and affairs don’t always start physical.  Guys, we unknowingly flirt, ladies you will unknowingly flirt.  No I’m not saying that you can never talk to a person of not your gender, but be careful your vocabulary.  Be careful of your body language.  Be cautious of your time.

Guard your words, your actions, and your time.  Your words of encouragement should be for your spouse first.  Your actions, you helping out, should be for your spouse first.  Your time, make sure your spouse, and your family come first.  Your marriage is sacred.  If you aren’t paying attention to your spouse and holding each other accountable for all of their actions, you are not guarding your marriage.

You have to talk and communicate with each other.  You also need to be sure that your not keeping things bottled up inside waiting on them to ask you.  Yes, “We need to talk…” is scary as anything, but without facing reality, you will never have a successful and vivbrant marriage.  If there is one person in the world that you can be truly real with, be your honest to goodness real self with, it is your spouse.  Walls should be around your marriage not through it.

Your marriage is a living thing, it is the two of you.  If you don’t take care of it, if you don’t nurture your relationship with each other, of course it’s going to die.  We have to guard against complacency and the myth of that could never happen to us.  We just entered a new year 4 days ago, do you remember what you were doing this time last year?  Do you remember what you did together last week?

As we get moving into this new year, I want to challenge all of you, to not worry about your resolutions, don’t worry about losing the 20+ pounds, don’t worry about stuff.  Focus on making each day the best day of your marriage.  Focus on being fully involved in each others lives.  Guard against the things that take your focus off of each other.  Guard against complacency.  Guard against any thing else that can and will attack your happy life together.  There is nothing that you can’t get through together, as long as you stand strong and stand guard together.