Vital Question
What are we Trying to Save?

by Daniel J. Dick

If we want to save a marriage, we need to have a clear target in mind. We need to know what we mean, what we’re talking about, what we’re doing.

People often confuse the following three things, and then it is no wonder why there is so much difficulty hitting the target because nobody knows what the target is.

Wedding - the ceremony itself that begins the marriage.
Marriage - the bond - the glue - the promise - the covenant.
Relationship - how people interact - feelings, expectations, choices, behavior.

Our goal is to prevent or reverse or heal the breakdown of all three. When the above break down there is also a confusion in terms.

Breakdown - Loss of benevolent intentions, expectations, feelings, behavior.
Separation - Distancing between people to cope with breakdown
Divorce - Destroying a marriage to obtain permission to remarry.
Annulment - Declaring a wedding and subsequent marriage invalid to obtain permission to remarry. This is different from a divorce in that an annulment states that a real covenant never existed.

Something that May Help
You and Others

Suppose you were praying to God for your marriage and He were to ask you what you were doing to help protect marriages of others in your community, what would you say?

Would you wear a button or a shirt with a message if you knew it would save your marriage? Would you do it if you knew it would save someone else’s marriage but not yours?

Sometimes the reason our prayers are not answers is because God wants to accomplish something greater. Perhaps He wants to drive compassion and love into our hearts and get us to take a courageous stand for marriage in our community.

Perhaps allowing us to suffer what our community suffers is God’s way of helping us feel the effects of our complacency and indifference so we will learn to express love, so that we will learn to take a stand.

See the button to the left of this screen. This is an opportunity to take that stand. Do it as though your own family’s survival depends on it because it just may

Marriage Saving Concepts

Saving marriages is critically important as marriages and the health of the relationship involved in marriages provides the necessary foundation of security and love for any children born into that relationship as well as a security for other families and children within the surrounding society.

Saving marriages involves more than just enforcing legal or moral requirements or making the relationship comfortable or making sure the covenant is valid. It is important that all three areas be addressed well.

Validity of the Wedding

What is needed before a wedding will result in a legitimately binding marriage? Often the validity of a wedding will never be questioned until one spouse wants to dissolve the union. Then that spouse may question the validity of the marriage relative to society, to the law, and to God.

Read more on the Validity of the Wedding

Saving the Bond of Marriage

What is the bond of marriage made of? How can that bond be protected? When should it be protected?

Saving the Relationship

How can one quickly develop relationship skills to rescue a damaged or horribly broken relationship?