Table of Contents Chapter 1.Marriage: Contentment on the Desert Lap of the Journey 2.Marriage: Warnings about the Pasture 3.Marriage: The Bond 4.Marriage and Life: Picking the Battles that Have the Most Spoils 5.Marriage and Family, from Survival to Success: Your Staff and Sling Shot 6.Do not get your cover off your top: Look out for your Man 7.Learning to Say No: Yield Not to Temptation 8.Are Parents Entertainers or Trainers? 9.Extending Grace to One Another 1 Marriage: Contentment on the Desert Lap of the Journey The journey of life takes you across many different terrains, with symbolic resemblance to those of our mother earth. Depending on the country or city, most marathon runners get a little glimpse of the different land forms. Some go through valleys and hills, plains and mountains with varying levels of vegetation, ranging from arid to semi-arid to a thick rain forest. All these varieties of land forms with their respective types of vegetation have their own unique characteristics that exude beauty in their unique likenesses. Along the tracks through these routes, if one takes a pause and smells the roses and observes the beauty of the scenery, one will see that life flourishes through it all if we look for its beauty and admire its nuances. Our needs for sustenance and other things remain the same, but unfortunately each terrain offers different forms of sustenance. Being used to one particular terrain and its delicacies and beauties sometimes keeps us so attached to it that we always want to get stacked with it. As the saying goes, familiarity breeds contempt and that explains why we get complacent with familiar terrains. Either by our own choice or otherwise, we are often forced out of our comfort zones. Getting stacked in our comfort zones does not always do us much good, because the world is very dynamic and all the phenomena and systems within it are dynamic, as well. Nothing is constant, and if anything was, it would be change itself. Our ability to adapt to change in a positive way is what often gets us going. Resistance to change is tantamount to mercy killing. The only thing that will never change is the word of God, hence the reason to lean on it throughout one's life. One of the writers of the old Methodist hymns says, "Through all the changes of life, in trouble and in joy, make you his service your delight and he will make your wants his care." Some of these terrains that our tracks pass are either by chance, choice or some adversity. Whatever the cause may be, the Bible has advised that we walk through them gracefully and confidently. The psalmist says in the twenty-third Psalm, "Though I walk in the shadow and in the valley of death, I will fear no evil, for thou art with me. Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me...." King David really walked through a lot of shadows of death, but the rod and the staff of God the shepherd surely protected him from all of them. With confidence he defeated Goliath, and with patience, Saul, both of whom put him under the shadow of death. This strategy of King David clearly explains how God gives us wisdom to discern the right strategy for the different situations in which we find ourselves that pose an insurmountable threat to our very existence. In all situations, you come out victorious if you filter your thoughts through the eyes of Christ. You surely do have to rejoice through all life's changes because the Lord is KING, and nothing can be compared to him. This movement from terrain to terrain often times thrusts us from glory to glory, progressing higher and higher in advancement towards the will of God for our lives. Though all the trials are meant for our good, we often realize this only in hindsight. Sometimes, we may even be aware where God is taking us, as in the case of the Israelite, yet resist his will due to our unwillingness to endure the short term discomforts along the way.