Praying for Marriages (PfM)

Please join us this week in praying for marriages that are being negatively affected by a disruptive friend.   Just like spouses bring their families into their marriages, they also bring their friends.   This reality is normal and healthy.   Marriage should not signal the end of pre-existing friendships.   Nevertheless, there are instances when a friend, either of the husband, wife or both, does not honor the marriage relationship and becomes an instrument of division instead of a mainstay of support.   The nature of a friend’s disruptive behavior can vary widely.   A couple may be faced with a friend who does not respect their time and privacy.   They also may need to deal with a friend who does not understand that marriage can significantly affect how his or her married friend must manage money.   Martial stress can arise if one spouse makes unwise spending decisions in order not to disappoint this friend.   Married couples can...

Join us in praying this week for couples that are going through marital separation.  Although separation from a spouse can be necessary because of abusive and/or addictive behavior, marital separation is not a cure-all; in fact, it can lead to issues that make reconciliation even more difficult.  When separation is viewed as just a way to avoid the stresses of marital disharmony, it can lead to a false peace that provides no positive movement toward the resolution of the marital problems.  The longer that “hiatus” continues the harder it is for couples to reenter the difficult process of healing a broken marriage.  Separation can deepen feelings of failure and hopelessness and chip away at a couple’s commitment to their relationship as they experience the very real physical withdrawal from one another.  This physical withdrawal, when coupled with the emotional distance almost always present in broken marriages, can make marital infidelity more tempting.  F...

Join us this week in praying for marriages in which communication has broken down.   By all accounts the lack of effective communication is a frequent and devastating dysfunction in marriages.   The break down in communication can occur for a wide range of reasons.   It can arise from words and/or body language that communicate disinterest in or contempt for a spouse’s input.   Sometimes the desire to communicate can dry up if a spouse feels the other’s words are never followed up with action, in other words, if lightly made promises are never kept.   Nagging can also cause communication to grind to a halt.   And when effective communication stops, all sorts of misunderstandings and false assumptions are likely to spring up.   These situations, in turn, lead naturally to a cascade of trouble and stress since any attempt to address misunderstandings and false assumptions will fail when the couples’ ability to communicate effectively is already...

Please join us this week in praying for marriages that are in deep financial debt.   Debt is a life-situation pervasive in our American culture.   When this debt is excessive, it can lead to numerous problems for a married couple.   First, it can lead to a blame game in which spouses expend their energy assigning blame instead of working on a resolution.   Second, deep debt can create crippling stress as the couple tries to maintain life and limb while fending off creditors.   Third, debt can lead to hopelessness, since escaping from deep debt is most often a long road that many couples may see as beyond their ability to travel.   And finally, even when a couple commits to escaping debt, they will face the difficulties of changing long established habits, of giving up things that are precious to them, and of learning to say “no,” or at least “not now,” sometimes to even good and worthwhile things. Please pray that couples in this situation wil...