Week 83: Mixed-race and mixed-cultural Marriages

Please join us this week in praying for couples in mixed-race or mixed-cultural marriages.  In a very real sense, couples in these marriages face the same challenges and difficulties as most couples.  But in another very real sense, these common challenges and difficulties can be complicated by the couple’s mixed-race or mixed-cultural situation.

Think about the conflicts that occur in marriages simply because the spouses come from different households that solved problems differently or celebrated holidays differently or handled finances differently.  Now imagine how those conflicts could be exacerbated when the spouses are from races and/or cultures that are vastly different. 

Furthermore, racial and cultural differences can cause confusion in a marriage because some racial and cultural characteristics and traditions can be infused with a history and loaded with meaning unknown by one spouse and that defy an easy explanation by the other.

Even if the couples handle their differences well, their families and friends may not.  At the worst, family and friends’ biases can cause problems for the mixed-race or mixed-culture couple; but even just honest ignorance or misunder-standing can cause problems for the couple as well.

Finally, during times of conflict or stress the couples themselves can revert to racially or culturally colored actions, opinions, stereotypes or language that can be deeply hurtful to the marriage partners.

Please pray that couples in this life situation will

• Understand their life situation can exacerbate challenges common to marriages and that they must guard themselves against this unique danger

• Be understanding of their racial and/or cultural differences and be patient with each other

• Pledge to face together those challenges created by biased or uninformed family and friends

• Be open to the fact that some values, habits or ideas infused in their lives by their individual racial or cultural background may be anti-Christian and need to be subjugated to the lordship of Christ

• Be quick to forgive each other and to ask forgiveness when hurts due to racial or cultural differences occur

• Be each other’s advocate and defender in the light of racial or cultural bias or misunderstandings