Today, let’s pretend that we’re riding in a boat out on the sound in the outer banks of North Carolina. The warmth of the sun penetrates the exposed skin sending delightful tingling spikes of heat rays throughout the body. The waters of the sound are calm and clear since not many boats have been out yet. Soon enough, we cross over the sound and through the mouth of the inlet and into the vast ocean waters. Of course these waters are not as calm. Matter of fact, the waves are churning and racing fiercely up against the boat. Still, the motion of the ride inside the boat remains calm and peaceful, that is until we feel a turbulent undercurrent that causes the boat to rock and then move ever so sluggishly in the water. We’ve apparently struck a sand dune and so the master oarsman has to carefully steer the boat off of the dune and back into deeper waters. For awhile the boat was bogged down in the sand, but now, with the expertise of the oarsman, we are steadily moving again.
 

I find that marriage is much like this. We can be moving along quite well and then an undercurrent will surface, an attitude that we try to suppress or an annoyance that we can’t tolerate –a rift develops in our usual calm passage. Circumstances have us bent and hopeless and then we open God’s word feeling positive that He will give direction concerning our immediate situation. And yet the direction that He chooses to give is in relation to another concern from a couple of weeks back. I guess this rationale can be explained by Charles Stanley’s advice, “Trust God and leave the consequences up to Him.”

When I first penned my upcoming book, Mediocrity to Maturity, I left out a vital life lesson learned along the way. I chose to leave this painful episode of my life out, but then God stirred my heart to tell the story, and so hesitantly, I did. With the book in production, I’ve recently thought about removing this story again, before the book goes into publication. This morning, I opened my Bible to a small, not often thought of book, the book of Joel. This is what I read in Joel 1:1-3 “Hear this, you leaders of the people! Everyone listen! In all your history, has anything like this ever happened before? Tell your children about it in the years to come. Pass the awful story down from generation to generation.” In this passage of Scripture, God urged parents to pass their history down to their children, telling over and over the important lessons they’ve learned. And so the Lord has led me to this conclusion; One of the greatest gifts we can give young people is our life story to help them repeat our successes and avoid our mistakes.