Marriage

A retired Marriage and Family professor from BYU is serving as a Senior Missionary (with his wife) in our ward here in Fresno. His name is Douglas Brinley. My mom took some classes from him while she was at BYU. We found out that we have a connection with the wife of their grandson - her family was in our ward in Japan. The world is a very small place.

Anyways, we were invited over to dinner at their house last Sunday along with another Dewey couple. While they are here in Fresno, the Brinleys have been doing firesides on marriage. The problem is hat he usually speaks on Friday nights, and Bear works late. But it just so happened that he was doing a fireside especially for a certain ward the day they invited us over for dinner. Bear has Sundays off. I was so excited to go! I was ready to take all these notes.

But his message was simple. And once I heard it, I felt very silly because it was exactly what our Sealer had said on our wedding day. I don't know why I was looking for a deeper, more profound message. Elder Brinley said that we are told to be better listeners, communicators, etc by all these marriage self-help books. You won't be able to find any General Conference talks or modern revelation on the marriage advice we usually think of. Instead, all we have to do is pray and read scriptures every day together as a couple. This of course sounds very simple, but we always forget. It's hard to find time in our hectic schedules to remember to take the time for these two things. But it's all about priorities. And time management. Is it worth it to take a few minutes out of my Facebook and Pinterest time to strengthen my marriage every day? Definitely. 

I want the Lord to bless our marriage and I want to become a better person by taking the time to read and pray every day. But more importantly, I want the Spirit to be with us. That is the most important thing. That way I can become the best version of myself and be more sensitive to Bear's needs. I want to take the time to do the little things and have those build up. I want to be like the Brinleys, who practice what they preach. I want a happy marriage, one that lasts. 

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I try not to post political things on my blog, but because I am LDS (Mormon), my beliefs will slip out every once in a while. I'm also planning on doing a post about some other marriage advice that I've been reading about recently that is not religious, but I feel that this post was more important. I don't want to preach or have people think that I'm looking down on them. Or forcing my beliefs onto you. I just want to share things that I feel are important to me.