20 Things You Should Never Forget In Marriage

Why did God give us the ability to remember things? Memory is such a strange thing. Memory doesn’t have any substance or form or physical presence yet somehow it has an immediate and very present effect on our everyday reality. God gave us the ability to store memories so that these memories of the past would help us in the present. This is why God continually commanded the people of Israel to remember where they came from. Remember that they were once slaves, remember that they once wondered in the wilderness and most importantly, remember how God saved them and brought them through it all. To remember is to apply the lessons of the past to the circumstances of today. It is good to remember.

Hey, we’re Aaron and Jennifer Smith, your hosts of the Marriage After God podcast, and today’s episode is brought to you by our newest one year marriage prayer devotional. The Marriage Gift. This one year prayer devotional officially releases on October 17th, but you can pre-order today simply by visiting the marriage gift.com. We desire to see every marriage be a praying marriage. That is why we wrote this book. We want to invite you to pre-order your copy today and see prayer become a foundational aspect of your marriage. Do you ever find yourself not having the words to pray or know what to pray for when it comes to your spouse and your marriage? Do you feel nervous or uncomfortable praying with your spouse? Do you desire your prayer life to be more consistent and more vibrant? Do you want to pray for your marriage more? If you answered yes to any of these questions, then please visit the marriage gift.com to PR to your book today and give your marriage the gift you will love to open every day.

Hey everyone, we’re back for another episode.

It’s like my little fake drum

Should be a fun one. The initial idea was just a kind of fun way to get you guys inspired and encouraged to be thinking about certain areas of your marriage.

Being reminded. Being reminded. Yeah, I mean marriages, especially as the years go on, I mean, we’ve been married almost 17 years now and that’s not even, I mean, my parents have been married, gosh, in their forties, 40 years or longer, and just you can imagine over the years we can forget some stuff.

Sure. Some things we need to forget, which we’ll talk about. That’s

Probably true.

But before we jump in all of that, is there anything new going on with you this week that you want to share? Anything that’s encouraged you or?

I’ve just been, my main focus lately has been on marketing the new book, just talking about it, preparing stuff, getting all the backend stuff done, and so that’s what I’ve been doing. My head’s been in that space. That’s awesome. So I’m forgetting a lot of other things.

Something that was cool that just really touched my heart was a friend of ours, they had a baby recently and they’re going through a bit of crisis with her health and one their family members reached out and said, Hey, let’s all, if whoever wants to join in a fast and prayer on a specific day, and everybody in the church was game. We all wanted to do it. And the morning of, I woke up and felt really encouraged. I was praying and I thought, how cool is it Lord, that everybody’s simultaneously praying specifically for this baby girl? And the Lord was like, I’m going to flip your perspective for a second. I’m using this baby girl to draw many hearts to me right now. And it was really cool. Both are important and it shows how the body, all the individual members of the body work together for the good of the body. And it was just really beautiful

And how God can use even the littlest member, the weakest member, to open up all of our eyes to bring us to our knees before him to draw us like you said to himself. Yeah.

So super

Cool. That was a good little thing you just shared. Thank you for that.

Yeah, other than that, we’re gearing up to start school again. And it was funny, I put some of the kids’ newer school books and math and everything in there were little boxes where we organize our homeschool stuff and they’ve already jumped to it and I feel like we haven’t even really had a break in summer because we lingered with last year’s math and language arts and stuff. And so they’ve only been off for a couple of weeks and they wanted to jump right back in it. I was like, you guys, we start next week. Just wait. They’re excited though.

That’s awesome. What’s one of the big focuses you’re going to focus on this year?

There’s a couple of our kids who just aren’t confident with reading. I feel like I’ve given them the tools and I feel like they can do it, but they’re not quick or excited to jump into reading on their own. And so that’s a big goal for me this year.

It’s probably genetic. I wasn’t very confident in my reading skills either.

I get that. I just need to bring some fun, unfortunately

For me.

And then also I feel like with our older kids, just really encouraging the independent learning where they can, areas of school that maybe they can show some initiative in just doing, because I know that they can.

I’m excited for this year. I think they’re going to all grow a lot.

One aspect is we’re switching Elliot to an online math curriculum, which I’ve never introduced anything like technology based with our kids. And so there was a part of you that was like, no, let’s not do that. But we agreed that moving forward it’s actually good because they live in a technology filled world to give them

Healthy opportunities to experience technology in a safe way.

It’s just a new aspect to me as a teacher. I dunno how it’s going to go. I’ve never done that before, so just interesting stuff.

That’s good. Something that I know a lot of our listeners probably know this we mentioned in the past, but we do home church, so we don’t go to a regular building. A lot of people do, which is totally fine also, but we do it in our homes and we’ve been hosting church how many months? Three months? Yeah,

We did throughout the summer.

Yeah, three months in our home. And one cool aspect of our home church is we take turns, we’ll switch houses for periods of time and we just got done doing that, so we’re going to be switching to someone else’s house. But it’s a really cool thing that we get to do because everyone in the church, not everyone, but many people in the church get opportunities to serve the church in that way.

It’s a little bit layered and serving and showing hospitality and preparing ahead of time and providing that space for everyone. It just takes a lot. So we’re always grateful when things get switched up a little bit. But we had fun. It’s been fun here.

Yep.

It’s good for the kids too. They wake up early and they put all the chairs out and our music binders and things

Like that, they get to help set church up, which is really cool

With us talking about church. And for everyone listening, I just want to encourage you guys, we want to encourage you guys that church is such an integral part of our faith and being able to fellowship on a weekly, regular basis, I’ve just seen so much benefit not only in our family and our life and the support, the encouragement, the prayer, everything that it provides, but also when you’re in fellowship and there’s needs that people have and you’re able to just jump right in because you know them. You’ve been walking with them, you see them regularly, you love them, you love them, and it’s a huge support system. And so if you’re listening right now and maybe you’ve been out for a while, you haven’t been really connecting, we just want to encourage you to find a local community, local church that you can be participating in and fellowshipping with because we all need each other.

I totally agree. And it’s also not just we should do it just because good for us, but God desires us and commands us as his people to be in fellowship with one another. So we should be looking if you don’t have a church, if you don’t have a fellowship to find one and to look for people who love God and love his word. Amen. The last thing I want to bring up before we get into the topic is the pre-launch for our new devotional is going really well. I just want to praise God for that. That’s awesome. We were in the top selling new releases on Amazon already for over a week and it doesn’t even come out until October. I just want to share with everyone because anyone that’s been listening to our podcast, you’re one of the reasons they did that. So I just want to thank you. God is so good. And if you haven’t already pre-order the book, we want to again ask you to do that and participate in this book launch, not only to bless your marriage, but also to get the word out about this book because the more people that ranking for the book gets better on Amazon and more people see it. So you can go to the marriage gift.com, which will take you straight to the book.

So let’s jump into today’s content.

We wanted to mention how we just recorded a podcast with

Liz Bagwell from Rhythm Restoration. So that episode should be coming out soon and we’ll share it with you guys when it gets released. I love that she uses her background in science. She was in it for two decades and she mixes it with her faith and as she shares on her podcast, that’s the way she’s getting the message out. I just love

That talking about how biology and science just confirms things

That we did in his world. What God. Yeah. I love that. When we were thinking about this episode, even though it was going to be a more lighthearted episode, I was like, oh, we should try and draw in some of the science for it.

We’re science professionals, we might as well. No, but we do love learning.

We do love learning and we love that you guys love to listen to us. So you get to learn with us. We just pulled a few things out that we were going to share with you guys today. So on top of the 20 things you should never forget in marriage, maybe you’ll also retain some of this information for why, I don’t know,

Maybe they’ll remember what we’re talking about with memory.

Okay, so in the simplest of terms, memory is the way we store and retrieve information. Wikipedia says it’s the retention of information over time for the purpose of influencing future action,

Which is kind of what I was talking about at the beginning of the episode or what you were I should say, is that’s the purpose. God designed memory into us.

What we said was to remember is to apply the lessons of the past to the circumstances of today.

A simple example of that is, and we learned this as children, things that hurt us. So fire burns, you remember that for a long time. It’s got a very visceral response in our body, and so our flesh learns real early. I should not touch fire. That does not feel good, right?

Okay. So then John’s Hopkins medicine says, according to scientists, memories are formed as a result of connections between neurons in the brain. New connections or synapses are formed. Each time a new activity is learned, the more a person participates in a particular activity, the stronger the synapses and associated memories tied to the activity become,

Which that’s a good reminder and a warning, the kinds of things that we do over and over again.

I

Was thinking about that they become things that our minds remember. They call ’em neural pathways, and the more that pathway is trampled on, the easier that pathway is to walk. There’s a book I read a long time ago that talked about this for a specific subject, but doing things over and over again is a very powerful way of remembering something could be good and bad.

So for a good example, I mean this is just really simple, but everybody will probably have a memory flood them right now. But just think of grandma’s house. Everybody going to grandma’s house has that memory of what it looked like, what it felt like, that bold candy or that blue carpet or the way it smelled. I don’t know the things that you did with grandma when you visited.

My grandpa had a very specific clone. I think it was Stetson, and it was the only one he ever wore, and so he always smelled like Stetson.

See? So our memories are very interesting. As I was doing a little bit of research for this episode too, of just how the science community has tried to in a way dissect, okay, what is memory? And then define it. It still seems like such a mysterious thing. It’s kind of like when I think about a computer, how is a machine doing all of this? What you see visually?

It’s kind of

Strange.

I was thinking the same thing that even though they can explain maybe how it works, like, oh, it’s neurons being formed, but I don’t think they can still understand how our brain is actually storing. We can all have images and we can remember smells and sounds and where does that exist? How does that exist in the neurons in our brain? It’s

Crazy. But as they try to grasp for how exactly it all works, they have defined a few things for us. So I thought I would just share what some of these things are. So working memory is that short-term, smaller capacity of recalling information. It’s kind of what helps you make a quick decision or make a behavior, choose a behavior. Explicit memory is the more long-term recollection or awareness through associations. So those are the two main, what memory is, and then they break it down even further. So there’s episodic memory, which is your everyday experiences, what you remember, what your house is like, or where you put things

In the middle of the night when it’s pitch black in my room, I could walk from my side of my bed all the way to the bathroom and not hit any walls

I have, and

It’s pitch

Black, but yes, I can reach from my phone in one take and grab it. Oh, there you go. And then semantic memory are like, think of fact flashcards, general knowledge.

Yeah. This one flashcards. I’m not good at that.

You actually are. This is all those random bits of information.

Is that what this would count

As? Yeah, yeah. How many bones the human body has, those kinds of, that one. No, but you do know a lot of facts. You’re that guy at the Yes, that’s a hard one. You’re the guy at the party where you’ll be in a conversation with someone and you just start spinning

Back. If it’s about a movie, maybe movie

Quotes,

Or I do a really good time or do a good job of remembering useless facts. I have a lot of storage for that. Yeah,

Well, that would be there. So then procedural memory is how we do things. So the procedure of it, playing a guitar, something like that, riding a bike, and then sensory memory, which is sight, sound, smell, touch, taste, all of that. Okay.

So when I say I have a bad memory, really, I just have parts of my memory that are bad. I’m looking at these, I’m like, okay, some of these, I’m not that great with explicit memory. Yeah, yeah. The long-term recollection of things I’m not

Good at. I wish that I was better, but that’s one of the reasons we wanted to do this episode is I think we all are aware of how our memory can be good or bad, and for many of us, we probably just need to work on it a little bit, which is the encouragement that we actually can help our memory. This one vlogger I was watching was saying, if you’re healthy and you get good rest and sleep, which is huge for memory and the way that our brains process information, eating good brain foods, challenging our brain to work, to remember

Repetition, working that muscle out.

Yeah, it’s like a muscle. It creates those neural pathways, which you already mentioned, and it can be made stronger. So the encouragement today for all of us listening is we just wanted to inspire each other to work better at having a good memory because, and we’ll talk about it in a minute. There are things, especially in marriage that we need to remember. So before we get there, why do we forget? Why are there things that we forget?

As hard as it’s for me to explain how we even remember things, why we might forget those things. Where does it go? I don’t know.

There are some things that I really want to remember, even just silly, but lyrics to a song, I’m like, sometimes they stick glue first time right away. Other times I’m like, I can’t

See song lyrics, things like that. I would say I’ve never been good at it, but I also don’t care.

Yeah. Well, I think caring is a big part of why we forget things.

Is there an initial desire of like, oh, I want to be good at this thing, or I enjoy this thing, or I want to recall this for the future. So people that work in specific careers or fields like

The

Medical field, they focus on this one thing, they want to be the best at it. So they start retaining things in that area, and I would imagine they probably forget other things that have nothing to do with that.

It’s like your brain, let’s go of the non-essential in a way to make room to them. Yeah. Okay. So do you think that our memory is unlimited or that there is a capacity?

Well, mine’s very limited, but I don’t

Think that’s true, Aaron.

I think God’s pretty incredible and he’s made our brains to be miraculous. I mean, there’s people that, there’s a word for it in here, I can’t see on the, oh, is it hyper thia?

Hyper thia

Have perfect recollection.

Yeah. But okay, so that is when somebody can recall something perfectly.

So there’s some people’s brains,

Like everything, every experience, every fact, everything they

Can look at, they can hold it all. So I would imagine this probably our brains are probably capable of remembering quite a bit.

So I think that’s true. But can we just talk about there are people in the world that have this condition, esia, but I think it would be more of a curse. I mean as far as we want good memory, but we don’t want to remember everything because think about it, there’s even traumatic or hard situations that you’ve experienced. Let’s say that you’ve forgiven someone who’s hurt you. We tend to be able to forget what has happened. But for someone who can’t, that would be really hard.

Well, a thought I just had is we were just reading Genesis one to the kids this morning and we were talking about how man is made in God’s image and God is eternal. And it even talks about how the amount of thoughts he has towards us that we don’t know and that we’ve been in his mind from even before we were born. So if you think about, so we’re made in his image, he’s made us able to have memory. I mean, he has eternal knowledge. Is it memory or is it just a constant state of knowing? But he knows all. He remembers all. And then later on he even says, but he forgets our sin. He does not see it anymore. Which is an amazing concept to think that God the creator who has all knowledge, all memory, all he knows all this stuff, we’ll let go of some of that intentionally so that we can have a relationship with him through Christ. Listen to what it says in Jeremiah 31 34, and no longer shall each one teach his neighbor and each his brother saying, know the Lord. For they shall all know me from the least of them to the greatest declares the Lord for I will forgive their iniquity and I will remember their sins no more.

That’s pretty awesome.

So he’s choosing to forget our sins in Christ, which is amazing.

When we were doing the notes for this episode, there was two movies that stood out to me. One of ’em was Inside Out, which

The Pixar animated film.

Yeah. I thought that was a really creative way to put in picture form an explanation of how the mind works for kids. I don’t know, did you like that movie? I loved it. I thought it was really cool. And then the other one was Remembering Frozen two. Everyone’s like, no, don’t say that when Olaf is talking about how water has memory. And I just thought that was really funny. And then the whole time, me and my kids were talking about it, mom, does water actually have memory? We’re like,

We don’t know.

Anyways, has nothing to do with what we’re talking about today, but here we go. Okay, so we were talking about, so why, yeah, why do we forget? Why do we forget? So if you guys want the scientific terms, there’s three different ways we forget things. The first one is passive osce essence.

So obliviousness,

It’s, it’s just the fading of information. It’s just like, I don’t know where it went. I can’t recall it. There’s one called Targeted Forgetting, which is when, so already mentioned, but at night when you get rest, our brains are processing all the information that we gathered that day and it’s basically throwing out for us or purging the information that it thinks we don’t need.

Man, how does our brain decide what that is?

I dunno. And then the third one is motivated forgetting, which you kind of just brought up with the Lord in this very intentional, I’m going to forget this, I’m not going to remember it anymore. And for us, intentionally suppressing information helps us to specifically regulate emotions tied to those things.

So suppressing bad memories like, oh, I don’t like that. I don’t want to think about that anymore. Yeah. Okay.

So those are the three ways we forget things in case you guys ever wanted to know.

That’s crazy. So I mentioned how I have a bad memory, but you keep telling me I don’t have a bad memory.

I am sure everybody gets frustrated with their inability to remember things at times, but I think overall you actually do have a very sharp memory.

There’s certain kinds of memories I’m better at. For some reason. I don’t have a great long-term memory from my past as a child. Not that I think I’m suppressing anything on purpose. I just think I haven’t remembered a lot of stuff. But you’re right, there’s other kinds of things that I’m good at remembering like facts and different ideas and concepts and a lot of biblical stuff. I feel like a lot of that’s stuck with me for some reason.

I will say that because I’ve had the opportunity to do interviews with you or talking to other people and just meeting new people. Your timeline doesn’t always add up dates, dates of things or when things happen. And I

Don’t know why that is, maybe because my memory compresses everything so much.

I’ve been in a conversation with you where we’re rolling through what the next year is going to look like and it’ll be September and you’re like, so what’s next month? January? And I’m like, what?

Yeah, I don’t have enough room in my mind for all this information. It’s useless about normal things. It’s just funny. So this is a good episode for me to be thinking about Pay attention, Erin, because simple things like my kids’ birthdays. I know that sounds funny, but if you were ask me what my kids’ birthdays are on the spot, I’m going to stumble.

No, you’re going to say, Jen, what was that?

Yeah, I can be, I think it’s in December. And I’ll say, Wyatt, what day is your birthday? All my kids know their birthdays,

But you just admitted five minutes ago or something like that, maybe 20. I dunno that there’s some things we don’t remember because we just don’t care. Do you feel like there’s parts of what we’re talking about that you’re like, well, I just haven’t cared enough about those things? Well,

Yes, I think in some sense, not that I don’t care about my kids’ birthdays. I think it’s like I haven’t put the care into remembering them, storing those like, oh, I’m going to need that in the future. But I have done that. So one of the things I do is I’ve put all the birthdays in my calendar

And it tells you

Which the simple act of adding them in my calendar and then them coming up helps solidify those in my brain. But yeah, so I’ve tried. There’s things like a long time ago, a friend of ours did this whole demonstration. We had a marriage ministry and there was probably what, 50 leaders or so, 30 leaders or so. And he wanted to, at a leadership training, he wanted to show how we can all be good people who are good name remembers. If you ever talk to someone I used say, I’m not good at remembering names. Yeah, okay. I used to say that. And he started off with saying, stop saying you’re not good at remembering names. And I’m like, oh, so I should just say something better. We talked about positive affirmations a few episodes ago. So I stopped saying immediately, I’m bad at remembering names and I don’t say that to people anymore. And what happens is you actually start to remember better when you tell yourself you can remember people’s names. Well,

Also you’re intentional about trying to remember people’s names, and so you’ll immediately repeat their name or you’ll say it a few times, I’ve seen you do this. So that’s part of the working the muscle where you actually can work on your memory.

He went around the room and he said every single person’s name out of all 50 of us in a circle without skipping a beat. And I couldn’t have named two thirds of the room. I mean, I knew them in passing, but I didn’t have close relationships with all these people. So he gave tips on repeat their name when you first meet them, say it several times in the sentence in a sentence while you’re talking to them. And then something I also practice is when it comes to names is even if I think I’m going to say their name wrong, I say it. And so what that does is that gets me in this confidence of like, oh no, I do know their name. And then they’re like, no, it’s not that. I’m like, Ooh, but I was really close. Or I’ll say, that was actually the first name I was going to say, but I didn’t say it. I wasn’t confident. But yeah, so there’s definitely ways we can get better at remembering things.

Well, should we jump into the list?

Yeah. This is 20 things. It’s

Not an exhaustive list, but it is an interesting list we came up for you to share just to get your minds wrapped around marriage and maybe things that you haven’t been thinking about lately, or maybe you can use this as a time to evaluate, am I being intentional to remember these things and why is it important? So why don’t you kick us off with the first

One. So definitely do not forget your anniversary. Is that a simple one? Never. Yeah, this seems funny, but this is a common thing, not that we don’t know about our anniversary, but life gets busy. We’re not paying attention days past eight weeks past, we we’re busy, things are happening. You could be in a season of just being overwhelmed, a season of lots of planning, a season of lots of execution, and then you’re like, oh no, is my anniversary next week? And you’re like, ah. Or you just forget altogether.

Why is it important to remember your anniversary?

Well, it’s just a conscious decision to remember to celebrate your anniversary, to remembering. I was going to say, to celebrate something important to your spouse. And I would even say, so one of the tips we give is set an alarm, of course, like I did with my kids’ birthdays. But I would say set alarm a month in advance

To give yourself time to prepare.

Then you can schedule out a dinner. You can figure out flowers,

Because really we’re, don’t forget your anniversary. We’re saying don’t forget to celebrate your anniversary, which is even more intentional of getting her those flowers or getting him that gift, whatever it is,

Or making sure to, there’s that restaurant that you’ve been wanting to go to, but it’s always booked and you’re never booking it out far enough in advance.

Get that babysitter. Yeah, go have fun. All the things. All the things. Okay, two, number two, don’t forget to go the distance to gift your love to your spouse. So again, maybe not all the time, are you talking about

Giving gifts or gifting your love? As in it

Could look different for everybody, but I think the message here is don’t forget to love on them. And it could look like giving a gift. It could just look like a loving gesture, but loving them, loving on them,

Remembering that you do love them. Yeah, I mean, again, this sounds simple, but we become ships that pass in the night. Sometimes we’re doing our things and we forget.

And the reason we say go the distance is because I think sometimes even the smaller gestures or the easy ones, it’s like, okay, those are even on autopilot. You can do that. Say, I love you in passing or whatever, but if you’re going the distance, you’re really putting some thoughtfulness to it, and I think we need that in marriage. Yeah.

Number three, don’t forget to kiss.

What

Do we forget to kiss sometimes? Yeah, a lot. Actually, we actually talked about this the other night. I was like, we should just do a challenge. We’re going to kiss every day. And we immediately forgot. We’re like, wait, we looked at each other. It was like the next day or two days later and we’re like, oh, we didn’t even do that. That thing we just said we were

Going to do. I like your note here. It says, don’t shoot straight for the prize without warming things up throughout the day.

If you’re married, we’re talking

About you need to flirt. Yeah,

It’s amazing how powerful this one thing can be that throughout the day, taking a moment, there’s challenges out there. Like kiss for more than three seconds, kiss for five seconds. Have a real kiss, not just a peck on the lips, but make out with your wife, make out with your husband. It’s an amazing thing. Amazing way to connect physically throughout the day. That’s not necessarily sexual. I mean, it’s sexual, but it’s not, if that makes sense.

So number four would be don’t forget to affirm each other often. I mean, we all need it.

And if you want to learn about affirmation, go back a few episodes ago and listen to our episode on affirmation.

Do it. Give that encouragement, send that verse, send that text, write a letter, call them. But we all need that affirmation. We all struggle with the temptation to have insecurities, doubts, frustrations, and we need to be encouraged on a daily basis. So don’t forget to do that for each other.

Number five, don’t forget your spouse does not exist just to serve you,

But that’s why I got married.

Yeah, they’re not there. Like, oh, my wife needs to just be making me happy, needs to be serving me all the time. My husband needs to be just, that’s not what your spouse is there for and it’s a part of it. Serving you is definitely a part of their role as your

Spouse. I’m going to add to this one just because for me, I know that I struggle with this, that it’s not a matter of you serving me per se, but it is. There’s you love

Me serving you.

I do love you serving me, but there’s also just this overall codependency on you that if you want to hang out with your guy, friends, I get this. Well, why don’t you want to hang out with me? Why don’t you come work from home? Why don’t you be close to me? This constant need for your presence, your affection, your help, help, it’s all of it. So it’s not just even serving, it’s just all of it.

So to add to that, I put some notes here. They’re your friend, they’re your partner, they’re your lover, they’re helper, your helper, your teammate, all of these things.

But they also are an individual, and so I think we should be mindful of how we are

Being thoughtful of their

Yeah,

Personhood. Thank you.

Their humanity there. I can’t give this out. What do they need?

What do

They need? Yeah, thinking about the other person. That’s good. Okay, number six, don’t forget you are still dating. Just because you’re married doesn’t mean that you’re off the hook

Here. No, dating only happened while we were dating.

I did love dating you. That was fun. You still dating, but being married, it’s still fun, is still fun. Couples don’t like to be on autopilot or feel like they’re roommates. We kind of already mentioned that, but if you need to schedule a date night, if you need to make it more routine, just to be familiar with that and remember it, do that if you need to. But don’t forget that you guys are still dating and you need that time together.

Number seven, don’t forget your spouse has weaknesses and breaking points. That’s a good one. I mean, for husband specifically, the Bible tells us that our wives are fragile, that they are find China, that the Bible says the weaker vessel, and it’s not putting them beneath us. What that’s doing is that it’s explaining that they have weaknesses, they are fragile and that we need to handle them with care. And so remembering, and husbands too have, as men, we have emotional breaking points. We have mental breaking points, not that we’re having emotional breakdowns and mental breakdowns, but I mean some people actually do. But recognizing that we have kind

Of, we’re not superhuman.

We can’t handle everything all the time and do all of the things perfectly. So just remember that your spouse, that they have weaknesses and breaking points.

And I’d love to add, I keep adding notes. Sorry, I’m making this in an even longer list, but with this one, if your spouse has communicated to you that they are at a breaking point or they are feeling emotional or sensitive for whatever reason, and maybe they told you that and now we’re on the next day, don’t forget, remember that they just told you that because you might start the day off feeling great, and they’re still stuck in this low place. And if you forget, you’re going to meet them in that place of tension. I’m saying this because it’s happened to us and it happened recently, never where I was feeling down and in a hard place, and I had communicated that to you, and then the next day there was a moment

Where I can just move on. Life’s normal.

Yeah, move on. Life’s normal. And I felt rushed and frustrated over the way that you had communicated with me, and I could have walked with you in a little bit better grace, but you have weaknesses, but I have weaknesses. And so I guess my note here is just that when your spouse does communicate or you just see it, remember that it doesn’t just go away in a day. Sometimes it takes time. So I hope I explain that well, I’m sorry.

Number eight. Don’t forget the plans they made.

This is huge. Well, because I don’t know if this is a husband and wife thing, everyone can relate to this, but I’ll plan something and I’ll share, Hey, this thing’s coming up. Hey, this thing’s coming up. Hey, this thing’s here.

Well, sometimes you don’t share the plan. That’s true. I find out the day of the plan, so that doesn’t count. But there are times that you do tell me,

I think we both do it to each other,

But just not planning over each other, being thoughtful, like, oh, I think something happened again, having a family calendar.

Well, we finally had to because we were doing this to each other actually. Yeah,

You had your own calendar. Had my own calendar. I was like, no, this is happening today. You’re like, Nope, this is happening today. I

Remember this. Okay,

Double booking our families,

Which I’ve been getting more and more. When ads or Instagram suggest things to you or Facebook suggests things to you, there’s this company out there that makes a family calendar that sits on your counter, and it’s all digital, like digitized, but it’s pretty cool. I don’t know what it’s called. Okay. It exists,

But now everyone listening to this is going to start getting that ad on their Facebook, so you’re welcome. Okay, number nine.

Number nine, don’t forget to follow through because your word is part of integrity. You’re either walking in it or you’re choosing not to. And this is a big deal in marriage because we hurt each other when we don’t follow through with what we say we’re going to

Do. This is a big deal in parenting. Yeah. How many times do we tell our kids, oh, tomorrow night for something? Our kids are always like, will you snuggle me every night? They want us to snuggle. We’re like, well, we can’t tonight. They’re like, will you do tomorrow? If you tell them yes, make sure you follow through that. Okay. Number 10, don’t forget the boundaries.

Any boundaries. All boundaries. All boundaries. Everything. Yeah. So social media dealing with the opposite sex in-laws.

Money. Money. Yeah. Whatever boundaries you guys have set, whatever boundaries, the word is set. Remember those boundaries,

And this will protect your marriage if you walk in.

That’s what boundaries are for. Yeah. Can you go to the zoo? Do you go over the boundaries? No, into the lion’s cage, but I’ve

Thought about it now.

A lot of people have, and there’s lots of videos about that, but boundaries, they’re literally meant for. They’re to show what’s your territory and to keep you safe from outside that

Territory.

Good thing. Yeah.

Thing number 11, don’t forget to walk spiritually together. It’s not just going to happen magically. You have to be doing it, and you have to be checking in on each other. Ask each other. Have you been reading the word? Have you been digging in? What have you been learning? What has God been teaching you? And prayer is a part of that. Do you want to pray together? Have you been praying? What’s that like?

That’s a major one. Should have been number one, should have been number one. Number 12, don’t forget what attracted you to each other. I think this is a big one.

It’s good. What attracted you to each other back then? When you said, I do, but also what

A attracts you to each other now?

Yeah, because things change. I’ll say develop over time a

Person. Are you saying we get older and

Change? Our character gets even stronger and better.

Sometimes we change for the better. Sometimes we change for the worse. No, we’re working on it. But there’s always something to look to, always something to remember and say, oh, you know, I actually love this, this

Much better. The reasons why we love each other. Number 13, don’t forget you already forgave them. This is when you don’t need to remember

Everything. This is one of the things we should forget. When the Bible says love keeps no record of wrongs.

Exactly. Yeah,

Yeah, yeah. If we say forgive, because we should, we’re commanded to, and yet we bring that thing up every single time. Then did you really forgive? And this is a hard one for us. We’ve talked about this in the past about forgiveness and repentance, and

I think if the Lord’s willing to forgive us and remember our sins no more, we need to be able to walk like that in marriage.

And it’s exactly what Jesus tells us to do that we must forgive each other. So yeah. Number 14, don’t forget you sin two. Ouch.

So when you’re in that heated moment or feeling frustrated by your spouse because their sin has affected you and hurt you and hurt your marriage, just remember you have sin too.

Yeah, we all do. And not that we should ever overlook sin because of that, as in like don’t say anything, but having that understanding, that base foundation of like, well, you’re a sinner. I’m a sinner. Helps you forgive, helps you reconcile, helps you walk in truth and in love. So it’s just, remember, we all have sin. What is it first? John says, if anyone says they do not have sin, they’re a liar. Liar. And the truth is not in them. Yeah.

Crazy. Okay. Number 15, I like this one. Don’t forget to do things together and not just make plans separately. Sometimes we can get in a mode of like, oh, here’s a free pocket of time. I’m going to go do this thing over here. And then the next day she says, I’m going to take this time over here. And then eventually you guys realize

Months have gone by and you only do things alone.

Yeah. Don’t do that.

Doing things alone is it could be necessary sometimes. Sure. There’s times that I go watch a movie by myself, but I don’t do that often, but a lot of the stuff we do together,

That’s good. Number 16, don’t forget to have fun

Together.

I feel like I have to remind you of this one. Sometimes

I do. I have to do this, especially with my kids, with you. Sometimes I’m just, I don’t know what it is. Maybe it’s genetic the way I was raised. Maybe

Some personalities

Have a hard time having, but I have to tell myself like, no, have fun right now. Don’t be a stick in the mud. That’s what I have to tell myself.

So maybe you listening needed to hear that. Don’t forget to have fun.

Number 17, don’t forget to explore together. We’ve talked about this a lot. I think it’s one of our favorite things to do is explore and adventure together. Well, and

Especially just to bring it back up, we’ve already mentioned couples don’t like to be on autopilot, and it’s so easy to find yourself there where you’re just kind of going through the motions. If you’re week to week is feeling boring or tedious or monotonous, which by the way, in our notes, I had look. Yeah, look at this. I had to look at how to spell up monotonous. It’s not a word I use all the time. Oh, man. I spelled it like four different ways.

Minton,

Min

Ous, min Minot.

Anyways, here’s your word. Ready? Go. Go. Have fun. Go explore. Go do something. This is your permission.

Okay. Just a quick note. We lived in California for most of our lives and most of California we never explored. Isn’t that silly? There’s so many things in California that people are like, oh, you ever seen? I’m like, no. Have you ever been?

No. We’re kind of creatures of habit in the sense that you kind get in your routine of school, work, friends, family,

We just went neighborhood. We just went for the third or fourth time to Crater Lake here in central Oregon. It’s a national park. It’s beautiful. And we took, my parents and I talked to someone that has lived here their whole lives and has never been to Crater Lake, and it’s only a couple hour drive and it’s beautiful. And so wherever you’re at, you have things around you to go explore and you’re just not thinking about it. Go explore something.

Go find what those things are.

Be the one person that everyone’s like, wow, you’ve done all those things in our area. You’re like, oh yeah, we’ve

Done that. And why is it important? Because it draws you guys close together in an experience, and you’re forming that memory. You’re making a memory together of something really spectacular. Maybe it’s something natural that the Lord has made and you get to sit there and be in wonder about it. But maybe it’s just a walk. Maybe it’s just getting outside. Maybe for some of you it’s hard to get outside. I don’t know.

That’s good. Number 18, we’re almost done. Don’t forget to say I love you. Don’t just assume they know. Tell them often. And the best way to tell someone you love them is by your actions. Show them all the time that you love them.

I think with that whole, don’t assume that they know is something where you end up regretting later if something tragic happens or something like nobody’s guaranteed tomorrow, nobody’s guaranteed the next five minutes and you just don’t know. And so it’s really important that we can be mindful of what it means to say I love you, and to say it often and to show it often.

So a quick little, if you don’t mind me saying, we’re actually working on some children’s books around this topic.

If you’ve been following us and listening for a very long time, it’s been years in the making forever. It took us a while to find an artist, and then we found her. And they’re so beautiful, you guys. I’m so excited to

Share this. They’re almost done. And

Then it took time to format, and then we moved, and that was a whole process. And so it got lost in the shuffle, but they’re so close. I’m so excited.

And we’re not going to say the name of the titles, but it’s around this idea of how to say, I love you.

Okay, so that’s coming. Where are we at? What number are we at

19?

19? Don’t forget your vows and the commitment that you made to each other. They’re not just words. They were a declarative promise and we should remember them often. That’s

Good. Last one, but not least, don’t forget to initiate also. Yeah. Two t o o. Don’t forget to

Initiate two, be one-sided. So

Yeah, if the husband or the wife, if one of you is always doing the initiation of sexual intimacy or spiritual intimacy, prayer, intimacy or going on adventures or dating, if there’s one of you that’s kind of doing the moving of that, first of all, kudos to you. Kudos to you. Good job. But don’t let them be the only one doing it. Yeah. Share, initiate. Make it a mutual initiation where you desire to, as the word says, outdo one another in honor that you’re seeking to, you’re like, you initiate, I’m going to initiate more than you, and then you guys do this good fight of initiation. You won’t regret it, I promise. We were just

Talking to the kids about the good fight of, we don’t want you guys to argue just for the sake of arguing or fighting, but if you all have said, you may not do each other with kindness, and we’re like, yes. So she gave an example of like, you can go first. You can go first. No, you go first. And I’m like, yeah, that’s kind of arguing. I want to see. Yeah,

I would love that.

Okay, so that’s the list of 20 things you should never forget in marriage, but there’s one more bonus, round bonus. This is so important.

Bonus 20 plus one,

You guys don’t forget to remember what God has done for both of you on the cross and in your relationship, and then reminisce together and think about those things

Just like he told the people of Israel. Exactly. He wanted them to remember his works for them. Exactly. His efforts in their life, what he has done, because when you remember those things, you worship him and you thank him.

Amen. We hope more than anything that this was a fun episode to listen to, but also an encouraging one to not forget some very important things when it comes to our marriage relationships, and not just remember them, but to be intentional about them and do them. Okay, so to close out for the growth spurt, this is the last day of the month, and so in August we’ve been talking about keeping your eyes on the prize and dotting over each other, and so this is the last day to do that. If you guys want to do it, put it in now. I can never do it again. You can never do it again after this. Yeah, just kidding. You have to do it every day because you’re married and being married is awesome.

And don’t forget to dote over each other.

So give a cute glance, a wink, an encouraging word, whatever you want to let them know that they’re your special prize. Hand the lower

Back. Hold their wait. What? I said a hand on the lower back just to letting ’em know. I

Believe they’re going to massage.

I need that. Oh, a massage would be a good way to do this.

All right, so challenge is that’s for you. Do you want to praise?

Yeah. Dear Lord, thank you for the gift of memory. Thank you for the ability to remember the important things, and remember all that you have done for us. We pray we would grow in our memory. We pray it would grow stronger over time and never deteriorate. Lord, please help us to not just remember what is important, but also be willing to intentionally love each other well as we remember and pursue these things in marriage. We pray our marriage is blessed and that your will is done in us. In Jesus’ name, amen.