Growing Old Together

Dr. Wayne Goodall speaks about the challenges of growing old

Hello, thank you for listening to me. My name is Dr. Wayde Goodall and I’m going to be talking to you about “Growing Old Together in Marriage.” And every marriage after you’ve been married for 2 hours, you’re growing old together. Because you’re married and you want your marriage to last for the rest of your lifetime.

The statistics worldwide tell us that there are four critical times that can affect every marriage. And they kind of put years on it, like year one is a really challenging time because now you’re married. You’re living with this person and you’re trying to figure out how to have a relationship with another person and build on that for the rest of your life. A lot of couples they end their marriage in that first year and so they need help. They need encouragement.

• Year seven is a challenging time they tell us because you’ve had children, they’re in the home and they’re breaking things. They’re expensive. Children creates a new dynamic. These are times of stress that can come to your marriage.
• Year 20 is another time. Why year 20? Because now you’ve had children and you’ve raised them and lots of times when you’re raising children you forget the person you’re married to. Remember that marriage is a relationship and you work on your husband, wife relationship all the time because it’s primary your children need to see that Mom and Dad’s relationship is important. So you spend time together, you have date times together but lots of times couples forget to do that. And after the children have been raised and they’ve left the home around year twenty, they forget what is marriage all about. They wonder how do you have a happy marriage because they haven’t paid attention to each other.
• Recently, they came up with another one. Year 40. Wow, couples that have been married for four decades. And they say that couples that have been married that long and if they’re not getting along but yet they’re secure in themselves, financially secure, they just to agree to live their two separate lives. This is tragic because God wants us to enjoy our marriage all of our life. Every marriage is a challenge. Every marriage is dysfunctional. It’s only a matter of degree because there are no perfect people.

We can learn to grow old together by forgiving each other. We can learn not to be an irritant to each other. We can learn how to become more forgiving and healing in our relationship with the other person. Marriages get better as we grow older. We become better human beings because marriage is a gift of God. We can do better because God will help us. He’ll help us understand the importance of the other person and they’ll understand us too.

I want you to know that you can grow old together in your marriage because God is involved. He will help you. Growing old together in marriage is a wonderful blessing. What a gift that God has given you.

This is Dr. Wayde Goodall speaking to you about healthy marriages. Thank you for watching me today.

Closing Thoughts…

I want to thank you for listening to me as I’ve talked to you about your family. And I also want to remind you that God created your family and God created you. The best way to make your life work is to be connected to your creator. The scripture tells us that if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead you will be saved. When you do this you’ll get connected to the creator. I want to pray with you right now to be connected to the one that created you and your family. Would you pray with me?

Father, I give my life to Jesus Christ today. Help me to be different. I believe that he died for me and he rose physically from the dead. I ask you to forgive me of my sins. Thank you and I pray in the name of Jesus. Amen

Now if you’ve prayed that prayer with me and you want to pray even more with another person, hit “yes” on your computer screen and you’ll be able to pray with another person. If you have more questions, and all of us have questions, God’s good with your questions, I want you to hit another button, “I still have more questions.” We would be thrilled to answer you. Thank you for praying with me today.

God bless you. I’m Dr. Wayde Goodall.