‘Since God chose you to be the holy people he loves, you must clothe yourselves with tenderhearted mercy, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience. Make allowance for each other’s faults, and forgive anyone who offends you. Remember, the Lord forgave you, so you must forgive others. Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds us all together in perfect harmony. ‘ Colossians 3:12-14(NLT)
Love Is the Greatest
‘If I could speak all the languages of earth and of angels, but didn’t love others, I would only be a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. If I had the gift of prophecy, and if I understood all of God’s secret plans and possessed all knowledge, and if I had such faith that I could move mountains, but didn’t love others, I would be nothing. If I gave everything I have to the poor and even sacrificed my body, I could boast about it; but if I didn’t love others, I would have gained nothing. Love is patient and kind. Love is not jealous or boastful or proud or rude. It does not demand its own way. It is not irritable, and it keeps no record of being wronged. It does not rejoice about injustice but rejoices whenever the truth wins out. Love never gives up, never loses faith, is always hopeful, and endures through every circumstance. Prophecy and speaking in unknown languages and special knowledge will become useless. But love will last forever! Now our knowledge is partial and incomplete, and even the gift of prophecy reveals only part of the whole picture! But when the time of perfection comes, these partial things will become useless. When I was a child, I spoke and thought and reasoned as a child. But when I grew up, I put away childish things. Now we see things imperfectly, like puzzling reflections in a mirror, but then we will see everything with perfect clarity. All that I know now is partial and incomplete, but then I will know everything completely, just as God now knows me completely. Three things will last forever—faith, hope, and love—and the greatest of these is love.’ 1 Corinthians 13:1-13(NLT)
‘There are three things that amaze me— no, four things that I don’t understand: how an eagle glides through the sky, how a snake slithers on a rock, how a ship navigates the ocean, how a man loves a woman.’ Proverbs 30:18-19(NLT)
Let’s take a look at Gottman’s research on how important it is to be positive in your marriage, as well as the idea of developing frequent, small positive acts toward your spouse. His “magic ratio” is five to one in terms of the balance of positive to negative interactions. Gottman found that marriages are significantly more likely to succeed when a couple’s interactions are closer to the five-to-one ratio of positive versus negative (in other words, five positive interactions for every one negative interaction). According to Gottman, couples with more negative interactions than positive ones are typically headed for divorce.
So imagine for a moment that we’ve followed you and your spouse around with a video camera over the past several weeks. Every single conversation—including inflection (tone) and nonverbal communication (smiles, winks, smirks, eye rolls, gasps, looks of disgust, etc.)—has been recorded and transcribed into written form. The words and nonverbal actions are then sliced and diced into two clear-cut categories: positive and negative. Now we’re going to post the results on the wall and closely evaluate your positive-to-negative ratio. How do you think you’d do? Would you be five-to-one positive or two-to-three negative or maybe even at one-to-one?
To help you move toward a five-to-one marriage, we recommend that you immediately begin to practice three specific actions.
from The First Few Years Of Marriage by Jim Burns & Doug Fields