The Most Essential Ingredient For A Mature Relationship

Mark Gungor

Every married couple looks forward to having a stable, secure and mature relationship; one where difficult issues have been resolved, where the understanding and rules of the relationship have been firmly established and where both parties feel secure and understood.

Unfortunately or fortunately, there is one ingredient that is essential for any relationship to become mature and that is this: time.

Even if you do everything right, time is the only way to grow your weak and immature relationship into one that is solid and mature.

In our culture of entitlement and instant-gratification, that's difficult for many people to understand.

But there are no short cuts, and there is no fast forward button.

Growing a relationship simply takes time.

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God bless your family and your marriage.

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Personal Testimony by Jim Stephens.

Many years ago I was getting very frustrated at how slow I was changing and the pace of the improvements in my life. I was scheduled to give a lecture on the principles of growth and so I decided to pray to God and ask why it's so hard to grow.

I wanted a good answer, not only for myself, but one that I could easily explain to my audience that made practical sense to them.

The answer that God gave to my prayer was to think about the process of having a child. He said something like, "Suppose a husband and wife decide to have a child. They go to bed at night and make love. Then the next morning the wife gives birth to the baby."

Then I thought about all kinds of other things too. Suppose you plant an acorn in the ground and come back the next day and there is a tall oak tree in it's place.

Life would be totally chaotic, right?

Not only that, but the whole process of such fast growth would be missing the most essential ingredient of all - LOVE.

Lots and lots of changes take place gradually for that husband and wife over the nine months that it takes to have a baby. Not only physical changes, but emotional changes and intellectual changes that are much more important. A man and woman are transformed into a father and a mother. It's a miracle.

All of the relating that takes place, the giving and receiving, is the expression of love being manifest. That's what time is all about.

Time is the stuff that life is made of. Giving your time is in reality giving your life. And time was meant to be the process by which love was to be manifest into reality.

Each moment in time is another opportunity to manifest love through energy exerted for others.

The time it takes for growth is another expression of the love of God.