40 Days to Strengthen Your Marriage and Impact the World - Introduction

Smile, lot’s of people are watching. Your marriage matters to a lot of people. If you have a healthy marriage, your children and many others will benefit from your example. You will leave a mark that will impact the world long after you’re gone. Unfortunately, successful marriages are on the decline in America. Statistics show that since 1960, the percentage of people in America who are married has steadily declined, the number of people who are divorced has increased, the number of people living together unmarried has increased sharply, and the number of married people who say they are very happy with their marriage has declined. (If you want to check out lots of statistics, visit http://marriage.rutgers.edu/) More troubling to us is the fact that less than 40% of high school seniors believe they will live fuller and happier lives if they choose legal marriage. We believe that just seeing one healthy marriage would change a young person’s mind.
But this book is not about statistics. It is about your marriage. It was written as a simple tool to help you succeed in marriage. It was written to help normal couples strengthen their marriage. It is written in plain language in short, readable chapters. It doesn’t ignore the tough challenges that some marriages face.
Marriage is not rocket science. Average people can succeed at it if they try.
This book was written for a man and wife to read together and to talk about together. How do you read a book together? Any of these approaches will work: take turns reading out loud, one reads out loud while the other listens (just make sure you’re both awake) or, read silently sitting side by side. Read it and then talk about it. Each chapter offers something to talk about at the end of the chapter.
This book was intended to be read, one chapter per day, for forty days. The chapters are all about the same length and will each take about 5 to 10 minutes to read. But the point is to strengthen your marriage, not just say you read the chapters. If you get off schedule, don’t panic, just pick up where you left off. You may come across something that sparks several days of discussion and you may choose to stay on that topic for a while until you get back into the book. If you take 40 weeks to get through the book, we don’t care. We just want you to succeed in your marriage.
We rely unapologetically on the Bible in this book. We believe that God invented marriage and the Bible shows us how to have a healthy one. Our hope and prayer is that your marriage will grow stronger and that you will be a blessing to everyone who knows you.