APPENDIX A: CONCRETE DESCRIPTIONS OF LOVE
1. Love is being willing to have your life complicated by the needs and struggles of your husband or wife without impatience or anger. 2. Love is actively fighting the temptation to be critical and judgmental toward your spouse, while looking for ways to encourage and praise. 3. Love is the daily commitment to resist the needless moments of conflict that come from pointing out and responding to minor offenses. 4. Love is being lovingly honest and humbly approachable in times of misunderstanding, and being more committed to unity and love than you are to winning, accusing, or being right. 5. Love is a daily commitment to admit your sin, weakness, and failure and to resist the temptation to offer an excuse or shift the blame. 6. Love means being willing, when confronted by your spouse, to examine your heart rather than rising to your defense or shifting the focus. 7. Love is a daily commitment to grow in love so that the love you offer to your husband or wife is increasingly selfless, mature, and patient. 8. Love is being unwilling to do what is wrong when you have been wronged but to look for concrete and specific ways to overcome evil with good. 9. Love is being a good student of your spouse, looking for their physical, emotional, and spiritual needs so that in some way you can remove the burden, support them as they carry it, or encourage them along the way. 10. Love means being willing to invest the time necessary to discuss, examine, and understand the problems that you face as a couple, staying on task until the problem is removed or you have agreed upon a strategy of response. 11. Love is always being willing to ask for forgiveness and always being committed to grant forgiveness when it is requested. 12. Love is recognizing the high value of trust in a marriage and being faithful to your promises and true to your word. 13. Love is speaking kindly and gently, even in moments of disagreement, refusing to attack your spouse’s character or assault his or her intelligence. 14. Love is being unwilling to flatter, lie, manipulate, or deceive in any way in order to co-opt your spouse into giving you what you want or doing something your way.
Continued on next page...
Appendix A 44
Made with FlippingBook - Online catalogs