For Better FOREVER, Revised and Expanded. Lisa Popcak

her and let her know how much I love her.”

      When possible, don’t just ask God for help with the specific concerns; ask him to help you do a better job of being there for each other and supporting each other as you address those concerns. God wants you to be each other’s helpmate. Let him teach you how to do it.

       I = Intercede for Others

      Don’t forget to pray for the people in your life who have special needs or concerns. Take a moment to not only ask him for his grace and blessing on them, but to give you the grace and wisdom you need to find ways to be a blessing to those people whenever possible:

      Husband: “Please bless Andy. His son is giving him and his wife such a hard time. Give them your wisdom and grace to know what to do. Lord, sometimes it’s hard to know what to say to him. Help me support him in ways that enable him to draw closer to you through it all.”

      Wife: “And Lord, please bless Ann at church. She is having so many struggles with her health. Strengthen her, and help me find ways to be there for her and make things a little easier on her.”

       S = Seek His Will

      This is similar to asking for God’s help, but it has to do with bigger concerns, which might take a little longer to figure out what God wants you to do about them. Learning the steps of hearing God’s voice (i.e., discernment) is beyond the scope of this book (for more information on this, check out our book, The Life God Wants You to Have), but suffice it to say that when you consistently ask God for his advice and counsel, he will find ways to get through to you. When you’re Christian, everything doesn’t have to be up to you anymore. God wants to help. And when you seek God’s will together, God will speak to both of you so that you can check each other’s math, so to speak.

      Husband: “Lord, we aren’t really sure if we should start looking for a new house. We’re starting to outgrow this one, but everything is so expensive. Help us to know your will, whether that is to stay here or to go somewhere else. Find us the home you would want us to raise your children in. And even though I’m nervous about looking at homes, please give me the wisdom to know what’s really best for us and the courage to do your will, whatever it is.”

      Wife: “Yes, Lord, help us to really know what you want. And even though I really want to move, help me to be sensitive and considerate to my husband’s concerns. Help me to be open to all the ways you want to provide for us. And let us work well together as we try to understand what you want us to do.”

      In addition to asking God to let you know his will, make sure to bring your desires to him in a way that says, “This is what I would like, but your will, not mine.” The good news is that even when God’s will is different from yours, it will still make you happy. He made you, after all. He knows better than anyone else what it is going to take to make you authentically happy. Don’t be afraid to pray for his will.

      While you’re at it, as we showed in the example, when you and your spouse are of different minds about a bigger decision, ask for God’s grace to be sensitive to each other’s concerns and to find ways to be a support to each other as you find your way forward. This will go a long way to preventing those arguments where you each stake out an opposite position and then just verbally hammer away at each other until one of you — resentfully and angrily — surrenders.

      Couple-prayer is especially important when you’re seeking God’s will about any decision that affects your marriage and family life (which is pretty much everything, when you think about it). We regularly talk to couples who pray individually about such big decisions but come to different places in their prayer time. For instance, a wife says that, in prayer, God is telling her it’s time to have a child (or another one) while the husband says that God is telling him to wait. What’s going on here? Is someone lying? Is God sending mixed messages?

      Assuming that both the husband and wife are sincerely seeking God’s will, even if they are coming to different places in their prayer, it may not be that one is mistaken, and it is certainly not that God is sending mixed messages. What we usually find is that God is showing the husband and wife difference pieces of the same puzzle, but that the husband and wife are mistaking their piece for the whole picture. For instance, in the example above, it may be that God is showing the wife that it is time to have another child, but he is showing the husband that it will be important to overcome a particular challenge in the marriage (e.g., already not getting any time together, frequent arguments, etc.), or difficulties with a child they already have, as a way of clearing the road for that next child.

      It isn’t that God is saying “yes” to two different and mutually exclusive ends. Rather, God is giving the husband and wife different pieces of the same puzzle and then asking them to exercise their communication and couple-prayer muscles so that they can learn to be better helpmates to each other, as he teaches them how these two different pieces of the puzzle fit together.

       E = Express Your Desire to Serve Him Until You Meet Again in Prayer

      This is basically where you wrap up. Couple-prayer shouldn’t just be limited to the specific time that you’re sitting together praying. Because your marriage is a sacrament, your whole marriage is a prayer. God wants to use everything that happens in your marriage as a way of opening your hearts to him and to each other. Because of that, it’s a good idea to not just end your prayer and put it away like it was a piece of exercise equipment. Instead, end your prayer with the understanding that God wants to keep reaching out to you both throughout your day. Ask him to help you be attentive to what he is trying to tell you so that the next time you meet in prayer, you will have more to share, more to be thankful for, and more questions to put before him. This way, your whole married life can be the prayer that it is because your whole married life can be an ongoing conversation with God.

      Husband and/or Wife: “Lord, thank you for this time together. Help us to know what you’re saying to us through the things that happen in our lives and all the movements of our heart. Help us to always put your will first. Amen.”

      Concluding your prayer in this manner helps prepare your hearts to receive whatever God might wish to share with you and makes you mindful that God wants to spend every moment of every day with you — not just at prayer time. When you wrap up your couple-prayer time with a request to stay open to the movement of the Holy Spirit, you begin to make a personal connection to the idea that married life is, itself, a prayer. It helps you see the truth in what Archbishop Fulton Sheen once said, that “every moment is pregnant with divine purpose.”