Tough Enough Series

I love what Emily Kingsley says about handling disappointment. She’s talking about the disappointment when your kids don’t turn out the way you thought they would – particularly a handicapped child. But this has far more implication than just for parents.

“I’m often asked to describe the experience of raising a child with a disability. It’s like this: When you’re going to have a baby, it’s like planning a fabulous vacation to Italy. You buy a bunch of guidebooks and make your wonderful plans. You’re going to see the coliseum, the Cistene chapel, the gondolas. You may learn some handy phrases it Italian and it’s all very exciting. After several months of preparation and anticipation, the day finally arrives. You pack your bags and off you go to Italy. Several hours later, the plane lands. The stewardess comes in and says, “Welcome to Holland.” “Holland?” you say. “I signed up for Italy. I’m supposed to be in Italy. All my life I’ve dreamed of going to Italy.” But there’s been a change in the flight plans and we’ve landed in Holland and there you must stay. The important thing to remember is they haven’t taken you to a horrible, disgusting, filthy place filled with pestilence, famine and disease. It’s just a different place. So you must go out and buy new guidebooks and you must learn a new language and you must meet a new group of people that you would never have met before. It’s just a different place. It’s slower paced than Italy and it’s less flashy than Italy. But after you’ve been there for a while and you catch your breath, you begin to look around and you begin to notice that Holland has windmills. And Holland has tulips. And Holland has Rembrandts. But everyone you know is busy coming and going from Italy and bragging about what a wonderful time they’ve had there. And for the rest of your life you’ll say, ‘Yes, that’s where I was supposed to go. At least that’s what I had planned.’ And the pain of that experience will never, ever, ever go away. The loss of that dream is a very significant loss. But, if you spend your life mourning the fact that you didn’t get to Italy, you may never be free to enjoy that very special, very lovely thing about Holland.”

That principle applies to a lot more than just being disappointed in a child. Some of you on your wedding day stood at the altar and you thought you were going to Italy. And today you think you went to Bangladesh!

Training Phase #2—Thoroughly Understanding My Vows

One of the chief determinants of marital toughness is the degree to which your promises to your spouse are current—that is, the degree to which you passionately affirm them today. Marriage counselors and psychologists observe that most married persons’ awareness of the promises they made on their wedding day declines over time.

Many “older-married people” in our society have little more than a superficial understanding of what they pledged to their spouse. Many of them have just taken a “stick it out” form of commitment. Of course of all the vows they took that’s the least important.