**Beware: This post contains the rantings and ventings of a currently rather moody girl. This post may or may not make any sense at all, and the author shall not be held responsible for any maladies the reader experiences, including dizziness, nausea, loss of sight or speech, or migraine headaches. Thank you.**

Ok, this has been bugging me for a while now. I saw a church billboard just recently that took the saying “The family that prayer together stays together” and changed it into “The family that prays together has a better chance of staying together”.
Is that not the most discouraging thing ever written? I mean, seriously…we are now leaving the idea of families staying together up to pure chance? Even with prayer?
This just makes me downright mad. Why leave it up to chance? Why is it okay for a good family to just be a chance? We’re leaving strong marriages and good families up to LUCK?
My dad always likes to say “Luck is where opportunity and preparation meet.” So if you are prepared and the opportunity comes knocking, consider yourself lucky. But you won’t be lucky if the opportunity comes and you are not prepared.
Same thing goes. Good marriages and good families don’t happen by chance. People don’t stay together by chance. Relationships don’t work out by chance.
You make it work!
Have we become such a passive, churchy, conservative people that we have forgotten how to fight?
We are told by the “good Christians” to be like Jesus, and then given a picture of Jesus, the quiet preacher, the guy that held babies and lambs, so passive and gentle. That’s the Lamb part of Jesus. But what they don’t tell you is that Jesus has another side. He is the Lamb…but He’s also the Lion. He’s the passionate, dangerous, fearsome lover and bold leader! He is the God that works the impossible! He is the Warrior, the Bravest Heart of them all!
Okay, so we’ve got the passive Lamb part down.
Now who’s going to be the Lion?
Who will shun the idea that true love and family and marriage and life and everything good and wonderful only happens by chance? Who will stand and fight?
Bad times come. We live in a fallen world. Life will not be perfect. We carry our past, the past actions and choices of our families, and anything else bad and discouraging the world tacks to our shoulders with us the rest of our lives.
But we can choose to be better. We choose to be one step better than the generation before us. And we choose to prepare the next generation to be one step better than us.
We choose to make marriage work and to make it be for life.
We choose to forgive.
We choose to show grace to those who have stumbled, and to move on.
We choose to not leave our families up to chance, but to fight and to triumph!