Love and War: Finding the Marriage You've Dreamed Of, Vol. 5 Book

Love and War: Finding the Marriage you've Dreamed Of
John and Stasi Eldredge
Book Notes

1. Asking for your marriage to flourish without God is like asking a tree to blossom without sun and water.
2. In marriage, you have been entrusted with the heart of another human being: loving and defending this heart next to you is part of your great quest.
3. Marriage is going to ask everything of you for:
a. Marriage is hard work; and
b. We are a royal mess
4. We all have a way that we do life: the way we handle pressure, the way we listen, the way we look for happiness, and the way we control our world. This way we do life is called our style of relating.
5. Our style of relating is borne out of brokenness and sin; it is the number one thing that gets in the way of real love and real companionship.
6. God has created an environment that will challenge our style of relating. This environment is called marriage.
7. If we are to be happy in marriage and relationships, we must deal with our brokenness, our sin, and our style of relating.
8. In order to learn how to love, we must have compassion for our spouse's brokenness. We must also make the 1,000 little choices to turn from our style of relating.
9. We must make the deliberate choice to love.




10. To understand our spouse, we must understand the story of their life. Devote time to hear your spouse's story.
11. Shift focus of our energy from needing the other person to change to asking God, how do I need to change? Make shift from changing you to changing me.
12. Romance requires free hearts: pressure on the other hand, kills everything in touches.
13. There is all sort of joy to be found in your marriage, once you stop looking to your spouse to make you happy.
14. Create an environment where over time and intentionality, you are nurturing companionship. Every day is unrealistic, once a month is not often enough, it is somewhere in between.
15. Recognize what satan is doing in our lives. Are we actually praying against it on a regular basis?
16. Spiritual attack must be a category you think in, or you will misunderstand more than half of what happens in your marriage.
17. Top three things to help your marriage; find life in God, deal with my brokenness, and learn to shut down the spiritual attacks that come against my marriage.
18. Adventure builds companionship in a marriage; it awakes us from the dulling effect of the daily grind.
19. To cultivate an adventurous marriage, start dreaming a little as a couple. What are we looking forward to together?
20. Write down all the thing we would love to do in the coming year. Do this exercise alone and then come together to talk about your dreams and desires. See what might happen.
21. In order to find a shared adventure, in order to cultivate something beautiful, you have to choose the pace of your life. You have to choose to move toward your spouse with desire and intentionality.
22. A marriage needs a mission. It is essential to a vibrant marriage.
23. Boredom is the death knell for a couple.
24. What you make of your marriage depends on how you look at it.
25. Seek a mission that God has for you. Ask God what He has for us to do as a couple.
26. The law of entropy in a marriage works as follows: all things decline to the lowest common denominator.
27. Making decisions is probably the number one source of stress, tension, anxiety, pouting, manipulation, and argument in marriage.
28. Do not judge motive, you really do not know another person's motives.
29. The valley of speculation is the enemy's terrain; so many critical moments turn on interpretation.
30. Fight for a sexual life that is frequent and deeply satisfying for both spouses. Do not surrender this precious gift of God.