Rusty Motors, Plastic Milk Cartons and Gunny Sacks
Or How to Make a Marriage Green
I have been thinking about this article for awhile. How am I going to come up with a concept of marriages being green? Ron and I have been married for 28 years this coming August and we aren’t the spring chickens that we once where. There are some aches and pains Ron turned 50 this last winter and I teased him about trading him in for two 25 year olds. But after all the time we have been together I wouldn’t trade him for any other man in the world. So…I’ll have to recycle and reuse making it a greener and better place for marriage.
Like a rusty old motor pulled out of a 28 years old car, the motor can be fixed and reused by a backyard mechanic. They are great at finding new parts and working and reusing the parts that are still good. Just like the reuse of trust in our marriage. That has been built, tried and restructured. I won’t lie to you and tell you that the trust have never been broken between us. After 28 years we both have screwed up and hurt each other and broken the trust. But we looked at each other and made the decision that our marriage was important enough to rebuild and go forward. The ironic thing about it is our trust is stronger now because it has been tested and we learned the lesson of the work it took to rebuild and strengthen it.
Plastic gallon milk cartons can be recycled into so many different things. I’ve cut the bottom out of them and used them to protect the plants in the garden during early spring. I’ve cut the top off using them as a container holding anything that needs a bin. Each child had one for mittens one year. My hubby would cut the bottom off and take the lid off using it as a funnel. I could add the support in a marriage as being recycled and used in different ways. How one day it is my turn to support my husband and the next day his turn to support me in a decision I have made. I’ve reused and recycled that support over and over again. The beautiful thing about this is it doesn’t keep track of who used the support last it is just there waiting for whoever needs it.
Gunny sacks are a multi-purpose item that we used on the farm. We received them full of hog feed. The kids took pigs to the local youth fair every year since our oldest was six years old through high school. After they were emptied we would recycle and reuse them in a variety of ways. The kids would put wood on them and drag them up to the house in winter and slide down the hill back to the wood pile. They were used as rough dry off towels in the summer for animals and people and warming blankets in the winter. Love is the same way, it can be thrown around us warming us in the winter and drying us off in the summer. Love it tough and can be used to keep your marriage feeling good and taking care of the other person. It is capable of taking care of all the little trials and tribulations that come up between you and your spouse. Adding the love will help you through any tough spots.
So, there you go a couple of great ways to keep, recycle and reuse the things to keep your marriage green and growing. We want so much to lead in the fight of helping others to see that marriage is important and worth fighting for!
So what do you do to keep your marriage green?
Ron and Shawn make up the “Odd Couple.” We are a husband and wife team who have been together for the last 27 years. We have laugh, cried, fought, made up, and made more mistakes then any two people could. Through it all we have raised the greatest three kids in the world! We would like to offer you a free report we put together titled 10 Marriage Help Tips Report with video. Click here for the report. Here is a picture of us at the World Famous Ft Worth, TX Stockyards
Well this is probably a stretch and since my relationship is only about 15 months old we probably haven’t hit a recycle point yet…. but, I think of recycling as revisiting and tweaking previous issues that have surfaced in previous relationships (or the current one) and pulling some usefulness out of that and working it forward in a positve way. IE: learning from mistakes?
I’m not sure that I could find uses for gunny sacks, milk cartons, or old engines in a marriage. But, one thing I would never try to do would be to recycle old feelings of pain- they tend to make things worth less. Old feelings- the ones the marriage start with- they need constant recycle and rebirth.