I’ve been following the blog of Michelle Arnold, former HA staffer and wife to Rod Arnold, another former TM staff member.
On her anniversary, Michelle wrote a great post about marriage. She starts by saying:
I once heard someone say if you marry the right person, you will never have a fight. That person is drinking a very special Kool-Aid. That’s not reality, unless maybe you’ve only been married a year and live on separate continents. But you know what? It seems that people don’t often talk about the reality of marriage.
It’s a beautiful and honest post. You can read the whole thing here. (2021 Update: Blog has since changed hands to an escort service so link goes to Wayback Machine)
I love that she included the good, the bad and the ugly. This is reality. This is exactly the kind of mentoring and discipleship we need in the body of Christ – real authenticity about real issues. This gives people hope and freedom.
I have no interest in a Christianity that puts a band aid on my deep wounds and tries to pretend that if we follow a few Bible verses, everything in our life will be fixed. That is just not reality.
Thank you, Michelle, for being real and sharing your heart. For helping relieve us of some of the unrealistic burdens of marriage we learned at the Honor Academy.
8 comments:
hooray for sanity!
May 26, 2010 9:34 AM
Z said…
Beautiful description of marriage!
May 26, 2010 10:05 AM
MM said…
The Arnolds are great people. Very down to earth. Listened with you had an issue and gave soild advice when needed. Nothing was a fluff or canned answer with them. They really took the time to understand, listen, and guide.
I would say follow her blog. You will see.
Thank for todays post
MM
May 26, 2010 11:02 AM
Shiloh said…
I put her link in a new tab, and my tab says, ‘Marriage is: Sex in the City.”
haha.
🙂
Thanks for this R.A.!
May 26, 2010 11:54 AM
dan said…
All the Arnold’s are cool people, aren’t they?
What I find pretty silly about TM’s teaching that good marriages don’t involve fights is that it’s the exact opposite of what pretty much every respected relationship expert says. And I’m going to go ahead and lump in people with healthy marriages as “relationship experts”, because anyone who is married, happily or not, knows that thinking you’ll never fight really sounds like a hallucination…after smoking crack. And drinking for hours and hours. In the desert.
Fighting (fairly) is GOOD for a marriage. Conflict resolution brings people closer together, and that goes with friends, coworkers, and yes, spouses. I think it’s not only laughable but dangerous that Teen Mania would teach the “no fighting in marriage” stance.
Oh, and here’s an awesome quote from my old pastor: “The only people who say their marriages are perfect, are men.”
Put that in your pipe…
May 26, 2010 12:09 PM
Anonymous said…
One of the reasons so many marriages fail is because people’s heads have been filled with these idiotic and dangerous ideas like you will never fight if you have a good marriage. Then when they have a problem they think, “I have a bad marriage / This isn’t my soulmate / There’s someone better for me out there.” I had to accept I married someone as flawed and messed up as me. We fight because we’re passionate about our lives and our relationship. We also fight because we’re sinful, selfish people. But through those fights, we identify our sins and selfishness. We get to exercise grace and forgiveness by extending them to each other. We learn humility in admitting we’re wrong and seeking forgiveness. There’s no other relationship in your life you would define as “good” or “bad” based on whether or not you fight!
May 26, 2010 1:32 PM
kristen said…
i love reading michelle’s blog too 😉
May 26, 2010 6:17 PM
Anonymous said…
I worked under Rod Arnold at Teen Mania. I worked for almost a full year under him and underwent quite a few challenges with my job and academic undertakings that happened simultaneously. I think out of every manager I ever had at TMM – he was probably the best. I regret being intimidated to death by him – but it wasn’t just him it was men in general. I regret that our professional relationship ended under the terms that it did and its honestly sort of haunted me for years. I considered that time to be one of my biggest mistakes of my adult life. I will always remember the Christmas party for our department and really seeing the vibrancy in the Arnold family – it was for real. Michelle is also pretty lucky because if you haven’t worked with Mr. Arnold – then you wouldn’t know he was the hottest guy working at TM at the time. It’s true. The intention of this isn’t to start a war about the TM cute factor – but maybe in a way to put that regret out there and really walk away from it. I think I once tried to apologize via myspace – but hey who knows maybe it wasn’t the right guy.
May 26, 2010 8:22 PM