Every marriage has a cycle of malfunction. This message gives practical steps to turn our malfunction into miracles in our marriages.

Oklahoma Family Retreat 2015: Nothing is Impossible

<p>Every marriage has a cycle of malfunction. This message gives practical steps to turn our malfunction into miracles in our marriages.</p>

<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

Restoration International

Alane Waters

Tom Waters

Malfunction to Miracles

We need the prayers of 1 another, don't we?

And I've just been so impressed by all the young people, the ones that you see out there, the ones that are backstage, not just the young people, some of the adults that are helping to make all this happen.

A lot of things go on behind the scenes, you know, just having the mics ready and all the equipment and the video and the sound.

There's a tendency, at least the natural tendency, is that if nothing squeaks or squawks, then nobody notices anything about the sound people or the audio or the people doing the mics in the background.

If everything goes smoothly, which means they're doing a great job and the Lord is blessing, nobody notices.

But if something goes wrong, everybody notices.

So I just wanted to take a moment to say we're noticing all that's being done here behind the scenes and we're very thankful that the message can go even beyond here and we welcome those of you that are on the live stream this morning.

It's great to have you with us even though you can't be here in body.

So This morning we're going to be talking about something that we're excited about.

Something that we've experienced a lot of in our marriage.

We've experienced a lot of malfunctions in our marriage.

And we have experienced a lot of the miracle working power of heaven and so that's why we're excited this morning because God can take us from all the malfunctions to many miracles And I have to be honest and say that there are still some occasional malfunctions that happen, but we know that His grace is sufficient.

There are many examples we can bring before you today about malfunction.

And we just want you to think about your own marriage and the areas that you trip up in and your pattern of dealing with the conflict.

Because that's what we're going to talk about today.

And like I said, we could give many examples, but obviously the best ones are our own, because we can talk about them very specifically.

So we're going to bring another 1 of our bloopers to you this morning.

And what we want to do is express the situation that happened.

We're going to bring you into our lives, into our story and then we're going to process it.

We're going to dissect it and then We want to look for how we go through it with God's solutions and then the beauty of the outcome of what God will do for every 1 of us as we cooperate with Him and turning those malfunctions into beautiful miracles.

So this, you want me to talk or you want to talk?

This experience happened very early in our marriage.

By the way, wives are very good, that's why I said she could talk, because I just give you a quick overview, but wives are very good, generally speaking, to be able to, what am I wrinkling your shirt?

No, well the shoulder's coming down here.

They're very good at being able to express the malfunction in very articulate ways.

Okay, we had just been married less than 2 months, right around the 2 month mark, and my husband had been invited to be a groomsman and a special music singer in a friend's wedding.

Now obviously we knew that before we were married.

We were engaged and a little while later his friend was engaged somebody he worked an x-ray with and this friend asked him to be a participant in there in his wedding so like any healthy couple in love we discuss this because we realized it was right on the heels of our marriage, of our wedding.

So we discussed it prior to him accepting it.

We figured out how it was all going to work.

And he accepted that honor of being in his friend's wedding.

The challenge, or 1 of the challenging points about this was the wedding did not occur where we lived, there in a suburb of Chicago.

It was going to be back in the Boston area.

So it was all figured out well ahead of time, how we would handle it, and what we would do, and then the time came for this friend's wedding.

We had decided that, well we both came from families that were savers, okay?

And that's been a huge blessing to us over 35 years of marriage.

So we haven't had a lot of conflict over finances.

Yeah, wife to be at the time we were discussing it.

That it would probably be more practical financially for her to stay home.

She didn't really know any of the people that were going to be in the wedding.

It was going to be a relatively quick trip.

I would be completely consumed in my responsibilities.

Believe me, we aren't buying it anymore either.

But anyway, this was the logic that we were using and I was using particularly and it made sense to you, right?

I agreed with it because I thought you know, that's all right.

I can stay home you know when you first start a home there's a lot of things especially as ladies like to do to make it feel like our home and so I thought well I can you know be fixing up things around home and And I really anticipated just kind of a turnaround time, you know, just a turnaround time.

This was all decided before he accepted the offer to be in the wedding.

Well, as we were married and it was time to book the tickets, it became evident to us that in order for him to get there for all the preliminary events that happened before the wedding he needed to be there on Friday which means he needed to leave on Thursday because he's going east.

So the weekend is growing and because the wedding is Sunday afternoon, he is going to be coming home on Monday.

So this short turnaround weekend all of a sudden grew by another day plus.

Well that's alright too, I mean I do have things to occupy my time.

So we prepared and I can remember driving him to the airport.

This is the days when you could actually go in.

You could go right to the gate with the person you were going to be putting, you know, sending off on the plane.

You just didn't just drop them off at the curb and say goodbye.

You could actually spend every last second with them until they got on the plane.

Well the first surprise I had as we got to the airport is that he said, just drop me off.

That's why I'm having you tell this story.

He figured I'd have less time away from work if I just would drop him off, I could, you know, get right back on the road and get back to work.

But in my heart, I was actually thinking of you.

Of course, you're just had to remind me that I was thinking of you.

So anyway, in my heart, where did I want to be as a new wife?

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Malfunction to Miracles

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Sound Doctrine