Learn to make pie!

What is the secret to staying together? If you have been married for a couple years I am sure you have had this question posed to you. As a high school teacher I was asked this all the time, with the state of marriage in 2018 teenagers find marriages that last more than 10 years to be quite a mystery! While this makes me sad I love that they ask! So I have a lot of different things I like to talk to them about...

Know who Christ is and marry someone that also knows, if someday you cannot find a single thing to agree on you can agree on Christ!  

Look at how the one you are wanting to marry treats his/her opposite sex parent... are you ok with it? Because that is exactly how they will treat you someday. 

Love is a daily choice, not an emotion that comes and goes. LOVE IS A CHOICE!

Don't just marry the one you love, love the one you marry.

If you are a very selfish person don't get married. (harsh I know but true)

Those are just a few examples of things we discuss, I try to never overwhelm them with too much information so often we just talk a out one of those topics but it never fails I tell them to learn to make pie.

I know you are curious... is she being serious? I can't bake a pie? Really does she think so little of her marriage that a good pie can fix all the problems? Or is her marriage so easy a pie is all it takes to fix their problems?!

Haha no! BIG FAT NO! Just bare with me...

As a teenager, I grew up in a rural area in the very NW corner of Arkansas... right where Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri, and Kansas meet. There is not much there except farms, churches, and communities where everyone knows your business. Its a little bit of heaven if you ask me. Anyway, so my older sisters use to clean house for a hardworking farmers wife... well she was a farmer too, she would rather be out with the cattle than in her house cleaning to be honest. Every Wednesday afternoon Mom would drop them of to clean and after a few weeks I noticed something... she always had two fresh pies on her oven. Not just pies folks... perfect flaky crust perfections!! I had heard people from various activities with our 4-H club say "oh is that Ms Jan's pie? I need a piece right now!" or if we did a pie auction fundraiser they always sold well... often to her husband. So of course one afternoon we were there to pick up the twins and not sure who asked but the question was asked "How did you learn to make pies so well?" Remember what I said... she would rather be out working cattle than in the house most days. I was probably 10 or 11 at the time and her answer has stuck with me all these years! I consider it to be some of the the best marriage advice I have ever heard and put into practice.

Her answer went something like this (or atleast this is what I remember)...

Well you see I am very stubborn and so is my husband, we got married young, probably too young. Within the first few weeks of being married we had a big fight and I headed to my momma's house, but you know what she told me? "Go back, you are married, this isn't your house. You need to work it out." I was mad! Really mad and not sure what to do. So my momma suggested I go make my husband a pie! Can you believe it??? Make him a pie? Well he was being bullheaded and not making any sense and on and on my reasons went to NOT make him a pie. But you know what I did when I got home? I made him not one but TWO pies! I didn't just make any kind of pies either... I made HIS favorite pies, not mine. You know what I learned from making those two pies? I couldn't stay mad at someone I am doing an act of selfless kindness for. So from then on when we would have an argument or I would get so mad I would want to head to my parents house, I went to the kitchen and made pie... often two, depending on how mad I was. Needless to say I got really good at making pies! My husband and I learned to work out our differences and now I don't make pies because I am mad, I make them because I love to. 

Now if you ask my husband if I make a lot of pies he would say no, but thats not what I learned. What I learned is that just when I am so mad I want to throw in the towel (yes I have those days!!) if I will stop thinking about how hurt I am and instead do a labor of selfless love that is only something Nick would appreciate I find my self able to forgive, see the situation more clearly, and work through it with more productive results.  I am not saying this will solve ALL marriage problems, I a not that simpleminded... what I am saying is that successful marriages are 100% a selfless act. The only way to make a marriage work is to be like Christ, to lay down your will, lay down your pride, and take on the heart of a servant. I truly believe the root of so many marital issues if the seed of selfishness. The only way to keep that seed from growing is to till it out throw act of selflessness. 

Don't go stress yourself out trying to make a pie! My tall, dark, and handsome prefers cookies haha! But take the time to find something your husband/wife would love, something that takes some time and effort to accomplish... maybe even something they know you don't particularly enjoy doing and DO IT WELL!!

1 Corinthians 13

1 If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. 2 And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. 3 If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.


4 Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant 5 or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; 6 it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. 7 Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

8 Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. 9 For we know in part and we prophesy in part, 10 but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away. 11 When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways. 12 For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.
13 So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.