My friends and I have been doing a terrible job keeping up with this blog this summer.  No excuses.  As fall approaches, we hope to revive this site and bring some new energy to our ministry and our marriages.

Recently, our community was shaken by a murder-suicide that took the daughter of one of our most prominent and generous families.  Events like this, which drastically change the trajectories of numerous lives are, mercifully, pretty rare.  I pray virtually every day that God’s will for me and my family does not include a tragedy like this.  For the grieving family, most of what follows will seem like empty words; their solace will come from God and leaning into one another.  For others, I hope you can find some useful ideas below.

As we have pointed out numerous times on this site, love is an action, not a feeling. Feelings come and go, while the actions of our wills are up to us; we are in control of our wills.  Thus, we have the ability to be in control of our relationships.  Much the same can be said for happiness.  We have the ability to create our own happiness.  Heck, there are even exercises we can do to upgrade our own happiness.

In her book The How of Happiness: A New Approach to Getting the Life You Want, author Sonja Lyubomirsky takes a clinical approach to examining the subject of happiness. This study is briefly summarized in one of my favorite blogs, The Generous Husband. As blogger Paul Byerly observes, this is an important subject, as happy, effective, successful people have better marriages.