For all the books, workshops, seminars and “weekends to remember” that are promoted you’d think that marriage was the most important thing.  Unless you currently have children, then work on your marital relationship can be postponed while you focus on your children.  They are obviously the most important.  Or…not.  I suggest that we can “work on our marriage to a fault.”  What?  With all the breakups, dysfunction and trouble in the home, how could that be?  I say this because changing certain behaviors to make marriage better are good but not ultimate.  Permit an example from another field.  If you were a doctor and someone came to you only wanting relief from symptoms while refusing to deal with their disease, what would you say?  You’d probably give them something for their symptoms AND want to deal with the underlying cause.  This is the real problem with a lot of “marriage work.”  If you are married and your spouse says, “We need to work on our marriage,” it would be a good idea to address the symptoms that raised the subject.  However, the real work of marriage work is the work of personal transformation.  We need to work at becoming the kind of people who can live in harmony with love and respect.  You may have noticed, love and/or respect is very hard “on demand.”  If the underlying issues that have caused selfishness and/or disrespect are unresolved, trying harder with a new set of behaviors will be short-lived.  The message Sunday will be for married and single persons…young and old.  We’ll be looking at the source of our behaviors and consider how to “Become People of Love.”