Love maps & The Master Architect

This week in class we started some fun assignments.  For starters, we're required to go on a date every week for the next 5 weeks.  Best assignment ever.  And I've been bugging my husband about making date night more of a priority so now that it's an assignment, well, we just have to do it.  O.k., I make it sound like he's not game...he is.  It's just that thing called time.  And money.  But we're encouraged to be creative and I've got some plans for some fun, free date nights so that we don't have to spend money every time we go out.  One of the keys to a long, lasting marriage is the friendship that you share with your spouse.  So the date night assignment is part of that.  Going out to get to know each other better, spend quality time together, etc.
We also took a "Love Maps Questionnaire" from the Seven Principles book by Dr. Gottman.  In this book, he said, "Emotionally intelligent couples are intimately familiar with each other's world.  I call this having a richly detailed love map - my term for that part of your brain where you store all the relevant information about your partner's life."  So in the questionnaire, we answered questions about each other and then got points based on whether or not we answered those questions correctly.  I'm happy to say that my hubs and I did great on this little activity and scored very high!  It's good to see that we've both been paying attention to each other for the past 14 years.  :)
We also read chapter 2 of Drawing Heaven into Your Marriage, by H. Wallace Goddard, PhD.  This, is a great book about drawing God into your marriage and making your marriage stronger by following gospel principles.  As we make Heavenly Father a partner in our marriage, he can do amazing things with us.  I loved this line, "We can ask Father to help us see our partner and his or her struggles with the loving-kindness with which He views them."  I love that.  If we pray to see our spouse the way that Heavenly Father sees them, instead of how we, with our flawed, mortal minds will see them, we will be able to better understand them and love them with a purer heart.  I also loved this.  Dr. Goddard included this passage from C.S. Lewis, "Imagine yourself as a living house.  God comes in to rebuild that house.  At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing.  He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on: you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised.  But presently, He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make sense.  What on earth is He up to?  The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of - throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards.  You thought you were going to be made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace."
Dr. Goddard said of this, "If we trust the Master Architect and appreciate the style of (our house), God will turn our jarring differences into lovely courtyards and magnificent towers."
Isn't that great?  By letting Heavenly Father be the Mater Architect of our lives, including our marriages, he can make us better than we ever imagined.