My friend Ellina Lesnik lives in Ukraine. We hosted Ellina and her husband and three girls this past summer at our home for a 4th of July party. Ellina and her husband have since gone back to Ukraine and are helping to feed hungry people working with Samaritans Purse. Both of them are Christians working to bring the bread of life and bread of heaven to people all over the unoccupied areas of the Ukraine. Reading her emails and facebook posts the struggle and suffering they go through are unimaginable.

She told me this past summer she had written a book titled ‘My Imperfect Marriage’. She opens up her own marriage and the marriage of her own mother and father and shares the abuse, neglect, struggle they have had. Then each chapter of the book tells about a particular marriage in the Bible, of which there are 22, and relates it to her and her parents marriage.

The following is a portion of the introduction:

I promise you that this book is free of sugary perfection, empty romance, and superficial advice. We will talk about difficult family issues, hopeless situations, dead ends, wounded destinies and really bad marriages.

My purpose is to show you, dear reader, that God does not work in perfect marriages, but in ordinary ones. Sometimes even the worst ones. And there is always a lot of hope in His action!

This book has been written to live out in the real world, in real marriages, to give you hope, to encourage you, and to strengthen you as a couple.

If you do nothing but read the introduction to the book and the first chapter you will be encouraged in your own marriage.

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Luke 13: 6-9 (King James Version) Till I shall dig about it and dung it.

Dung it means manure. This fig tree has no fruit so they are ready to cut it down. The gardener says lets give it one more chance to be fruitful.

Are you bearing fruit in your life? Are you useful to God the Father? He will give you another chance to be fruitful. But first he may put manure around you.

How many times have you heard someone say, “My life is full of crap” or something similar? Crap being another name for manure. Well maybe God is just fertilizing you and expecting some new growth from you, that will then bear fruit.