Search Results: lent
Natural Fertility
True love cannot be contained; it always gives life in some form, bursting forth from the couple with irrepressible urgency. For most couples, this life-giving impulse will result in the biological birth of a child. For others, it will be expressed in a shared effort to generously give of their time and talents to others.…
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Change Reaction
It’s easy to see how couples get stuck when ‘being right’ has become a habit. Clinging to our ‘right to be right’ is like gangrene in a relationship….
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A Sacramental Season
It’s ‘Sacrament Season’ in Australia: children are busily preparing to make their first Confession, first Holy Communion or Confirmation. Meanwhile, weddings are playing catch up following months of pandemic restrictions. A life-long encounter As parents, we had high ambitions for the sacramental preparation of our children. Good intentions, however, struggled against the time drought of…
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#1 Marriage as a Mission
What does it mean to make ‘marriage our mission’? With our guest, Philipa Caulfield, we break it down and explore how we’ve done it and why we need it. Guest: Philipa Caulfield, with her husband Luke, are SmartLoving super-sponsors. They’ve been accompanying engaged couples for over ten years and have featured in some of the…
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Restoring hope in life long marriage
Divorce creates a problem for us, a cognitive dissonance: Love is not permanent, vast, unrelenting, faithful. Redefining the ideals we have for marriage however, leads to more divorce and pain, not less.
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The Family Models Synodality
Only two of our five children, now adults, still reside with us. As resident adults, we respect their right to make decisions about their personal life, but we also impose some house rules. For example, we require them to communicate about their movements, tidy their rooms, do their own laundry, and participate in the preparation…
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Making the connection: It’s easy with these three tips
In times of challenge and stress, it’s especially important to make the connection with each other. Here we offer three tips to make it easier. We recently analysed the feedback from 400 participants in our online marriage preparation course. The results to the question, “On which of the following areas would you like more formation/education”,…
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SmartLoving Keys
On a mission to love… Every couple wants to avoid divorce and get along without too many fights. A successful marriage however, is much more than just this; it is a life-long union in which both husband and wife flourish as individuals and enjoy a deep and passionate intimacy. Thinking only in terms of ‘avoiding…
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Smiling Saints
St Valentine is the one saint with a feast day (Feb 14) that is known by millions of people, including non-Christians. But how many know why he is a saint? The back story is that Valentine, a Roman priest at the time of Claudius II, was imprisoned for conducting secret weddings against the orders of…
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The Nature of Love
We all ‘know’ what love is: it’s that feeling of affection and attachment we experience for another person. But is love just a feeling? Or is there more to it?
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