Today is my 15th wedding anniversary, and in honor of my beautiful (inside and out) wife Robin and her supernatural ability to put up with me for so long, I want to share a few lessons I’ve learned along the way. Please hear me: we don’t have it all figured out. We have our ups and downs like any normal marriage, but we’ve made it this far by the grace of God and we’ve picked up a few hard earned lessons along the way:

1. You can never put your marriage on cruise control. You would have thought that after 15 years we would have figured enough out where we could coast for awhile. Wrong. Each of us has a gravitational pull towards our own selfish desires. Cruise control will ultimately take us towards destructive ends. That’s why after 15 years of marriage, I’m still working on how to be a better husband, still fighting so our marriage can stay strong and true. When you stop investing in and working at your marriage, that’s when it starts dying.

2. Kids are a blessing and a burden. We have four kids, all of them 10 and under, which means we haven’t slept in a decade. We wouldn’t trade them for the world, but they’ve brought more stress and more burden than almost anything else in our marriage. Please hear me: kids are the greatest blessing in a marriage and we thank God every day for our four, but if you have kids thinking it’s going to be a cakewalk, then you’re smoking something.

3. Marriage is the greatest cure for selfishness. God was ingenious when he created the institution of marriage, because it’s been the greatest discipleship tool in my entire life. I can learn as much head knowledge as I want to in church, but it’s in my marriage where I actually put it to work. Submitting myself to my wife, letting go of my selfishness, putting her wants and needs above my own, the gritty sweaty work of discipleship, happens in the crux of my marriage.

4. If you can solve money you’ve solved 85% of your arguments. Now I get why Jesus spoke out so strongly against money. It’s not that he was poor and needed anything or he hated money, but he knew the destructive power of money in a marriage. Robin and I have gotten into debt several times and have had to do the hard work of getting right back out. If your aim is to make enough money, you’ll never be satisfied. Throw in a few kids you want to give the world to, and you’ve got the recipe for the majority of your arguments. By far the majority of our arguments as a couple is trying to decide how to spend our limited resources on the unlimited options around us.

5. It’s amazing how much you win when you choose to lose. The most often repeated phrase of Jesus in the gospels is “if anyone loses their life, they will find it.” No truer words were said about the beauty of marriage. It’s amazing how when I choose myself, choose my wants, choose my desires, when I choose to win, I ultimately lose, hurting myself and my family in the process. But when I choose to lose, to put the needs of my family ahead of myself, to give up hobbies and pastimes, to let others choose where we go on vacation this year, it’s amazing how much I end up winning. I guess Jesus was right all along.