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Saturday, August 13, 2011

BookDaily Update

 
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Sunday August 14, 2011

Scarlet Fever: HillCountry Heart Series

By Sable Hunter
ISBN: 9781456353476
 

Scarlet Rose Evans had a bucket list - “100 Things I Want To Do Before I Die”. She sat up in her bed, her bottom cushioned on a thick pillow, notepad on her lap, and crossed off two items on her list. #57 had been a disappointment; War and Peace was depressing, and she didn’t want to waste any time being depressed. #14, however, had made her smile; even if it had made her bottom sore. Scarlet had giggled while trying to hold a hand-mirror at just the right angle so she could see the small, scarlet-red rose that now graced the top of her left hip.

If the Board of Deacons had any inkling that the Church Administrator of Pine Forest’s Lutheran congregation now ...

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Lucille Mulhall: An Athlete Of Her Time

By Cynthia Kay Rhodes
ISBN: 9781609762322
 

Before the turn of the twentieth century, most women would not dream of engaging in “men’s work.” Women were expected to ride sidesaddle, wear skirts, and most women did not race their pony like lightning after a prairie wolf. Regardless of society’s rules, these were the things Lucille Mulhall loved. Growing up on her family’s ranch in Oklahoma, she learned to do cowboy chores: rope, train horses, and brand cattle—and she did it better than most men.

Recognizing his daughter’s natural talent, Colonel Zack Mulhall encouraged Lucille to enter the world of show business. From steer roping competitions to vaudeville acts to Wild West shows, Lucille entertained ...

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Today's Business & Economics Chapter

 
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Business & Investing
Sunday August 14, 2011
The Investment Answer
by Daniel C. Goldie
 

The Decisions

CHAPTER 1

The Do-It-Yourself Decision

DO-IT-YOURSELF

The do-it-yourself (DIY) approach is increasingly popular in some industries: home repair and renovation, decorating, self-publishing, and fashion. However—we are not going to beat around the bush here—in most cases, we do not believe it is prudent when it comes to investing. Finance is complex, the odds are stacked against you, and the stakes are very high: your entire financial future. Most people would never make serious medical decisions without consulting a doctor. We believe you should take care of your financial health the same way you take care of your physical health—with the appropriate professionals by your side!

Attempting to invest on your own can be difficult, time-consuming, and emotionally taxing. Most individual investors do not have the skills or the inclination to manage their own investments. However, even for those who do, this may not be a good idea. In today’s world of global markets and complex financial instruments, professionals have access to superior resources. It is difficult for an individual investor to effectively put together and maintain an efficient portfolio that is properly diversified, minimizes fees and taxes, and avoids overlapping assets. In addition, the ongoing monitoring of your portfolio and maintenance of your desired risk exposure can be challenging and overwhelming without access to the tools that are used by competent professional financial advisors.

What’s more, our own natural instincts can be our worst enemy when it comes to investing. This is illustrated in an annual study conducted by Dalbar, a leading financial services market research firm that investigates how mutual fund investors’ behavior affects the returns they actually earn. Figure 1-1 shows data from the most recent Dalbar study covering the 20-year period ending in 2009:

  • The average stock fund investor earned a paltry 3.2 percent annually versus 8.2 percent for the S&P 500 Index;

  • The average bond fund investor earned only 1.0 percent annually versus the Barclays U.S. Aggregate Bond Index return of 7.0 percent; and

  • What is perhaps most remarkable and unfortunate is that the average stock fund investor barely beat inflation, and the average bond fund investor barely grew his money at all.

How could this happen? The simple answer is that we tend to buy stocks and bonds after their prices have risen. We do this because we feel comfortable and confident when markets are up. Similarly, when markets have experienced a downturn, fear sets in and we are often quick to sell. This behavior can result in our buying at or near market highs, and selling at or near market lows, thus failing to capture even a market rate of return.

Figure 1-2 illustrates what we call the emotional cycle of investing and how it can cause us to make costly mistakes.

Certainly the media and the Wall Street brokerage industry are motivated to contribute to this phenomenon. As you search for your next great investment idea, you might read a financial periodical such as Fortune, Forbes, or Money, or you might tune into CNBC, Bloomberg, or Fox Business News, all of whom try to turn investing into entertainment. Then when the hook is in and you decide to act on some new idea, your transactions will put additional commissions in your broker’s pockets. Many financial institutions still take far too big a cut as you move your money from one hyped investment to another.

There are many behavioral inclinations that work to our detriment as long-term investors. For example, do any of the following sound familiar?

Overconfidence. A general disposition to be overconfident can help society in many ways. For example, without this bias, many new inventions, companies, and pioneering research would never come about. However, we need to understand that overconfidence with regard to investing can be detrimental to our financial health. Success in one walk of life does not automatically translate to success in investing. Unfortunately, many highly accomplished people have learned this lesson the hard way—through severe investment losses.

Attraction to rising prices. When the prices of most consumer goods such as gasoline or beef rise, people tend to either cut back or find a substitute. However, with financial assets the opposite seems true. Many investors are more attracted to a stock whose price has risen than one whose price has fallen because we incorrectly extrapolate past price changes into the future. Likewise, mutual funds that have done the best recently are aggressively purchased, while recent underperformers are sold. It is important to know that with investments, past performance is not indicative of future results.

Herd mentality. There is a comfort in being part of a group. When others do something we are more comfortable doing the same. A recent example is the influx of money into mortgage-backed securities and risky loans, and the debacle that followed. Of course, history has shown that when the herd moves in one direction it may be time to consider going the other way. (See chapter 5, The Rebalancing Decision, for how to avoid this problem).

Fear of regret. We are often reluctant to make investment decisions for fear they will turn out badly. For example, have you ever left money sitting uninvested because you were afraid to enter the market at the wrong time? Our view is that the right time to invest is when you have the money and the right time to sell is when you need the money.

Affinity traps (Bernie Madoff, anyone?). Instead of doing our own research, how often do we make an investment simply because we have mutual ties to an organization, or because it was recommended by a respected friend or famous person?

Certainly, there are other emotions that are hazardous to our financial health if left unchecked. Many of us can relate to an observation made by the economic historian Charles Kindleberger, author of the classic Manias, Panics and Crashes: “There is nothing so disturbing to one’s well-being and judgment as to see a friend get rich.”

Market fluctuations cause us to continuously battle against our biases. We need discipline to counter these normal human tendencies. The right discipline begins with an understanding of how markets work. It establishes a process that allows us to focus our time and effort on those things we can control. This helps us achieve our investment goals more efficiently and with less worry.

It is very difficult to accomplish this on your own without a good steward in your corner. This is why we believe most investors who are serious about managing their wealth should seek the assistance of a professional. A qualified financial advisor should bring discipline and clarity to the investment process and help you avoid behavioral traps that can impede your ability to realize your financial goals.

If you agree with us, the question then becomes which type of advisor to choose: a retail broker or an independent, fee-only advisor.

Years ago, before the widespread availability of independent, fee-only advisors, retail brokers were the primary means of obtaining investment advice. Now you have a choice. There are significant differences between the two that you must understand.

RETAIL BROKERS

Retail brokers are commissioned agents compensated by their firm or a third party for selling you investment products. Traditionally known as stock brokers, today they call themselves Financial Advisors and Financial Consultants. Despite the titles they put on their business cards, they should not be confused with independent, fee-only advisors.

Retail brokers typically offer two different types of accounts—a “classic” brokerage account and an investment advisory account.

Brokerage Account

With a brokerage account your broker will act as an agent for his firm. In this capacity, your broker’s first duty is to his firm, not to you, even though you are his customer. While he may offer the periodic stock tip or some occasional advice, that is incidental to his main business of generating trades and commissions.

With this type of account, your broker is not held to the legal standards of the Investment Advisers Act of 1940, which requires that anyone who offers both investment advice and charges an asset-based or flat fee to register as an investment advisor. According to the law, advisors must disclose any conflicts of interest and put their clients’ interests first. You do not get this protection with a brokerage account.

With a brokerage account, you should be aware of these potential conflicts and drawbacks inherent in the relationship:

Your broker is:

  • better compensated for generating more trades;

  • better compensated for selling certain investment products over others; and

  • limited to selling the investment products approved by his firm.

Investment Advisory Account

With an investment advisory or “managed account” your broker may offer many services such as financial planning and advice on the selection of investment managers and investment products—all for a single fee.

With managed accounts, your broker is held to the legal standards of the 1940 Advisers Act. He is therefore considered to have a fiduciary relationship with you and must disclose any conflicts of interest and put your interests first. While these advisory accounts eliminate much potential for abuse, there are drawbacks with this model as well.

For example, the broker is still limited to offering only his firm’s menu of approved investment products. In addition, the investment managers or mutual funds he recommends to you may be paying his brokerage firm to be included as an approved investment for all its clients.

It also might be the case that the investments you have through your broker’s current firm may not be transferrable to another firm. This could mean having to sell your investments, potentially triggering costly capital gains, to move your account to another firm, either to switch to a new broker or to follow your current broker when he moves to a new firm.

The Name Game and Changing Hat Tricks

It is important to keep in mind that regulators have done a poor job of policing the dozens of misleading titles that brokers often use. This means that you are on your own when it comes to asking the hard questions about whether they really work for you. Don’t believe those glitzy ads that you see in the Wall Street Journal or on TV about how they work just for you.

To complicate things even more, not all brokers work for Wall Street firms, although they still face the same conflicts and incentives. Some brokers may call themselves independent because technically they are not employees of a Wall Street firm. Instead, they are independent contractors of a brokerage house that might even be based in your home town. There are some 5,000 such firms around the country with thousands of branch offices. To clear things up, simply ask if they are a registered representative—this is the technical term used by all brokers. If so, they are not truly independent.

Closely related to the name game is the hat changing issue when dealing with someone who is registered as an advisor and broker. While brokers are required to act in a fiduciary role when giving investment advice under the 1940 Advisers Act, they can “switch hats” and act as a salesperson when selling you other investment or retirement products. This can be a problem because, with any advice you receive, you’ll need to ascertain whether it’s for your benefit, or because they’re getting a commission on the sale. In short, you need to be wary of a potential “bait and switch” problem caused by gaps in the law.

INDEPENDENT, FEE-ONLY ADVISORS

In contrast to brokers, independent, fee-only advisors are always legally required to act as fiduciaries to their clients. This means that they must put their clients’ interests first. Also, independent, fee-only advisors should be more closely aligned with their clients because they are generally free from the conflicts, constraints, and pressures that brokers face.

Compensation

An independent advisor will generally calculate his fee as a percentage of the amount of money he is managing for you. Because of economies of scale, this percentage fee generally declines as your account size increases. Unlike a broker, whose fees are often buried in hard-to-read disclosure documents, an advisor’s compensation is described in a straightforward, transparent fashion. Also, unlike a broker, an independent advisor only receives compensation from you. He does not receive payment from the investments he selects for you or commissions from moving your money back and forth between investments.

Custody of Your Assets

An independent, fee-only advisor should use a third-party custodian (a firm like Charles Schwab or Fidelity) to serve as the safe-keeper of your investments. These firms are responsible for ensuring that your money is in a separate account under your name with your advisor only having the limited authority to manage the account on your behalf. You receive regular statements, trade confirmations, and other information about your account directly from your custodian. Under no circumstances should you work with any advisor that takes custody of your money himself. This is how Bernie Madoff and others were able to steal from their clients.

We want to say again that an advisor is a fiduciary who must put your interests ahead of his own. Without the financial incentive to generate more trades or sell higher margin products, or the limitations of only having his firm’s approved investment offerings, an advisor is free to use any money manager or type of investment product that he feels is best for you.

A capable advisor can help you stay disciplined and avoid the temptation to move money from security to security, market to market, or money manager to money manager—particularly at times when the potentially destructive emotions of fear or greed set in. Because independent, fee-only advisors are not spending their time thinking about how to generate additional revenue from your account, they have the capacity to help you with many other important financial decisions—such as retirement and estate planning, insurance questions, and whether to refinance your mortgage.

In our opinion, the difference is clear: A broker is working for his firm. An independent fee-only advisor is working for you.

HOW TO SELECT AN INDEPENDENT, FEE-ONLY ADVISOR

Finding the right independent, fee-only advisor for you is important. You don’t want to hire an advisor only to later feel like you want to make a change. Getting the right person from the start will save you both emotionally and financially.

We have found that there are two areas of “fit” that are essential for having a long-term, successful relationship with an advisor:

  1. Investment philosophy. There are many different philosophies and methods of managing investments and providing financial advice. After reading this book, you will have a clear sense of the investment approach that you feel is best. You want to find an advisor that shares your investment philosophy and thinks about investing and markets the same way that you do. Of course, you want your advisor to have—and be able to articulate well—a clear set of investment beliefs and methods. If he does not have a clearly defined view or cannot communicate it well, you should look for a different advisor.

  2. Personal connection and trust. You will be establishing a close working relationship with your advisor—sharing important personal information (both financial and emotional) about yourself and your family. To do his job best, your advisor needs to know you well. In addition to the financial facts, he needs to understand your feelings about money, and your dreams and aspirations for the future. Do not hire an advisor if you don’t feel comfortable sharing this information with him!

Some other things to consider as you interview potential advisors include:

  • Professional qualifications—An advisor who has earned one or more professional designations has demonstrated a commitment to education and professionalism, and at least reasonable proficiency in his field. Some common professional financial designations include: Certified Financial Planner (CFP), Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA), and Certified Public Accountant (CPA).

  • Education—As you might inquire about a potential employee’s formal education, knowing where an advisor went to school and what he studied can help indicate his level of general intelligence, knowledge, and ability to problem-solve.

  • Experience—Financial advisors often have a variety of careers before they become advisors. Knowing an advisor’s work history can help you evaluate his level of experience and relative success. You should be careful before engaging an advisor who is very new to the profession or has not demonstrated success in financial services or a related pursuit such as accounting.

  • Business structure—Advisory firms have a variety of organizational structures. Some advisors work as solo practitioners. Others work in small professional partnerships, and a few work in larger organizations with many employees and advisors. There are advantages and disadvantages of each structure, and you want to be sure you understand how a business is set up before you become a client.

  • Services offered—Some advisors only offer asset management while others offer a more complete set of services that usually includes personal financial planning (sometimes called wealth management). It can be helpful to work with an advisor who incorporates financial planning into his practice because investment decisions should be made only after considering one’s overall financial situation.

  • Current clients—You should ask a potential advisor about the types of clients he works with and who he feels is his ideal client. You don’t want to be an unusual client—it is better to fit well within an advisor’s client base so that you benefit from his experiences with others like you.

(Continues...)

 
 
 
 
 
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Siemens Wins Contract Award to Work on Platform Supply Vessels

Siemens Wins Contract Award to Work on Platform Supply Vessels

Link to ExecutiveBiz

Siemens Wins Contract Award to Work on Platform Supply Vessels

Posted: 12 Aug 2011 12:52 PM PDT

Siemens Industry has today been awarded a multi-million dollar contract to equip two platform vessels with its diesel electric propulsion solution at Fincantieri Marine Group's Bay, Wis. A Tidewater subsidiary will construct the vessels and are expected to be delivered in the fourth quarter of 2012 and the second quarter of 2013. "Our partnership with [...]

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Today's Chapter: Sacred Marriage: What If God Designed Marriage to Make Us...

 
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Sacred Marriage: What If God Designed Marriage to Make Us Holy More Than to Make Us Happy
by Gary Thomas
 

Chapter One

THE GREATEST CHALLENGE IN THE WORLD

A Call to Holiness More Than Happiness

By all means marry. If you get a good wife, you'll become happy. If you get a bad one, you'll become a philosopher. -Socrates

Like everything which is not the involuntary result of fleeting emotion but the creation of time and will, any marriage, happy or unhappy, is infinitely more interesting than any romance, however passionate. -W. H. Auden

I'm going to cut him open.

Historians aren't sure who the first physician was who followed through on this thought, but the practice revolutionized medicine. The willingness to cut into a corpse, peel back the skin, pull a scalp off a skull, cut through the bone, and actually remove, examine, and chart the organs that lay within was a crucial first step in finding out how the human body really works.

For thousands of years physicians had speculated on what went on inside a human body, but there was a reluctance and even an abhorrence to actually dissect a cadaver. Some men refrained out of religious conviction; others just couldn't get over the eeriness of cutting away a human rib cage. While an occasional brave soul ventured inside a dead body, it wasn't until the Renaissance period (roughly the fourteenth to the sixteenth century) that European doctors routinely started to cut people open.

And when they did, former misconceptions collapsed. In the sixteenth century, Andreas Vesalius was granted a ready supply of criminals' corpses, allowing him to definitively contradict assumptions about the human anatomy that had been unquestioned for a thousand years or more. Vesalius's anatomical charts became invaluable, but he couldn't have drawn the charts unless he was first willing to make the cut.

I want to do a similar thing in this book-with a spiritual twist. We're going to cut open numerous marriages, dissect them, find out what's really going on, and then explore how we can gain spiritual meaning, depth, and growth from the challenges that lie within. We're not after simple answers-three steps to more intimate communication, six steps to a more exciting love life-because this isn't a book that seeks to tell you how to have a happier marriage. This is a book that looks at how we can use the challenges, joys, struggles, and celebrations of marriage to draw closer to God and to grow in Christian character.

We're after what a great Christian writer, Francis de Sales, wrote about in the seventeenth century. Because de Sales was a gifted spiritual director, people often corresponded with him about their spiritual concerns. One woman wrote in great distress, torn because she very much wanted to get married while a friend was encouraging her to remain single, insisting that it would be "more holy" for her to care for her father, and then devote herself as a celibate to God after her father died.

De Sales put the troubled young woman at ease, telling her that, far from being a compromise, in one sense, marriage might be the toughest ministry she could ever undertake. "The state of marriage is one that requires more virtue and constancy than any other," he wrote. "It is a perpetual exercise of mortification.... From this thyme plant, in spite of the bitter nature of its juice, you may be able to draw and make the honey of a holy life."

Notice that de Sales talks about the occasionally "bitter nature" of marriage's "juice." To spiritually benefit from marriage, we have to be honest. We have to look at our disappointments, own up to our ugly attitudes, and confront our selfishness. We also have to rid ourselves of the notion that the difficulties of marriage can be overcome if we simply pray harder or learn a few simple principles. Most of us have discovered that these "simple steps" work only on a superficial level. Why is this? Because there's a deeper question that needs to be addressed beyond how we can "improve" our marriage: What if God didn't design marriage to be "easier"? What if God had an end in mind that went beyond our happiness, our comfort, and our desire to be infatuated and happy as if the world were a perfect place?

What if God designed marriage to make us holy more than to make us happy? What if, as de Sales hints, we are to accept the "bitter juice" because out of it we may learn to draw the resources we need with which to make "the honey of a holy life"?

Romanticism's Ruse

If this sounds like a radically different view of marriage, it's important to remember that the very concept of "romantic love," which is so celebrated in movies, songs, and cheap paperbacks, was virtually unknown to the ancients. There were exceptions-one need merely read the Song of Songs, for instance-but taken as a whole, the concept that marriage should involve passion and fulfillment and excitement is a relatively recent development on the scale of human history, making its popular entry toward the end of the eleventh century.

C. S. Lewis-whose marriage to an ailing woman was seen as somewhat "odd" by many of his contemporaries-explained that such a monumental shift in cultural thought as the development of romantic love is "very rare-there are perhaps three or four on record-but I believe that they occur, and that this [romantic love] is one of them."

This is not to suggest that romance itself or the desire for more romance is necessarily bad; good marriages work hard to preserve a sense of romance. But the idea that a marriage can survive on romance alone, or that romantic feelings are more important than any other consideration when choosing a spouse, has wrecked many a marital ship.

Romanticism received a major boost by means of the eighteenth-century Romantic poets-Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Blake-followed by their successors in literature, Byron, Shelley, and Keats. These poets passionately argued that it was a crime against oneself to marry for any reason other than "love" (which was defined largely by feeling and emotion), and the lives of many of them were parodies of irresponsibility and tragedy.

One of the writers who embraced this romantic notion with fervor was the sensuous novelist D. H. Lawrence, whose motto was "with should and ought I shall have nothing to do!" Lawrence fell in love with Frieda Weekley, a married woman, and sought to woo Frieda away from her husband, as his "love" demanded he do. As part of his less-than-noble designs, Lawrence sent Frieda a note, proclaiming that she was the most wonderful woman in all of England.

Being married with three children and having already suffered a couple of affairs, Mrs. Weekley saw through Lawrence's emotion and coolly replied that it was obvious to her he had not met many Englishwomen.

Earlier in this century, Katherine Anne Porter bemoaned how "romantic love crept into the marriage bed, very stealthily, by centuries, bringing its absurd notions about love as eternal springtime and marriage as a personal adventure meant to provide personal happiness." The reality of the human condition is such that, according to Porter (and I agree), we must "salvage our fragments of happiness" out of life's inevitable sufferings.

In her startling and insightful essay on marriage written in the 1940s (titled, interestingly enough, "The Necessary Enemy"), Porter carefully explores the heights and depths of marriage, making the following observations about a young bride:

This very contemporary young woman finds herself facing the oldest and ugliest dilemma of marriage. She is dismayed, horrified, full of guilt and forebodings because she is finding out little by little that she is capable of hating her husband, whom she loves faithfully. She can hate him at times as fiercely and mysteriously, indeed in terribly much the same way, as often she hated her parents, her brothers and sisters, whom she loves, when she was a child....

She thought she had outgrown all this, but here it was again, an element in her own nature she could not control, or feared she could not. She would have to hide from her husband, if she could, the same spot in her feelings she had hidden from her parents, and for the same no doubt disreputable, selfish reason: She wants to keep his love.

Above all, she wants him to be absolutely confident that she loves him, for that is the real truth, no matter how unreasonable it sounds, and no matter how her own feelings betray them both at times. She depends recklessly on his love.

With only a romantic view of marriage to fall back on, Porter warns, a young woman may lose her "peace of mind. She is afraid her marriage is going to fail because ... at times she feels a painful hostility toward her husband, and cannot admit its reality because such an admission would damage in her own eyes her view of what love should be."

Romantic love has no elasticity to it. It can never be stretched; it simply shatters. Mature love, the kind demanded of a good marriage, must stretch, as the sinful human condition is such that all of us bear conflicting emotions. "Her hatred is real as her love is real," Porter explains of the young wife. This is the reality of the human heart, the inevitability of two sinful people pledging to live together, with all their faults, for the rest of their lives.

A wedding calls us to our highest and best-in fact, to almost impossible-ideals. It's the way we want to live. But marriage reminds us of the daily reality of living as sinful human beings in a radically broken world. We aspire after love but far too often descend into hate.

Any mature, spiritually sensitive view of marriage must be built on the foundation of mature love rather than romanticism. But this immediately casts us into a countercultural pursuit.

In his classic work The Screwtape Letters, C. S. Lewis satirically ridicules our culture's obsession with romanticism. The demon Screwtape gloats, "Humans who have not the gift of [sexual abstinence] can be deterred from seeking marriage as a solution because they do not find themselves 'in love,' and, thanks to us, the idea of marrying with any other motive seems to them low and cynical. Yes, they think that. They regard the intention of loyalty to a partnership for mutual help, for the preservation of chastity, and for the transmission of life, as something lower than a storm of emotion."

I think most of us who have been married for any substantial length of time realize that the romantic roller coaster of courtship eventually evens out to the terrain of a Midwest interstate-long, flat stretches with an occasional overpass. When this happens, couples respond in different ways. Many will break up their relationship and try to recreate the passionate romance with someone else. Other couples will descend into a sort of marital guerrilla warfare, a passive-aggressive power play as each partner blames the other for personal dissatisfaction or lack of excitement. Some couples decide to simply "get along." Still others may opt to pursue a deeper meaning, a spiritual truth hidden in the enforced intimacy of the marital situation.

We can run from the challenges of marriage-as doctors did from the human body, refusing to cut open the cadavers and really look at what was going on-or we can admit that every marriage presents these challenges and asks us to address them head-on. If we find that the same kinds of challenges face every marriage, we might assume that God designed a purpose in this challenge that transcends something as illusory as happiness.

This book looks for that purpose and meaning-how can we discover in the challenges of marriage the opportunities to learn more about God, grow in our understanding of him, and learn to love him more?

Numerous married couples have opened up their lives for us in this book, so I suppose it's only fair that I should allow my own marriage to be dissected first.

An Unexpected Engagement

Lisa and I often wonder what would have happened if she had said "yes."

During a free afternoon at a college campus-ministry retreat when we were still dating, I asked Lisa to join a group of us for a round of Frisbee golf.

"No," Lisa said. "I think I'll go for a walk instead."

She had recently returned from a summerlong missions trip to Mexico, and this retreat was supposed to be a time when Lisa and I could get reconnected. We had known each other since junior high and had been dating for about a year, and we were getting "serious." Unknown to Lisa, I had asked my best friend, Rob Takemura, to begin praying about whether I should ask Lisa to marry me. And unknown to me, Lisa and her mother had spent a Saturday afternoon the week before looking at wedding dresses, "just in case" Lisa should ever need one.

I was somewhat frustrated that Lisa wasn't being cooperative, so I said, "Fine, I won't play Frisbee golf either."

"You can," Lisa said. "I don't mind walking alone."

"No, I'll go with you," I said. Neither of us realized it at the time, but this turn of events would change both of our lives.

We walked along the river, set inside a stunning valley on the outskirts of Glacier National Park, and talked for about forty-five minutes. Suddenly, I stopped skimming rocks, and virtually out of nowhere I said to Lisa, "I want to marry you."

Lisa's mouth dropped open.

"Is that a proposal?" she asked, astonished.

I shook my head yes, just as astonished as she was. Lisa came up and hugged me.

"Is that an acceptance?" I asked, and Lisa nodded in the affirmative.

"Whew," she said after a brief moment. "Imagine if I had agreed to play Frisbee."

We laughed about it, and then experienced one of the most intense times emotionally I've ever known. There was a strange, almost mystical commingling of souls. Something was going on inside us, around us, and through us that superseded any physical connection. It was somehow deeper, more meaningful, and more amazing than anything we had ever experienced.

Over the next nine months, we made plans, as any engaged couple does. We talked about missions, family, seminary, serving God-you name it. It was an intense time, and we often prayed, "Lord, wherever you want to take us, however you want to use us, we're all yours."

We never slept together until our wedding night, so the honeymoon was a rather intoxicating experience, but once the honeymoon was over, reality immediately set in like a dense Seattle fog.

Because I was planning to save up money for seminary, we spent our first few months living in a very tiny home, offered to us rent-free by a family friend. I left for work two days after we got back, and Lisa was stranded in a small community, out in the middle of nowhere, and she began to cry.

(Continues...)

 
 
 
 
 
 
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Excerpted from "Sacred Marriage" by Gary L. Thomas. Copyright (C) 2002 by Gary L. Thomas. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
 

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