Mike and Melissa Kruger Reflect on 25 Years of Marriage | Word First

we are mike and melissa krueger i work at rts charlotte as the president and professor of new testament and i work for an organization called the gospel coalition as the director of women's initiatives and we are blessed with three children we have emma john and kate and we are excited to be celebrating in the immediate future our 25th wedding anniversary we met over 30 years ago when we were both at chapel hill together i was a freshman and mike was a senior and we started dating there and then soon after i graduated we got married yeah we lived out in phoenix arizona which was my first ministry job after seminary and of course that's always tough having a move when you just get married but then it got even more crazy because soon thereafter we headed to edinburgh scotland for my phd program so we not only moved originally to phoenix but then overseas and that was like anything uh overseas would be a challenging time yeah especially for me yes i had lots of phd work to do melissa was like i'm in a foreign country what am i doing here but we fell in love with scotland and it was wonderful and eventually the lord brought us back to charlotte where i've been at reform theological seminary for the last 20 years and that's been the children phase yeah and we've been so blessed we've loved getting to raise our kids here in charlotte near family and good friends um so we've gone through a lot of different seasons and a lot of different locations but we're thankful to have landed here well like any couple that's been married 25 years we've had various seasons in our marriage and sometimes you see your spouse really struggling and sometimes you see your spouse really doing well and what do you do when your spouse is struggling well oftentimes at least for the husband i'll probably try to fix it or solve it you know but then i've learned over the years that you know one of the best things i can do for melissa is to pray for her and that's one of the lessons we learn in our marriage is that putting your spouse in the hands of the lord is the best thing you can do for your spouse because god has the ability to actually solve those problems or as a spouse realizes very quickly in marriage sometimes it takes 25 years to realize that you don't really have the power to solve them and we've also seen that with our family and joining together in prayer as a family is honestly one of the sweetest times each morning we all sit around the kitchen table and we pray for one another and it is one of those ways even when our with one child off to college we prayed for her this morning and we still feel connected to her um through prayer and so it's a beautiful way not just to be connected as spouses but to be connected with our kids and to just share in that together as a family yeah one of the things you face as spouses over 25 years is a lot of decisions uh decisions about where to live what job to take what to do in certain circumstances and that's where you realize the power of prayer too that you're not drawn just on your own wisdom or your own opinion about things but really looking to christ to make sure that whatever decision you make is a decision that he's in and that only really comes through uh making sure that you're praying together with your spouse yeah and praying scripture for our spouse i mean i think one thing that's helped me to allowing the scriptures to start as the basis for how we pray for one another so we are very excited about our new book five things to pray for your spouse and we're really excited for a number of reasons first this is the first time we've ever co-authored a book together so we've each written other books before now and this is the first time we've collaborated on a project and we really love that this is the project because we really believe in the power of prayer but we also believe in the way it plays itself out in the life of of a marriage and one of the challenges with prayer that everyone knows is that you struggle to pray because you don't always know what to pray and how to pray you have no structure around prayer but when we wrote this book we decided look we're going to give it some some structure give it a poor scriptural basis and we're really excited to see how that's going to help couples as they pray yeah and so i mean what we really hope is that this will just be a guide to help your prayer life and help you pray for your spouse and honestly i think that's better than any book we could have written about marriage or really any other thing that we can help people with is to be on our knees before the lord because everybody's marriage is different and everybody's circumstances are different but we serve the same lord who can is reigning over all of our circumstances and who can help each couple and whatever they're facing and so that's what we really hope is that whether you're newly married and you get this as a wedding gift or whether you've been married for 30 years that we can be spouses who pray for one another