Attention all married couples

If you haven't watched the movie Fireproof, you need to! It truly has such a phenomenal message and is really convicting.

I first heard about the moving from one of my favorite shows in the whole world, 19 Kids and Counting (it was actually on an episode of an episode where they were still 18 Kids and Counting but that's not important). During the show the whole Duggar family went to this Christian film festival where they got a sneak peak of the movie. The main star is the guy from Growing Pains, Kirk Cameron, who actually is a devout Christian. After the movie the family got to meet him and pray with him that this movie would touch many lives, it was pretty cool!

Another cool thing that I took from that episode was the fact that the kissing scenes in the movie were actually filmed between Kirk and his real-life wife Chelsea. I thought this was great since I personally feel like actors and actresses seriously screw up their marriages doing intimate scenes with other people as part of their "job." Where else in the world is this okay? "Sorry honey, I spent 5 hours today making out with my co-star and pretending we are in love but it doesn't mean anything, because it's my job." Right.

Just look at how many celebrities end up hooking up with their co-stars? Reese Witherspoon and Ryan Phillippe after Cruel Intentions (now divorced), Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams started dating after The Notebook (now broken up) and even current Twilight stars Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart just to name a few. In fact Kirk and Cheslea first met on the set of Growing Pains, Chelsea played "Kate" Mike Seaver's love interest.

So clearly there's a connection here. And not to mention the dozens of stories that we hear about so-and-so cheating on their spouse with their co-stars. Not cool. Anyway, before I get off on too much of a tangent, the fact that this movie respected marriage enough to have two actual married people partake in the intimate scenes impressed me. And this is before I even knew what the movie was about!

After the Duggar episode, I saw the Fireproof book at the bookstore (the book was actually written after the movie, which is sort of strange). I saw that it was in the Christian book section and that it had a fire on the cover so I thought maybe Matt would read it on our upcoming trip to Mexico. Well turns out I ended up reading it and I absolutely loved it!

It was raw, it was real, and it made me realize that my own marriage, your own marriage, could be in that situation in a split second if we let it. Embarrassingly I saw so many similarities between myself and the wife in the book. I can be so ungrateful, I can be so demanding, I can be so disrespectful to my husband, and on and on. It was a hard dose of reality that I needed and it inspired me to go and buy the movie and watch it to remind myself just how quickly things can spiral downhill. Our marriages need to be fireproof and they are definitely worth fighting for!

After reading the book I immediately went out and rented the movie, then bought the movie because I loved it so much. I begged Mattie to watch it with me but he was absolutely convinced that it would be some lame Hallmark style movie with really bad acting. And if you know Mattie he can be a bit of a movie snob. He basically avoids watching anything with actors with skills beneath him. I'm exaggerating a bit, but you get my point.

Anyway, being the wonderful husband that he is, he eventually agreed. And much to both of our surprise he absolutely loved it as well! He could definitely relate to things in the movie, and we both vowed to each other then and there to do whatever it takes to make our marriage fireproof as well.

It was an eye-opening experience for us, and I hope it will be for all of you as well. In this culture where the divorce rate keeps rising and marriages are entered into like a contract where "if you hold up your end of the bargain, I will hold up mine," this movie was a refreshing dose of true reality. Reality from God's perspective. Not man's.