The Love Dare
Challenge Your Troubled Marriage One Day at a Time
Fireproof – The Movie has created a phenomenon not only in the movie world, wherein this low budget Christian film is competing with some of the top moneymakers, it has also started a movement among Catholics and Protestant Churches where the movie and the subsequent book, The Love Dare, are becoming the centerpiece of bible studies and adult groups trying to bring their marriages back from the brink.
The Love Dare – A 40-Day Challenge
The dare begins easily enough with a reflection on the patience of love and the activity of the day to make a conscious decision to not respond in anger to anything your spouse does that day, but it expands into more and more difficult issues and aspects of the marriage and the behaviors by both parties which are affecting the success of the covenantal relationship.
Each chapter begins with a simple statement about love. Love is patient, kind, unconditional, seeks to understand, etc. It culminates on day 20 with the realization that Love is Jesus Christ, and as partners you cannot give what you do not have yourselves. If you don’t have the love of Christ within you, you cannot give this to your spouse. So it is at this turning point, that the reader is challenged to accept the Love of Christ.
The journey continues into deeper issues of forgiveness, the release of addictions or parasites to the marriage and understanding sacrifices which are required of you towards your spouse in order to make marriage work.
The Bottom Line Premise of the Love Dare
In the end, however, the premise of The Love Dare is that you choose to love. Love is not a feeling, but rather a choice; a choice we make irregardless of how the other partner chooses to respond (of course, this excludes abuse). In choosing to love your partner irregardless of how they respond to these daily gifts that The Love Dare requires of the reader to their spouse, you are learning what true love is all about.
You love because you choose to, not because of the payback you expect to receive. By realizing this profound nature of Christian love, the outcome comes of itself according to the will of God in each individual circumstances. It may not be able to save all troubled marriages, but it could save many if the principles are applied by both parties at some point.
In the movie, the husband begins the journey of the Love Dare alone. His wife doesn’t know what he’s doing. But in the end, she decides she wants to take that dare, too. So he had to exercise a lot of patience in the process of the reconciliation of the marriage. It wasn’t an easy process, but it was a sincere process – one which encouraged the interior evaluation of his own motives regarding the relationships with which he had vowed to spend his life.
The Love Dare is a great companion to the movie and is good to have on hand to look through as you’re watching the film for cross-reference.
And for couples in trouble, I’d also recommend adding The Holy Mass and The Chaplet of the Divine Mercy to the devotions.
Sources: Fireproof: The Movie - Starring Kirk Cameron and Erin Bethea, The Love Dare – By Stephen & Alex Kendrick with Lawrence Kimbrough, Fireproof your Marriage Couple’s Kit – Outreach Ministries
Kirk Cameron and Erin Bethea in ‘Fireproof’
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