Fire Proof Your Marriage

The focus of the movie Fireproof is a crumbling marriage. Kirk Cameron stars in the film as a firefighter that is great at his job, but is failing in his role as a husband. He demands his wife show him the same respect at home that he earns at work and she tries to get him to see that while he may be a successful firefighter, he is a terrible husband and isn't deserving of her respect. They each want their feelings validated and so they go around and around in circles with the same fight. Hurt feelings and anger escalates each day until divorce seems their only answer.

Kirk's character is then introduced to the book The Love Dare by his father who explains how the book saved his marriage. He encourages Kirk to stick to the dares each day and complete the book before giving up on his marriage. Out of respect for his father, he agrees to give the book a try.

At first completing the dares feel awkward to him. He realizes how long it's been since he and his wife were even kind to one another, much less since one tried to romance the other. But after several days of sticking with the dares, he begins to feel good about his kind actions. His dad reminds him that love is sometimes a choice. To keep a marriage strong and to keep it loving, we have to decide to act like we are in love even when we don't feel it. This commitment to show love to our partners even when they don't return it will bring about great change in a marriage and in our partners, as illustrated in the movie Fireproof.

Fire Proof the movie follows a couple as they attempt to rescue their marriage from the choking flames of divorce by using The Love Dare book as their road map. Now you can take the principles of Fireproof one step further with your own copy of The Love Dare book. This daily devotional for married couples guides you through challenges designed to build a strong, committed marriage in a broken world that threatens to burn it to the ground.

The Love Dare book consists of daily messages, ending each day with a love dare, which is a simple yet challenging act of love for your spouse. This 40 day journey enables you to unharden harden hearts in both you and your spouse and to heal your marriage from the damages caused by apathy and neglect. The Love Dare book teaches you to guard your marriage against pride and temptation. The Love Dare will reinforce and enrich your marriage, win back a love you thought was gone, and learn more about God who not only created unconditional, sacrificial love but also illustrated it.

The reason why The Love Dare works is that it solves the biggest problem in every failed marriage...apathy. Just about every marital problem has apathy at its root. At some point in a marriage, the warm fuzzies wear off. Then we can either choose to work at our marriages, keeping them fun and alive or we can become apathetic towards our partners.

Typically we blame our schedules for our stale marriages. We are too busy with work, school, or the kids. We don't have time for date nights, back rubs, or even thank you notes. The truth is, you make time for what is important to you. What you invest your time in is what you are choosing to make a priority in your life. If you choose to ignore your marriage, it will wither and die.

The Love Dare helps reignite all of those feelings you both had when you first fell in love. There is no trick to The Love Dare. It is a step by step road map that guides you to a happier marriage. The reason the dares must be done daily is that the consistency shows your spouse that you are sincere in your efforts to improve the marriage and aren't simply trying to trick them into staying. If you backslide and skip a couple days, you may lose a bit of the trust you earned back from your partner and you may need to start back at day one again.

A healthy marriage takes time. If a gardener doesn't tend to his garden then it will become overgrown with weeds that will choke the life out of any of the good plants he had sewn. A marriage works in the same way. Neglect fosters "weeds" in our marriages.