Life Audio. Thank you for listening to your daily prayer, a podcast dedicated to helping you find the words you need to connect with your father in heaven.

No matter what is going on in your life today,

you can trust that God wants to hear from you.

Right after this short word from our sponsor,

we will pray through today's prayer together,

a prayer to celebrate marriages.

A prayer to celebrate marriages, written and read by Lynette Kittle.

That is why a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and they become one flesh, Genesis 2.24.

In society today, the celebration of marriage has taken on an extravagant party-like tone,

where the bigger and the more elaborate the wedding the better, and where the simpler celebration of the union of one man to one woman is being left by the wayside.

Our culture has taken holy matrimony and morphed it into the wedding industry,

one based on making big money, noticeably so because of just the fact that it's now called

an industry, proving the intense marketing efforts

and profitable business it has come to be.

From costly wedding venue options to overpriced reception halls, couples are spending thousands,

sometimes millions, on extravagant weddings, designed to compete with royal

weddings that leave attendees in awe, forgetting and leaving the sacred meaning and holiness

of marriage at the altar. Tragically, for many couples wanting to take the true cold water plunge of marriage in life,

the costliness of a wedding and reception has become an enormous obstacle

and even an excuse for many couples to indefinitely postpone holy matrimony.

Rather than focus on the sacrament of marriage itself, couples spend years engaged,

putting marriage aside with some forgoing it altogether,

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