Well, we all know that whenever you go on social media and you see people posting about their marriage,

we typically see what I call, my marriage is amazing posts. Does anybody know what I'm talking about?

It's like, hey, look how good we are and look look at how happy we are, and how blessed that we are.

And there are so many marriages that genuinely are really, really good.

But typically, when you look on social media, what you see is the highlight real, right?

You see people on their vacations, you see the romantic dinners, you see the matching pajamas

at Christmas time, and the caption says something like, I love you more today than ever

before, which is often true, but sometimes what it means is we almost killed each other last

week, but we're still here, and so I'm acknowledging that we're still here. And we've got to be honest about the posts. No one ever posts about the argument in the car.

Right? Especially the one on the way to church. It's, Amy and I are very blessed to have a great

marriage. And I honestly think that the place we have our worst fights

are in the car. Why? I'm not sure, but I know I'm not doing something right when I'm driving

in the car. Maybe you can relate. And if you look at just what you see online, a lot of times you

may be convinced that there's something wrong with your relationship.

And I want to talk to those of you who are maybe dating or maybe married and you feel like

there might be something wrong with me or with us and show you that real love reminds you,

real love is not always perfect, right? It's not always flowers and fireworks and fairy tales. Real love is

often choosing to be kind instead of having to be right. Real love is apologizing when you get it

wrong and forgiving when someone has wronged you. Real love is committing to stay when everything in you wants to leave.

And so today we're going to look at a real story about Hannah and Elkanah from the Old Testament.

It's in 1st Samuel chapter 1. It is a very real story about real people with real problems

that weren't perfect, but they stayed faithful to God and faithful to each other.

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