As women, we face some specific pressures that produce stress and can trigger a crisis in mid life. Marriage is a major cause of undue stress for women.

For some, it's the lack of marriage that is causing the stress. If your knight in shining armor hasn't shown up yet, then use your time constructively to examine yourself.

Don't worry about trying to examine others. Just make sure that you're where God wants you to be.

Now some women are dealing with being unhappily married. There is no point in worrying or getting stressed out because you're dissatisfied and your marriage is in trouble. You need to redirect your focus.

Try putting the same amount of energy that you spend on dealing with the stress into correcting the situation. Start looking in the Word of God for the solution instead of worrying about where you missed it!

Sometimes we get lazy and we don't want to do these things. We think, I'm a woman, so I should know what to do. But we really don't know. That's Hollywood talking.

Only God knows what to do. He knows our mates better than they know themselves. God can tell us exactly what to do to fix any situation and when to do it. And He will share it with us if we go to Him!

If you're facing divorce, your number-one obligation or duty is to make sure that you're doing everything God requires of you so that if the divorce decree is signed, you're at peace, because you know that you've done what God said.

Otherwise, you'll wind up beating yourself up over your divorce for the rest of your life.

When a woman who has gone through a divorce comes in for counseling, I encourage her to be up-front with me. I've seen too many women repeat the same mistakes over and over again because they were in denial: It was always "his fault." So I ask them point-blank, "But what did you do?"

Divorced women who want to remarry need to be honest with themselves to see where they made the mistake the first time. That's the only way they're not going to make the same mistake a second time.

When you only try to deal with these issues according to the world's standards, you're only going to magnify the heartache. But when you examine yourself and do the things that the Word instructs you to do on a daily basis, when marital issues come, you'll find yourself rising above them through His mercy and grace.

Source: Marriage And Family by Deborah L. Butler
Excerpt permission granted by Word Of Faith Publishing