What Malala Yousafzai's encounter with the Taliban can teach us about marriage

Do you sometimes lose hope about your marriage?

Does change seem an energy-sucking dream?

Let me be honest.  I have not been there.  I cannot claim to relate or truly understand the heartache and frustration of a dying marriage and what you must go through every day when you wake up the kids or you come home from work and the air is hurtful or just dead.

At the Leadercast, they had an interview with 17 year old Malala, a Pakistani girl who fought for the right for girls to go to school in the Taliban-held Swat Valley.  The Taliban subsequently tried to kill her and she was shot in the head. 

Miraculously, she survived and now, even at such a young age, she travels the world championing the rights of girls to get an education. 

In this interview she was asked how she holds onto hope for Pakistan.  She remarked that she has always been inspired by movies because they constantly showed hopeless situations that were suddenly turned around by a hero.  In the words of her interviewer, Henry Cloud,

"Leaders hold together how bad it is right now, along with the hope that it can be better." 

This young girl knows the reality of a bleak world, much like I can only guess some of you know in the reality of a bleak, and lonely marriage. 

I don't want to suggest that Malala has an answer for you, but what I see in her is someone who has been able to accept, not ignore, the reality of the world, but holds out hope that moves her to action to change it. 

That doesn't fix anything in and of itself, but it is the beginning.  And until we begin, we go nowhere.