There is a story of a man who was building a ship and this guy was really into the ornate riggings of ship building so he built the most gorgeous sail you could imagine. He put all of the most beautiful furnishings on the sail and in the paint job. It had the most technological navigational furnishings that you ever saw but when it came time to invest in the keel and put the weight there to stabilize the ship in storms; it really was not that important to him since nobody was going to see it. He fudged on it and did not put much down there.

So, the first day he was out on the ocean, a storm came by and the ship capsized and the man who went out into the harbor with great applauds came back with shame because he “had forgotten to build below the waterline.” One of the great tragedies in life today for many marriages is that most people are caught up in the sails and the wood and the equipment and the accouterments of life but the character that lies beneath the waterline is so hard for them to get to that it never gets addressed. It’s easy for life to get cracked above the waterline, we should be building beneath the waterline.