I have to begin here with blatant honesty. There are a few reasons I don't like to write, blog or even talk about difficulties in my marriage:
1. I have a TON to be grateful for in said area. We are really blessed to be here almost 11 years later and I don't for one minute want anyone to think I am missing that.
2. My husband and I are very different, and I don't want anyone to think that my awareness and sometimes difficulty with this is greater than my ability to recognize where we fill in each others gaps in a good way.
3. I don't want anyone to think badly of either of us.
I am generally soft spoken, my husband is really loud. I am serious and stoic, my husband is a walking caricature. I am a square, my husband is a sailor. I want to save the world, my husband wants to enjoy the world. I eat carefully, my husband also functions as a garbage disposal. I worry about everything, my husband doesn't worry about anything. Most importantly though, I am a Jesus follower, my husband is not.
Quick background- I certainly wasn't living as a Jesus follower when we met, so it may seem to some that I tricked my poor husband into thinking I was the sort of girl he would want to marry and then quickly proved otherwise. There are times I am sure he feels this way, and I don't blame him. To be fair though, we hadn't known each other long enough to have any real proof that we were the sort that should be marrying each other at all, but we were young, I was pregnant and infatuation looked like love, so we did.
God has carried us (and still does) through a great deal of trial and error. I mean, HUGE errors including but not limited to mental illnesses, infidelity, substance abuse, anger issues and geographical separation. We have both grown and changed, learning to bend to prevent a break. The man I lay next to at night is not the same man whose hands I held in that Pensacola courthouse at 20 years old. God has been good to us.
And now the however.
However, life has changed my husband, but Jesus has changed me. In case you don't quite understand that: Life changes through lessons, (God too sometimes), but my love of God and desire to be like Jesus changed me despite life. My desires and outlook on pretty much everything reflect what is considered an upside kingdom compared to the world we live in. The Jesus in me has freed me up to:
Love without being loved back.
Give without receiving.
Trust in the intangible and unseeable.
Forgive without having been offered an apology, under THE MOST unforgivable circumstances.
Find contentment in being last.
Many more nonsensical gestures....
Not that I have nailed all these things, I totally haven't, but they are my hearts desire and they are so because of who I understand Jesus to be. These traits and beliefs and my faith in the God of the Bible FULLY shape who I am and because my husband does not share these beliefs, it makes it hard to meet in the middle sometimes. Okay, it makes it impossible to meet in the middle sometimes.
In the beginning I spent a lot of time trying to make my husband see what I see. Believe what I believe. Change the way I have changed. I drug him to church on holidays praying that something would move him, shake him, break him, spark a fraction of interest even. I learned quickly (probably not quickly enough) that I couldn't make church his thing, nor could I force him to see truth as I see it. So I let it go, mostly (I'm only human).
Here's what I am trying to get at:
In most marriages there are certain issues that just ARE. They are like thorns in sides meant to remind us all we are breakable and humility and trust have to be bigger than we are sometimes. They seem never ending, forever and irremovable if not by miracle. Without selflessness on someones behalf, these thorns will destroy our marriages and our families.
We all want to be loved like we love, give like we give, think like we think and when those desires aren't met we are hurt, frustrated and sometimes angry. We want to be understood and when we aren't it can be maddening.
Because my husband shares totally different values and beliefs than me, he cannot love like I love, he can only love like he loves. This is not a fault, it is just reality. He can only give and think the way that he thinks, because he only has his own life experiences to go by. He has a totally different set of tools to work with than I do and that isn't something I can hold against him.
Enter stage left, God.
It isn't my job to change or fix my husband, it's Gods- but MORE IMPORTANTLY (MOST IMPORTANTLY) God wants to change ME. He wants me to have the patience and love and joy and kindness and gentleness I need to love my husband just where he is at because HE (God) gave it to me. He wants to love me in ways no human, Bible believing or not, ever could because we are only human. He wants to fill in every gap, every space where I am lacking so that the GLORY of it all can ONLY BE HIS.
I started this talking about my husband, and our vast differences because it something I struggle with sometimes daily. But this isn't about my husband at all. It is about me. It is about how much I am trusting God to fill my gaps and show me love the way only HE knows I need it. It is my ability to trust that will grow me, which will allow me to show MORE love to my husband no matter where he is or what he is doing that I like or don't like, and that will in turn only serve to show him more and more of who Jesus really is and why He's worth thinking about.
I wrote this because we all have someone (beliefs aside) in our lives that we wish would just "get it", whatever "it" is for you. I wrote this to encourage you to be humble enough to let God work in you in order to remove "getting it" from the table. I wrote this because I need to wake up and read it every morning and every afternoon, not just to strengthen my marriage but every other relationship in my life.
I wrote this because life isn't about you, but by letting God work in you (instead of always pleading He work on everyone else), He will work through you, and that can change everything, life and world included.
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