123AskAndReceive

Forgiveness.  This is the first thing I learned when I truly became a christian and I had to extend forgiveness to my ex-husband.  It was hard, and yet it was the most freeing thing I had ever felt.

Since then I have been working on this and recently had noticed that lately I have been more quick to forgive my husband.  He continues to do things that annoy me (how dare he :)) and I have been choosing to not hold resentment and to forgive and even seek the opportunity to work things through when he has done or said something hurtful.  It doesn’t always work, but I think that it has helped.

I do choose forgiveness.  I have really realized that God fogives us over and over and over, day after day after day.  We continue to son and he extends his grace and forgiveness as if we had never done anything wrong.  If he can do that for us and we don’t deserve it, then how do I feel that I can hold a grudge over someone else for something, especially the man I am married to, the man who I will spend the rest of my life with, the man I choose to be with.

I love that I don’t have to hang onto that in my heart for another person.  I love the fact that it frees ME and it shows my husband love when I can do that.  I am not perfect at it.  As I sit here now, my husband and I talked about something earlier and I wasn’t necessarily happy with him and I came downstairs to do somethings and he went to bed.  I am not super angry at him, and I do choose to forgive him, it is sometimes just not so easy to do right on the spot.

I just pray that God can teach me how to handle these converstaions.  These things that seem to come up over and over and I feel like they are things that just go unresolved and we maybe don’t really fight about them, but we just don’t come to some sort of agreement about them.

Maybe that is it.  Maybe what I need to do is work out the issue by sitting down with him and figuring out a solution to the ongoing issue that comes up.  That is it.  I will sit with him sometime tomorrow and I will talk to him first about my feeling when this particular thing comes up and then I will ask him to help me come up with a solution to avoid it being an issue again.  Kind of like setting a goal.

This journaling thing has really been helping me.  I am so glad I am able to get this out sometimes and then also to be able to come back to it later to see what my thoughts were or how my thoughts have changed even over this short amount of time.

I guess the thing that comes to mind is the idea of having those relationships that I see on TV or movies.  I get sucked into thinking it is possible to feel that way and I start to compare and think there is something wrong with me that I don’t feel that way about my husband.  I begin to think there is something wrong with me because my husband does not treat me that way or he certainly does not do those things.

Some days I can end up feeling pretty low about my marriage and my husband.  I can sometimes feel like I am not the “prefect wife” the “perfect mother” I can’t possibly live up to what all these other people can do.

The reality is, and I know, that no-body’s life is really like that.  And certainly I don’t really think when it comes right down to it that I would even want to have my life like that.

All I know is I long to have something deeper than I do right now with my husband and that is why I am doing this.  I am watching less TV, less movies that depict lust over love, fantasy over reality, and I am focusing more on what God does have in store for me and how he is changing the shape and the texture of my heart towards my husband.  If I look back over the past few weeks I can see how I have been more attentive, more eager to please, quicker to forgive, I try to smile more, laugh more, enjoy life more.  Something is changing in me.

I know how easy it is to get sucked in though.  One small thing can trigger it.  And a floodgate of disappointment is sure to follow.

I hope to continue to hang on to God and to have him help me through this.  I pray for his guidance to show me areas that get in my way of following what HE has planned for me.  I pray that HE will give me knowledge of HIS promises and give me a heart filled with HIS perfect love.

This is hard for me.  My marriage has suffered in the past with my husband’s addictions and behaviors.  They have gotten so much better over the last few years, but some days they seem to just trickle right in.  It is the oddest behavior at times.  It isn’t something that is super concrete big deal breaker stuff.  It is about him not wanting me to know “who he really is.”  He will hide some behavior or hide things from me and tell me a lie to cover something up when I ask him what he is doing or what does he have.

When I first met him he smoked.  I didn’t want to date a smoker and didn’t really know he did.  I found out later that he had quit when he met me and yet was still kind of doing it behind my back.  After we got married he quit doing that but would chew nicorett gum and hide that from me.  I would find it and then ask him about it.  He would make up stories and I could never understand why he wouldn’t just put it on the counter or not “lie” when I would find it when I did the laundry or something.  It’s not like I was finding a woman’s number or something…

He was ashamed I guess.  He didn’t want me to know that he did that and he maybe felt weak or something… I am not really sure.  I tried to tell him that if that is what he wanted to do then that was his choice, but I really had a hard time with the secrets and the lies.  It broke our trust and it is really hard to then trust someone after that.  Every time he would go to the store I would wonder, “Is he getting gum, is he doing something else..”  I would look harder when doing laundry, hoping that he wasn’t hiding things.

I could always tell when I was going to find something though… it was the wierdest thing.  His behavior would change and I would learn to ask him if something was going on, or if he was hiding anything, or I would come right out and ask if he had been chewing it or was struggling with it.  I would ask him if he wanted me to pray for him, I encouraged him and kept telling him that I loved him no matter what… I wasn’t going to leave him.  It helped, but it still happens from time to time.  The times are just further spread out.

I haven’t really had addictive behaviors but I have been around it.  My mom and step dad are alcoholics, my dad and step mom are over eaters and are addicted to food, I have dated alcoholics and been married to someone who was addicted to pornography.  Addictions are tough.  They can really destroy people’s lives and they can certainly destroy trust in a marriage.

Today my marriage is much better.  There may always be that thing in the back of my mind that wonders when I see him acting quick to shove something in a pocket when I come in the room if he is hiding something.  I don’t know if it will go away, but I know that I continue to rely on God to get me through.  I sometimes think to myself at least it is this problem and not an affair or something like that, but to me sometimes it doesn’t make it any better.  I have gone through an affair with my ex-husband and although the feeling isn’t as painful, I still feel betrayed.

I wish I could remove my husband’s addictions that come in between our marriage.  I wish that he would surrender it all to God.  I feel that until he does I may never be able to fully have that intimate relationship I desired coming into this dare.

I will hang on…

So what if our love is rejected?  Well, I guess I wouldn’t use the word rejected, just un-noticed.  Here I have been working so hard to show love for my husband and to treat him in loving ways, even when he isn’t being so loving towards me.  Lately he has been a little on edge.  I don’t know what is going on… I mean I know that it may have to do with a bunch of court issues with my ex-husband and yet I too am going through it but I am not letting that get the best of me and in spit of it all I am still trying to show love for my husband.

For years he has said that he loves it when I give him affection.  He loves attention and he “thrives” on the touchy feely.  Now, the first almost two years of our marriage were really hard and there wasn’t a lot of touchy feely going on, but now I am really trying and putting myself out there… even when I don’t feel like it and I feel like almost rejected.  I don’t like that feeling, it makes me want to crawl into a shell and hide under that protective shell.  I think to myself, “I could have been just fine, without doing the touchy feely thing, I do love him and I know he loves me, we have a pretty good relationship, so why mess up a good thing.”  Yet, the reason why I wanted to do this dare was to go deeper in my marriage and to experience all God has for us.

I want to have that most intimate of relationships with my husband.  I want him to know without a doubt how much I truly do love him and I am thankful for him.  I just feel like there is something sometimes that gets in the way.  Maybe it’s me.  Maybe it’s him.  I don’t know.  I will keep trying and keep going.  This is hard.  I do choose to love.  I choose to see this through in spite of behavior around me.  I will cling to God to get me through and I thank you Lord that you are stronger than me.

I believe that reading God’s word is one of my biggest challenges.  I don’t read everyday, yet everyday I think of God, I talk to God, I pray to him, but I don’t read everyday.  Sometimes my daily prayer has been at the end of the night and goes something like, “God, I am soo sorry I was busy today and didn’t get a chance to meet with you.  I wanted to but things just piled up and the day went by pretty fast.  Please help me to be better about that and help me to make you a priority.”  I get tired of saying the same thing and feeling guilty for not doing what my heart wants to do, but I don’t make the time.

I have read for periods of time, where each day I will find a good time to open my bible, do a devotional or just find some place and start reading.  Then all of a sudden I once again realize that a few days have gone by or even weeks where I haven’t put my head in the bible and been intentional to read God’s word.  I look up verses all the time.  I do quick things like that all the time.  I have become more familiar with God’s word, but I haven’t been committed to reading each day.

I do hope and pray that I can be more intentional.  That I can give time to God each day and be blessed by learning what he has for my life.

I didn’t grow up going to church.  I didn’t know who or what God was and yet I did hear about God. My brother was a christian and I heard about God from him.  I went through some really tough times in my childhood and made some bad choices in high school and into my young adult life.  I gave my life to Christ when I was 21 when I found myself with a young daughter and married to her father who wanted a divorce.  I was desperate and my father in law at the time prayed with me.

Although my life didn’t change too much after that, the seeds had been planted.  I was different yet struggled through some tough times.  I ended up divorcing and moving on to some more hard years.  After another failed marriage and another child with someone who didn’t want to stay with me I ran to God looking for that piece that was missing in my life.  I was very desperate for answers and I knew there had to be more to life than what I had.  I knew I was missing something, but I wasn’t sure what.  I had been ending up in dead end relationships with people who ended up abandoning me and rejecting me.  I longed for so much more.

I started attending church and attended an Alpha course.  It is a 12 week course for people seeking a better understanding of God, the bible, learning how to have a relationship with God, etc..  It changed my life.  I asked God into my heart again and asked him to be my Lord and Savior.  This time something was different.  Like before, I was desperate, but this time, my heart was in it.  I wanted change, I was seeking change, I was seeking more than I could comprehend.  I wanted my pain and hurt to go away.  I wanted so much to feel loved and worthy.  Well, I got it.  I am so thankful that God met me right where I was.  He had always been there those years before and yet even though I wasn’t living for him then, he was still there.  I look back over those years and I can see now how God was there and how he has turned those “mistakes” and bad choices into blessings and gifts.

He gave me two very beautiful children.  I am so blessed to be their mom and to now be able to share God with them and to teach them why God tells us to live according to HIS will and not our own.  I will teach then from my mistakes.  I will teach them that in spite of our mistakes, God is faithful and He will see us through.  I am remarried to a christian man and we together have two more beautiful children.  My life may be crazy, dysfunctional, and blended, but what Satan meant for evil, God intends for good.  In spite of past mistakes and wrong decisions, God is good and he will make our paths straight.

I share this in my journal so that those reading may know that no matter where you are, no matter what your circumstance, no matter what choices you have made, God is always there, always listening, always going to love you, forgive you, and guide you.  We are all sinners.  None of us deserve the gift he has given to us.  But he created us and he loves us and he DID choose to give his son so that we could have eternal life with him.  I hope and pray that anyone that reads this and doesn’t know that already will seek to find God and will turn your life over to him.  Let him be your guide.  He has a plan for you and he knows better than you.  I promise you won’t be disappointed.  What do you have to lose?  If things aren’t going perfectly, which I am quite certain there not, than give it a try and allow God in.

Thank you God for what you have done in my life.  Thank you for teaching me that no matter what mistakes I have made in my life and no matter how much I screw things up, you are always there, always faithful, and I can trust in you for all things.  I thank you for the gifts you have given me in my husband, my children, my family, and friends.  Thank you for forever changing my heart.

Ask today for God, and receive his gift for you.  It is easy and that.

I am always amazed at the power God has to change me and to show me things about myself that I never knew.  My eyes have been opened and my heart has softened.  I went into this dare hoping that it would bring my husband and I closer, that we would be more lovey dovey and spend some quality time together and those sparks would maybe be rekindled. We had a pretty good marriage but had kind of been drifting a bit since our youngest two kids (two and six months) I also have two older ones and so life is busy!  I wanted to see if this would help bring some of the closeness I have been desiring with my husband.

What I have found is that life got in the way. The kids needed to be fed and bathed, the groceries needed to be bought, the meals needed to be cooked, the house needed cleaning, the clothes needed laundering, the errands needed to be ran, the bills needed to be paid, you know the drill. Life happened and this dare thing sort of had me feeling like I had to “fit in” because I once again over extended myself and took on too much of a project, not to mention deciding to blog about this for forty days on top of leading a moms group table, etc.. etc…. well, to tell you the truth, some days I am just plain too dog gone tired to “love on my husband.”

So, I realize that doesn’t sound like my heart softened or my eyes were opened… but what I realized during the course of the last 19 days is that in spite of all the “life” that has gotten in the way and the feelings that have come up - that I didn’t want to do something or I felt too tired or even started to get a selfish attitude about why wasn’t my husband doing this or treating me that way - I prayed and I asked God to help me. I asked him to give me the strength to go on, to give more, to do more, to not complain, to not be disappointed, to remind me of the positive things, to focus on what is going good, not what isn’t going good. I have still fallen into the traps of feeling the feelings, but instead of acting on them I try and bring God in at those moments and give them to him right away.

I have turned to praying more, reading his word more, reading an inspirational blog or article, called a friend to help lift me up (thanks!), I have chosen a better attitude, a better outlook. My husband may be benefiting from all the “lovin’ I am giving him” but ultimately I am the one who is being changed here. I am the one who is truly learned how to love another human being unconditionally. I know I haven’t mastered it or anything, I have just scratched the surface.  I am the one who is benefiting from this Love Dare!

The one thing that I have truly learned is that this kind of love, this unconditional love for my husband could have never come from me in the first place. I have thought to myself in the past that there must be something wrong with my relationship because I don’t “feel” a certain way I think I am supposed to for my husband. The thing is I never knew HOW to love like this. This is God’s love, not mine. It is by HIM that I can love my husband, I just have to be willing for God to use me. He has given me the Holy Spirit to do things that I cannot do for myself. If you ask you WILL receive. If you ask for strength to go on, you will get it. If you ask for God to take away negative thinking, he will. If you pray for patience, he will give it to you. Ask and you will receive.  That is why I named my journal this because I KNOW that it is that easy… I just don’t always remember.  Thinking about it and wondering is one thing.  Doing it, asking for it, being willing to receive it - that is another…. but it is soo easy when I think about it and I always in the end say to myelft, “Why did I wait so long to ask God for help, ask for strength, ask him to remove this or that, ask him… why did I wait so long?  It is soo easy just to ask.  He wants me to ask.  He already knows what I need, he just wants to hear me ask.”

I have so many things going on in my life right now I wonder sometimes how I would make it without God. I could probably choose to get caught up in my world view and my world reality, but the fact is, I would much rather not. I would much rather escape from it all and I would rather give all of that to God and I would like to take my “escape” to God’s loving arms and know that none of what is going on here in my life right now really even matters in the whole scheme of things. Some things are just out of my control. The way others behave and how they respond or don’t respond, that is NOT within my control, so why do I spend so much effort worrying about things that I can’t control??? I could make these issues my problems but God says to cast our cares upon him, that he will take them from me, he will deal with them. I mean I still need to make decisions and I still need to live my life and stuff, but instead of the things around me having control over me and my thoughts, I can choose how to respond and what to spend my energy on instead.

Thank you God for this revelation and for teaching me how to love my husband more than I thought ever possible. I am so blessed and so thankful that you have saved me and you have given me lessons in my journey with you.  I may have went into this Love Dare one person thinking of an outcome, but I certainly will leave this forty days a changed person and more blessed than I could have dreamed of.  It has been hard some days, but perserverance is how God can make us grow and change.

So the day didn’t go as I had envisioned.  I thought of making a nice dinner and stuff but Thursday’s are tough nights.  Every other Thursday my husband has his men’s group and so tonight he had it.  We also had a contractor out to give us a bid on replacing our kitchen windows from our carpenter ant problem and so needless to say, dinner was out of the question.

I decidedinstead to make a dessert and then when my husband got home we could have some together and talk.  We actully didn’t get a whole lot of time to talk about his hopes and dreams but I did share with him that I would like to set up some time with him so that we could talk about stuff, just him and I, and it didn’t involve kids, work, money or any of that, just us and some time to share.  He said that he would like that.  We did end up talking a little after that and had a nice time together.

Some times I think that as long I am still making an effort to do something, even if it is not “what the book says” that I can at least in some way be connecting with my husband, I think that is what is more important than checking off my list of the daily dares.

I look forward to sharing time soon with my husband to talk about other stuff and to learn some things about him and hear what he envisions for our future and what he hopes to accomplish.

This was quite a struggle for me to get a handle on.  In the beginning of my marriage when my husband would do things to upset me I found it necessary to share with all my “people.”  You know, I would call up my friends, my sister, my mom, sometimes even my mother-in-law and share with them the things that my husband was doing.  Now, I am not proud of that behavior but it is what I did.  I wasn’t keeping his things secret, I was shaming him in public basically.  In some ways I think I felt justified in my being angry because of the things he was doing.  And if I could get someone to agree with me than I didn’t feel bad about doing it.

That is until God got a hold of me and started to change my heart.  I realized that I wasn’t helping my husband get through those bad decisions, I was actually encouraging them.  I was basically telling him that he wasn’t good enough.  I was telling him that he was a failure and would continue to fail and when he did, I didn’t have to say anything, the way I treated him said, “I told you so.  I told you that you would do it again.”  This started to change at the time I started turning to God instead of my “people.”  I turned to him and told him how frustrated and angry and hurt I was.  I pleaded with him to help me and to see me through.  It was hard at times but I realized that HE was the only one who could help me.

The thing about sharing my husband’s faluts with everyone is that they will think of him that way.  They will remember the times that I said this or told him when he did that.  They will remember.  They will have a tainted view of him.  We may get past our thoughts of our husband and even though they don’t necessarily have to “get past” feelings of our spouse, they will remember those things you say.  So, if I can give advice out of my own failure; it would be to hold your spouses mistakes and hurtful things to yourself.  Bring them to God or to a pastor or maybe even a really trusted friend.  But be careful who you talk to about your spouse.  When things get better in your marriage you will wish that you had never told anyone about your spouses shortcomings.

Praying for my husband would seem like such an easy thing to do.  It isn’t.  I feel like prayer time with God is something that I don’t make time for.  It is not that I don’t have the time, it is that I push him off and then at the end of the day I feel bad that I didn’t put him first and I didn’t pray for the people close to me in my life; my husband, my children, the friends that need prayer, the people at church that have requested prayer, the list goes on.  I know it shouldn’t be this feel guilty all the time thing, I know God does not want me to feel guilty, I do talk to him thorughout the day, but sometimes I feel like he gets sqeezed in throughout the day when I think about him.

I have prayed for my husband daily before and I have noticed a difference.  I do want to be better at praying for him and also my children and myself.  I need to just make the time and put my priorities in order.  I think sometimes though that there is soo much stress about doing what we think we are supposed to do and not what comes naturally and without shame and guilt attatched to it.

I do know that I do pray for my husband.  I want to be better at it and pray every day for him.  I will try.