(Newly) Married Wisdom #2

The last time I posted about what I've learned about marriage, I was only three months into it...hard to believe we are hitting our one-year anniversary in just under a week!!

As you can guess, I've learned a lot since that last post. I'm beginning to understand the meaning of "you learn something new everyday."

Without further ado, I give you my newest discoveries in the magical land of matrimony!

1)Perspective and response: a recipe for success! If I had to name one of the most valuable things I've learned thus far, it would be that your perspective of circumstances and the responses you have in them is one of the most important components to a strong marriage and strong character, and a successful life in general. I think it's obvious that marriage is not always rainbows and unicorns and dancing lollipops, so what do we do when things are less than desirable? When our spouses do something that makes our blood boil or our heart break a little bit? 

I gotta be honest and say that it took me a fair amount of time to put away my pride at how it's my "right" to react dramatically and without thinking if my husband did something to hurt me or aggravate me, and learn the power of a kind and loving response no matter what (still working on it...).

I was under the notion that because I was a female, I had permission to be overly moody, dramatic and emotional, and my husband just had to suck it up and deal with it because well, I'm a woman and that's how we women are! I could not have been more wrong. Why? Because moodiness and emotions are no excuse when it comes to loving like Jesus loved! Like, seriously: the man was tortured and died on a cross and He didn't complain once! Last time I checked, we are ALL called to follow his example, not just the dudes!

There's a Proverb that says "a fool expresses all of their emotions, but a wise person controls them." God showed this scripture to me during a time I was being particularly "difficult" and as a result was hurting my husband's feelings with my reckless outbursts and not thinking before I spoke. Holding your tongue is not easy, but man does it pay off in the midst of an argument! I've found that my husband excels in this area and I've got much more to learn about responding in love than I thought!

Keeping heavenly perspective is HUGE in marriage. It is easy in the midst of a rough situation or a bad day or an argument with your other half to see things negatively, to feel disappointed and downcast and discouraged. But if you change your perspective and simply look at the situation and/or your spouse with God's eyes, everything changes!

And wanna know something really cool? When your perspective shifts so do your words and actions! It becomes far easier to respond in love and gentleness in every situation when you are no longer looking at the glass as half empty and choose to see it as half full, instead. Nifty how that works, isn't it? This might be something you're saying: "well, duh!" but it's one thing to know it and another thing to get in the nitty-gritty of life, put your money where your mouth is and actually walk it out.

Along with having heavenly perspective, selfishness needs to take a back seat and we need to look from our spouse's perspective. I can't tell you how many arguments we've gotten in where it was full of "I feel, I need, I want," instead of putting myself in his shoes and seeing from where he stands. Selflessness is contingent on a godly perspective. It's not possible to remain in a constant state of selflessness without seeing things from the perspective of love! And it's not possible to have a loving response if we don't have a loving perspective. 

I feel like learning to not be selfish is a lifelong process and I never realized how selfish I could be until I got married!


2) Holiness over happiness. This is HUGE, guys. So many people, in the church especially, have this misconception that the prime focus of marriage is to find someone to keep you happy. Would you call me a Scrooge if I said they were wrong? Well then bah-humbug! If you're looking to your spouse to be your source of happiness, you will never be satisfied. I noticed when I put expectation on my husband to love me "perfectly" 100% of the time and to spend every waking moment enamored with his undying love for me, I not only found myself disappointed all the time by every opportunity that went by that he didn't take to be gushy and poetic, but I made him feel like an awful failure of a spouse. Really, Hali! No one is capable of that sort of attitude 24/7!

I was setting a standard no human being could ever meet. While marriage does entail those things and God does desire for us to have a marriage full of passion and romance, the truth is that only Jesus can satisfy those desires 100% of the time without ever letting us down.

I firmly believe that God allows circumstances to arise where our spouses fall short of our expectations to remind us who our true source of love is, and that's Him! I can recall many times where I found myself so "happy" in my flesh, so comfortable with my husband and my circumstance, that I was starting to get my main fill from Ian and stopped going to God for His affections. And let me tell you, everything can be absolutely wonderful with your husband and you still won't feel whole on the inside if your primary source of love isn't coming from God.

All that to say: God is far more concerned with you becoming more like Him than you becoming more comfortable. You know that whole spiel I gave in the last marriage post about iron sharpening iron? Well ladies and gents, there you have the reason for marriage! (Of course God wants us to be happy! But having true joy in your spirit that doesn't depend on circumstances and being happy in your flesh because everything is hunky-dory are two totally different things, and one is far more valuable than the other, not to mention it is available while you go through the rough stuff!) So don't get disillusioned if you find yourself having days where you're not-so-happily-married so to speak. Growth never happens without a little bit of hardship! After all, a tree doesn't grow if there's no pressure on the seed, right?

I once heard a quote that said, "If you want to follow Jesus with your whole heart, stay single. But if you want to become more like Jesus, get married." That pretty much nails it.


3)What happens when we're both right? This is a dilemma I've found myself and my husband in quite a few times in the midst of a disagreement. Sometimes, we are both justified in our argument against the other person. But what I've noticed is that when we are both right about something, 100% of the time we are also both wrong about something. Ha! Another "duh" moment. But trust me, it needs reminding in the midst of a disagreement!

So how do you resolve an issue when both sides are justified and have valid arguments?

I remember one time God reprimanded me when I was whining to him about how I was right and Ian was wrong, how I am justified to be angry because I was right, I, I, I, I!

He stopped me and said, "Why don't you think about what you did wrong instead of what he did wrong?" That stopped me in my tracks. I was pointing out the speck in Ian's eye, all the while I had a huge log in my own!

True humility does not get hung up on being wronged. Rather, humility prompts us to take a look at ourselves and see what areas we need to grow in before pointing the finger at someone else. 


Even more than revealing my pride, it revealed to me my mistrust. Fear rose up in me that God wouldn't call him out on what he did wrong and so I had to. I realized how little I trusted God with the details of my marriage because I felt I had to control the situation. So untrue!

As with everything else that God does, it makes no sense to our logic to react in humility when we are wronged, but it yields good fruit! Like the proverb says, "A kind word turns away anger." Being humble and meek will get you the apology you want, not being prideful and angry! I have seen this time and time again, that when I am the first to apologize, it softens my husband's heart towards me and he will apologize for his wrongs, as well (and vise versa!).

However, even in the event that our spouse doesn't apologize, we are still called to humility (now this is a hard one...)! Ultimately, God's goal is to shape your character, regardless of whether your spouse is allowing Him to shape theirs. Any opportunity to come low and humble ourselves is an opportunity to become more like Christ and get closer to Him. Why let that be stolen from us because we are all bent out of shape and offended by our husband or wife? God uses ALL things for our good, so if your husband or wife is being a jerk, be thankful that it's another chance to practice what we preach and look more like our God! That's why we're married, in the first place! Remember? :)



I'm sure I could dredge up more to share, but we'll save that for another time. Have anything to add? Comments are always welcome! :)


<3Hali

Expectations: Not for the Faint of Heart

I've heard it said, "If you don't have expectations, you won't be disappointed when they're not met." As an optimist and an idealist, I never liked this way of thinking. And honestly, not subscribing to it has always done me good.

But let's get real for a second; it's simply impossible to go through life without experiencing the disappointment of having our hopes dashed at some point, even when we put our hope in the proper place.  So how do we reconcile unmet expectations with a God that says He'll never let us down?

Like any normal female with a dream in her heart would do, I've spent much of my 9 years of knowing my now-husband, fantasizing about my life with him as a married couple. One of my deepest desires was to take him to the place that I grew up, my most favorite place in the entire world. Summer after Summer that he could not go there with me and my family, I would dream of the day when it would happen, conjuring up beautiful mental images of us walking hand-in-hand down the beach, star-gazing at night, sailing on the bay. My heart would literally hurt while I dreamt of the day it would finally become a reality.

After so many years of waiting, I was finally able to bring him with me this year in our first Summer as husband and wife! Could the timing have been any more perfect? I was simply beside myself. Finally my dreams were coming true!

In the week before our trip, God kept bringing to mind the lyrics of the Andrew Ehrenzeller song that I picked to be sung during our wedding ceremony: 

"So I set my love upon you, no expectation, only revelation..."

(Looking back at my 5 months of marriage, the irony and humor of my song choice is not lost on me, but that's another dozen blogs for another time...)

Going into this trip, I had extremely high expectations. After all, I have had years to dream and fantasize, to plan out my perfect scenario for every situation while on this vacation. However, from the moment we woke up to go to the airport, nothing was going the way I had "planned." Dumb little things that went wrong were like fatal blows to my dream. By the time we landed at our destination, I was extremely irate, disappointed, and quite honestly, hurt with God. Ian picked up on it right away and wasted no time reprimanding me in love: 

"Don't let the fact that things aren't going exactly as you thought, steal your joy."

Of course as any heart-sick individual would do at the loss of a perfect plan, I didn't heed his words right away and let a couple of precious days go by feeling upset, let down, and disillusioned as each hour yielded different results than I expected of this long-awaited dream.

"God, don't you tell us to expect great things? Don't you tell us that you're a good Daddy who wants to give us the desires of our heart? What happened, here?!" 

And there it was again, the words sang over my marriage:

"...no expectation, only revelation..."

And then I realized my fault: I put expectation in my own ideas of perfection, rather than putting expectation first and foremost in the character of God to fulfill dreams in His perfection! It's so vital that we don't jump ahead of God, assume that we know how He is going to do something, and then build our hope upon it. That is a sure-fire way to construct a rickety foundation that will crumble under the weight of the slightest disappointment! 

I've heard so many times to "come to God expecting": expect Him to move in a mighty way, expect Him to answer you, expect Him to be there in a time of need, expect Him to show up.

Are these bad things to hope in? Of course, not! But what I've found that I do (and I'm sure I'm not the only one guilty of this) is I will go that teensy little step further and--sometimes unconsciously--put my hope in what I think His methods will be and expect everything to happen just as I imagine. Then when things don't go the way I expected I am left feeling let down, like God didn't come through on what He promised.

"...only revelation." 

What we need is not expectation, but revelation, a.k.a perspective. Perspective to see things as God sees them and not as we see them, perspective to remember that His ways are not our ways and His thoughts are not our thoughts (Isaiah 55:8), that we must not lean on our own understanding, but trust that He knows what He's doing (Proverbs 3:5-6). It's easy to think that everything has gone wrong when they didn't go the way we wanted them to, but that hardly means God didn't make good on His promise; it means He did it HIS way, not ours, and we should ask for revelation to see beyond what things appear to be on the surface.

Bottom line: We will always risk being disappointed if we are more hopeful in His methods than in His character; His methods are often a mystery and beyond our understanding, but His character is clear and it never changes.

"Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but desire fulfilled is a tree of life." (Proverbs 13:12) The Hebrew word for "deferred" means "delayed" and the Hebrew word for "fulfilled" is "come, arrive." I finally see this verse in light of Jesus: while we may have to wait while the fulfillment of our dreams is delayed, we will never have to wait for access to Jesus and the fulfillment we can find in Him...it has already arrived! Because of this, our hearts will never be sick and our desire always fulfilled when our hope is exclusively in Him: Not what He can do, will do, or has done in lieu of our heart's desires, but simply in who He is!



In hind sight, the fact that my dream didn't pan out exactly as I had always imagined was a good thing--more than a good thing, it was a great thing. I would not have experienced what I had and realized what I did had things gone any differently. Once I gained revelatory perspective and looked past my expectations, I was able to take joy in my dream, again. I ditched the disappointment and embraced the moment, and while it didn't outwardly appear to be my version of perfect, I chose to enjoy it and it was amazing.



God has known the deepest desires of my heart longer than I have. He was aware of them developing for 9 years and He knew how I longed for their culmination. I am no special case; God sees your heart, as well. Have you been disappointed lately by circumstances taking an unexpected and unwanted turn? Have you had great expectations only to find yourself disillusioned with their outcome? Release your expectations and receive His revelation! Putting hope in Him will not disappoint.



"And this hope will not lead to disappointment..." - Romans 5:5



<3 Hali