Holy Housewives- Week Three

Have you ever been put in your place by God? 

That is what happened to me last week.  It is a humbling experience and not a coincidence that I am reading this book right now!

So, my thoughts on chapter three (with a fresh perspective from working through some trust issues with God):

• One of the questions posed in this chapter is what do you say when someone asks what you do?  Do you feel tempted to say “I’m just a stay at home mom”, etc?  That just word is dangerous.  Raising our kids is a sacred calling.  When I worked outside of the home, I never qualified my position as “just a marketing director”.  So, why do we do that when we have made the decision to make homemaker our full time vocation?  Stasi Eldredge, an author that I love, points out that anytime we say “just” about ourselves, we are diminishing the value of God’s creation.  Let’s not diminish the value of what we do by feeling the need to justify our decision to stay home with our children!
• While I agreed with this chapter, I found the example of the “professional” stay at home mom condescending and judgemental {something I really wish the authors of this book strived to stay away from}. 
• That being said, the authors make valid points.  I was not taught home to keep a home or cook.  When I became a wife at the age of eighteen, my husband had to teach me how to make macaroni and cheese out of a box.  I never have learned to sew and the things I know about housekeeping and parenting I have learned in adulthood. Is that way it should be?  No.
• Now, later on in the chapter, the authors take things too far for me again by suggesting that a church sponsored mother’s day out is, in so many words, insulting to mothers and their babies.  I beg to disagree.  Not all of us as women have made it to the point of being able to handle motherhood on our own when motherhood comes into our lives.  Those times without my children allowed me to recharge and be a better mom when I picked them back up.  I do not think mothers should be guilted into believing that leaving your child in a church nursery is inadequate parenting.
• I also agree with the authors that our families are our PRIMARY ministry as women and moms.  However, I completely disagree that our contribution ends there.  This is a very individual decision based on the call God places on a woman’s heart and her relationship with Him.  Out of the overflow of my relationship with Christ and my desire to tell His story, I accept speaking engagements that take me away from home and devote a certain amount of time each day to writing.  These things are not done at the detriment of my family (if I am in line with the Spirit) and are part of the ministry of my life.  I won’t apologize for or doubt the validity of that call.  It is between me and God (and my husband).

 

As we venture to chapter four, I just encourage you to read this book with a prayerful and open mind.  Also, don’t forget to check out Betty’s thoughts on this week’s reading as well.

Now, on to how God put me in my place.  Have you ever been praying for God to remove the speck from your husband’s eye and instead he points out the telephone pole sticking out of your own? Yeah, that is where I am at this week….

Controlling? Me? Never!

Sheila does this every week….picks a topic for Wifey Wednesday that I strongly resonate with (maybe a little too strongly in this case).  Today’s topic is “Losing the control freak inside you”.  I read that title to my darling hubby as I prepared to type out this post and he laughed.  Hard.

I will preface this post by saying (as I say often) that I am a recovering Type A.  I am the first born.  I tend towards the controlling side of the spectrum. I acknowledge that and pray daily for more of God and less of me.  Almost thirteen years of marriage later this is still a struggle for me but baby, I’ve come a long way (by the grace of God and the patience of my husband) and here is how:

• Embracing God’s plan for marriage.  In Genesis 2: 23-24 God lays out His design for our marriages.  I am a gift to my husband, made to be his helper and partner for life.  When you cherish that role, rather then resent it, respecting your husband and God’s desire for your marriage is so much easier.
• Embracing the uniqueness of our union. No two people are exactly alike.  Neither are any two marriages.  Marriage blends two unique individuals into a unique partnership.  Mike and I didn’t have great role models of marriage growing up.  I found myself early in our relationship trying to make our marriage look like what I thought it should look like.  The problem is I was getting my concept of what marriage should look like from magazines, TV, peers and society in general.  Only when I turned to God and His Word was I able to appreciate how Mike and I compliment each others differences.  We truly bring out the best in each other (funny how God designs these things isn’t it?).
• Embracing marriage’s limitations.  One of my favorite sayings is that there is a God shaped hole in everyone’s heart.  A hole that only He can fill.  Marriage was designed by God.  However, it was not designed to replace the vital role that only He can fill.  When we look to our husbands to meet needs that only God can and heal wounds that only God can we are going to end up miserable.  The level of intimacy and friendship that Mike and I enjoy did not develop until I acknowledged that I needed God to meet my emotional needs, not Mike.  Do you know how much pressure we take off our marriages when we take our needs to the One that can actually meet them?  It truly is life changing.

So, do I have the perfect marriage?  No.  Do I have a great marriage?  Yes.  Am I controlling and domineering like I was in the beginning? No.  Do I still get antsy if we are running late? Absolutely!

Did I settle? or did God know just what He was doing?

I haven’t participated in Wifey Wednesday in a while but the topic today struck a chord with me.  And you know what happens when a cord is struck?  I write. (and write and edit and write and so on)

…but it does mean that if you’re not happy in your marriage, perhaps we should stop focusing on whether or not he was the right one to marry, and start focusing on how WE can become the right one?

That is the phrase that struck a chord with me in Sheila’s post.  Mike and I got married young.  I was 18 years old, he was 24.  We already had a lot of grown up baggage (he had a son, I had a son and we had one on the way together, we didn’t know Jesus as our personal Savior, etc) to contend with and neither one of us had a grown up in homes that modeled what healthy marriage looked like.

In the early days of our marriage, I sometimes wondered if I had made a mistake.  We were so different.  We handled conflict different, we approached raising children different, we definitely had different approaches when it came to handling money.  Sometimes our differences seemed to etch a chasm between our hearts and prevent us from connecting and communicating.

We had been married a year and a half when I came to know Christ and two years when Mike accepted Jesus into his heart.  I would like to say that knowing God flipped a switch in our relationship and everything was fantabulous from that moment on….but I would be lying.

I can say, however, that as we grew in our faith and in our knowledge of what God intended marriage to be, we began to work on making our marriage better.  We saw a Christian counselor, we I read books, we attended marriage conferences, we sought sound counsel from older couples.

And our marriage evolved.

I went from days of wondering “why did I marry this guy?” to appreciating how God had wired Mike specifically to be my husband (and realizing that not just anyone could handle being married to this gal).  That appreciation has led to a deeper level of intimacy and a respect for my husband that did not exist in the early days of our marriage.

My encouragement to married couples is to seek to recognize the ways that God designed your spouse to complement your personality and needs.  Once you begin to notice the things that make your spouse right for you, it changes the whole dynamic of your relationship.

Heavenly Father, thank you for bringing the man I am meant to be with into my life.  Thank you for helping me see that we complete each other instead of giving up when ever discouraging times came our way.  Thank you for creating someone for me that allows me to be myself, that delights in my successes and is willing to go outside of his comfort zone to grow along side me.  Help us all see your design for marriage and adjust our expectations of our spouse accordingly. ~Amen.