Marriage
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Beautifully Taken for Granted: Building Trust in Marriage
Who WANTS to be taken for granted? You’d probably have thought there was something wrong with me if you had walked into my kitchen two years ago late at night after a long day and found me giggling. I was giggling to myself over a sink full of dirty dishes because after 9 years of marriage, countless hours of diligent sacrifice, my husband finally, beautifully, had taken me for granted. I worked really hard to be taken for granted. (this site uses Affiliate links-purchases support our ministry through a small referral fee that never affects your cost.) That sounds really crazy, I know, but the reality is I never saw…
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Let Him be Her Dad
Let him be her dad. It is a lesson I have to relearn often because dads are imperfect. It’s really easy from the outside to see how I might have handled things differently, but he needs the freedom to be who God made him to be. God gave each of us the perfectly imperfect parents we were meant to have. To let him be her dad, I had to learn humility and my Heavenly Father’s perspective. On this Father’s Day, I spent a lot of time thinking about my dad, my step-father-in-law, my father-in-law and my daughter’s father. Each of these men did things differently, wonderfully, imperfectly. But each were…
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Are your Expectations Ruining your Life?
Expectations are sneaky buggers. They are often so engrained into our ideas of normal that we forget we have them at all. We have all these cultural expectations that we don’t even question. For example, think about the 4th of July. Most Americans immediately picture patriotic picnics and hotdogs on the grill. If our day looks different, we can feel a little let down. And when these ingrained expectations aren’t met, we can experience real costs in our lives. I sometimes don’t even realize I had expectations until I find myself disappointed. And then I’m upset, angry, sad, etc. because I set myself up for failure. My expectations were ruining…
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Its Own Way: Having 1 Cor. 13 Love in my marriage
Sunday, my husband and I decided to cook spaghetti together. We had different ideas about making the sauce. Tomato sauce is one of the few things that I have worked to perfect, so I started to fight for my way. What should have been a simple discussion about which step should go first, started to be about who was a better chef, smarter, and generally the most rightest person in all the universe. I silently prayed for the right heart in that moment, and adjusted my attitude before it became a fight. Yet, I should have stopped before I started. The next day, God pointed me right to what He…
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50 Shades of Green Valentine’s Day
Do you picture a 50 Shades kind of Valentine’s Day? Are you doing Valentine’s Day wrong? I was for years and didn’t realize it until recently. The gift that made me realize just how much I’ve changed wasn’t really for me and involved new socks. And real love isn’t 50 shades of grey; it’s one shade of dark green, trust me. This year my husband has to work late, may not even make it home for dinner, and will probably barely drag himself through the house and to bed after the week he’s had, and I’m okay with that. In fact, when my husband “warned” me he has to work…
