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The Blessed Life- in Marriage


Our church is doing a series called “The Blessed Life”.  It is about how you end up living a blessed life by giving your first and your best to God, and then your life is blessed.  By choosing to have a heart for the Lord, even when times are rough and seeing the blessings that God pours out of you.  One of the main things they have been hammering home is that you don’t give your best to have your life be blessed, you do it because your heart is wanting more of God and naturally, His blessings flow from that.  In simpler terms, you do not give to get. 

I have had multiple people talk to me this week about marital struggles.  I have seen eyes rolled at husbands and heard of wives being just down right mean to their husbands and yelling at them over phone conversations.  Today is my 10th wedding anniversary.  YAY!  My husband and I do not see eye to eye on everything, but we try. I can honestly say this is the happiest I have ever been in my marriage and I look forward to saying this again next year and the year after.

A few years back, probably around 6 and then again around 3 years back, I was struggling with our marriage.  I felt un-loved, under-appreciated and I felt like I put all the effort into the marriage.  It was pretty rough on me and there were so many times that I thought the D word would just be easier.  I kept looking at what I was doing and what I was putting into the marriage and expecting to get the same out of it.  I was not giving with my heart- I was giving to get. 

Subconsciously, I think we all do that in some aspects of our life.  We are trained from a young age that if you pay for something, you should have it work and be good quality.  So if I am paying with my time, my marriage should be a good quality and it should be everything that I dreamt of growing up.  Marriage shouldn’t be hard- right?  If you are truly in love with this person and they really love you it should be easy- right?  That isn’t always the case. 

If we give to God’s kingdom just to get blessings from God, is that the right frame of mind to be doing that?  If we give our time and effort to our marriage just to feel how we want that person to make us feel is that the right frame of mind to be doing that?  When I was struggling, I read that book about the different languages of love.  I would get SO mad because I would work really hard to show my husband his love language, but I would get nothing in return.  I would put all this effort into doing what would show him I loved him and he wouldn’t even try to show me he loved me.  I was hanging around divorced women and other couples that were happily married and thinking the grass is always greener….

As our amazing pastors have been preaching about “The Blessed Life”, I have been thinking a lot about peoples’ marriages.  You can’t give just to get.  It is when you start giving with a good heart that your life becomes blessed.  God chooses to love us, even when we are un-loveable.  God chooses to show us love in ways that we might not like, but He always knows what will ultimately show us love. 

Maybe your spouse is un-loveable right now.  Maybe you are feeling dejected, hated, taken advantage of…  My encouragement to you is it gets better with effort!  You can try what I ended up doing a few years back and I am so incredibly glad that I did.  I started to REALLY love my husband.  I started to show him love when I felt he didn’t deserve it.  I started to show him grace when I felt like hurting him.  I started to see him how God sees us.  I started to see the ways that He shows love to us, and then I started to feel loved. 

I had a heart change.  I loved not to be loved but that is ultimately what came out of it.  I loved because I made a promise to love.  I loved because love was a choice.  I loved because God loved me first.  I chose to see that I couldn’t change the way that he acted, but I could change the way that I reacted to his actions.  I couldn’t change the fact that I wasn’t being shown love in the ways that I wanted to be shown love, but I could choose to see the ways that he was showing me love. 

After a while of me choosing to see how he loved me and choosing to love him, I started to feel loved.  I started to see his appreciation.  I started to see him doing the dishes as not an affront to my housekeeping skills (which are really lacking!), but as a thoughtful gesture.  As I started seeing his love to me- the way that I saw him and our lives together changed.  I was a happier person.  I didn’t love because I wanted something out of it or a warm fuzzy feeling (although that is what I get now when I see my husband even after 10 years!), I was loving because I wanted to love.  I was giving my best and I can say that I have an extremely blessed life.  God has blessed my life so much!

I am not saying that I have it all figured out and that it is going to be all smooth sailing from now on.  We have been married 10 years and in the grand scheme of things, that isn't a huge deal.  I just know that I am so happy and want to share with you a way to be happy too.  Last night, I came home after an interesting night.  It was past my kids’ bedtime and the lights were off in the house.  I was pretty tiered.  My kids and husband came out of the dark corner and surprised me and told me happy anniversary.  I was given a beautiful necklace and earring set and some other cute little things.  I love presents, but we don’t usually do gifts, so this was amazing!  I truly am living a blessed married life and a blessed life in general. 

God can make it better.  Choose to love how God loves us, unconditionally. 

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