My Outlandish Life

My marriage blog has grown way bigger than expected and is even being viewed by people around the world.  So here’s the thing, I wouldn’t be telling the truth about marriage if I didn’t share the good and bad.  Like I said, marriage is hard, real hard.  And I’m frankly sick of the fact that no one is willing to share the hard.

When I wrote my blog on marriage my husband and I were finding ourselves carrying the weight as the ‘Christian marriage’ in these two couples lives.  We were the example.  I shared this with my friend, the same one who says my life is outlandish (without saying the word outlandish), and she told me to begin to guard my marriage with prayer because Satan was gearing himself up for the attack.  How right she was!

I failed at healthy marriage in so many ways today and so did my husband.  If you could have been a fly on the wall!  And I realized something, something we don’t see a lot in our marriage any more, I realized how easy giving up would be.  I mean, we now have 3 kids and I’m a children’s pastor, so it’s not as easy as it could be, and still…to walk away and say “enough, you obviously don’t care” would be so easy.  Really, it would…and it would take so much less work and heartache.

So here I am telling you how screwy my marriage was today and you may be asking, “so how is it your marriage is supposedly so healthy?”  And the answer is this: I will choose to see my husband as a good person who was acting out of love, even if handled horribly bad.  And, he will  choose to see me as a good person who acted out of love (or feeling unloved), even if handled horribly bad.  You see, I know that my husbands knee jerk reaction is to fix, and that is a honorable and lovely quality of his, and I’ll choose to see the good in it.  He knows that my knee jerk reaction is to protect, another honorable and lovely quality, and he will choose to see the good in it.

Sometimes seeing the good is easier than others.  Sometimes, we have to be reminded through prayer and reflection.  Had you been a fly on the wall today, you would see that this is one of those other times.  You may have seen yelling, sometimes words (sometimes we all use them), and a whole lot of ugly.  I just thought you should know, we all have those days.  The question is…”How do you chose to handle the next day?”