challenges
To All The Young Moms
“What a young mom thing to do” I hear her behind me saying, while I’m explaining why I’m not leaving my baby in the daycare at church. She scoffs and continues, Read the rest of this entry »
hello? it’s me.
Excuse my (very long) absence. It feels like so much has been going on but in reality it has been just a lot of waiting, wishing, hoping and praying that so much will happen. Read the rest of this entry »
Why I’m Tired of “Knowing” What Love Is
“How to know if you’re in a relationship that will lead til marriage.” “Is he marriage material?” “10 signs you’re in a relationship that can last.” “The secret to a healthy relationship.” ……
How many of these do you see on a daily basis? And how many times do you click on one, secretly hoping your significant other will pass the test, and that you’ll have gloating rights over all the boyfriends in the world? And how many times does that guy turn out to be a mere human. Let me guess. 9/10 times? (Lol there’s a little hero in all of us). At least this is what I’ve found.
Phil and I have been married for almost two years, so I get it, I don’t have all the experience. But I have some, and I know somewhere out there, someone is bound to find this relatable. I know someone else, guy or gal, is tired of their relationship being undermined by unrealistic expectations and standards. And I DO have a lot of experience in that particular field. I struggled for a long time with basing my standards for my romantic life off of what I read, what I listened to, what I watched, or what I just assumed.
It worked when I was 17, you know? I mean not really, but it was at least at a point where I had room to grow up a little.
When you look at our picture, which is actually from our engagement shoot, I bet you don’t see two people with a past. All you can see is the love we feel for each other. Not the frustration of finding a pose that looks good on us, making sure I like the way my neck looks, trying to make my hair look like it’s manageable. You don’t see the pain from my childhood, our arguments over how to properly assemble our dresser, or the endless piles of dirty dishes that need to be washed.
I read an article this morning titled something along the lines of, “10 ways to know if your relationship is perfect.” There were things along the lines of, are they your best friend, do you love spending time with them, can you cry around them… you know, the usual. Do you respect each other, do you tear one another down when you fight… I think all those are very key, but basically I think what this article was asking, was “are you in love with this person?”.
Spoiler alert, I’m not always in love with my husband. And part of me doesn’t want to say it because, “Oh no! What will people think?!” … And honestly if you want to judge me, have at it. But the truth is, relationships are very difficult. And though I would love to say that I don’t have shortcomings, or that Phil is always perfect, it isn’t true.
We all know this too. There isn’t a person in this world that is a perfect significant other. And I hate “knowing” what my relationship is based on someone else’s life, standards, flaws, hopes, and worldview.
It’s overwhelming, confusing and inaccurate. and I feel that I should defend all us imperfect people.
I think everyone at some point has been hurt, has been lied to, has had a little piece of their heart broken. And everyone at some point will get frustrated, will get angry, will feel hurt or betrayed. Everyone is trying to find their way in life. And the second we start putting lines, conditions, and rules to what a personal and intimate relationship looks like, that’s when we become the judge in someone else’s life.
Now, I’m sure the intent of these articles is purely innocent, and designed to be cute. So I’m not trying to spew my soapbox all over you like a hate-wave. The only point I’m trying to get across, is to remember when you see pictures of smiling faces, articles that take you to nostalgic places, or quizzes that test your compatibility… remember, that everyone is flawed. No one is completely put together. We’re all dragging around a backpack of burdens, trying to find a place to leave it at.
Don’t forget to see that person you’re with through eyes of grace and love. To remember what’s important about love. To forgive them when they fail you. To not base the foundation of who you are on what other people claim to be the “right” way. And to be honest with yourself about who you are, and who your partner is.
Comparing yourself or your partner to other people, or other people’s standards will lead to disappointment. Always. It’s a bottomless pit of mystery. And it’s never satisfied.
Regardless of whether you’re spiritual or not, remember that the person you’re with was created as a beautiful, loved, and individual being. And they should be treated as such.
Life of a Christian in an Adult World
“Verily I say unto you, Whatsoever ye shall bind on earth shall be bound in heaven; and whatsoever ye shall loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven. Again I say unto you, That if two of you shall agree on earth as touching any thing that they shall ask, it shall be done for them of my Father in haven, which is in heaven. For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.
-Mathew 18:18-20”
How He (Still) Loves Us So.
Do you remember coming home after church camp in those high school summers and feeling such an insatiable drive and hunger for God? Jeremy Riddle and David Crowder would hang on your speakers for weeks and Wednesday night youth group was the most exciting night of the week. Read the rest of this entry »
Monday, Monday
It’s almost 9 on Monday morning and the house is a complete wreck.
Almost every room needs attention, and yet I’m finding all I really want to do is sit on our brand-spanking new couches, drink my way-too-strong coffee, and write a blog about something… I don’t really know yet.
Not Given To Much Whine
So Phil and I live in S. Korea. We’ve been here for a couple months and are still working on getting settled and finding our niche in our neighborhood. This has been particularly difficult in regards to food. Grocery shopping, eating out, sending Phil with lunches, finding markets with cool things… really, I’ve just had a disappointing time. The language barrier has to be the toughest thing, because you can’t buy anything if you don’t know how much it is, can’t ask how much it is, it might be priced higher because you’re American, and that’s even if you can decipher how to get there in the first place.
It isn’t that I don’t like Korean food, but they barely use salt
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Spiritual Richness
What is our responsibility as spiritual beings? Who is our responsibility? Is it safe to say that our own spirits are our responsibility?
I find that so many times, Christians fall to the wayside when it comes to stirring up our own spirits. Stopping sin in it’s tracks the minute it starts to creep in, and taking responsibility of our sanctification and spiritual health.
Often times you hear things come from Believer’s that sound like God has control of their life, but actually what is ruling them is passivity and fear. Asking God for an answer to every decision we make is wasting a perfectly good brain and will of our own that He gave us. I don’t think God ever intended us to be drones, to walk throughout life using Him as a crutch.
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Things That You Realize When You’re Not Looking For Anything.
“I will say of the LORD, He is my refuge and my fortress: my God; in him will I trust.”
-Psalm 91:2
I was reading this passage earlier and it really challenged me and I thought I’d share my personal thoughts.
I think trusting God can sometimes get a little blurry as to what it actually entails, what it means on a daily basis, and maybe how it has gotten misconstrued. I mean I know for me personally, that I don’t always FEEL like doing what I should, or what I know I need to, or maybe even what God has asked me to… but I don’t usually look at those types of situations as not trusting God. It’s usually a matter of free will, right?
A friend of mine and I were taking a walk and talking about married life and life with kids (she and her husband have an incredible baby girl), and how it can be challenging to adapt to the life of trusting someone else’s input – especially the times you might disagree with it.
Growing up as an independent woman with a good sense of herself (whatever that means, right?), and a pretty good head on her shoulders, learning to adjust to having another human as such a major part of my life, my decision making and my future, well it can seem kind of daunting.
I’ve struggled with a lot of perfectionism and feeling like my identity and all that I am rests on whether or not I answer “it” right, especially in my relationship with God. Trusting God when you’re single versus when you’re married has to be one of the most incomparable things in life. Now maybe to all you ladies who have been married for over a year, bear with me because I’m only learning and maybe the secret is right around the corner. The decisions I made when I was single affected (for the most part) only myself. Obviously they affected SOME other people, but you know what I mean? All you had to do was look out for numero uno. Make sure that you stayed out of sin and rough situations based on your own actions alone.
But marriage. That’s my heart AND his heart. THAT’S A WHOLE OTHER HEART!
It’s a weird place to be. Because honestly, loving my husband is one of the easiest things I’ve ever done. He is compassionate, he’s empathetic, he’s kind, he is by far the funniest person I’ve ever known, not to mention his good looks cause I could go on all day about those… no he has never been a difficult person to be in love with. He’s always the first one to repent, he always wants peace in our home, he stands up for me and defends my honor, and always keeps me safe. I mean…heh, I definitely scored.
And then there are the moments when I disagree with one of his decisions, and I have to decide in my heart, whether to trust him or not. And those moments can honestly be the most difficult. Because I’m not just choosing to trust him, but I’m also choosing to trust God. Let’s face it, Phil isn’t always right, but God gave him to me as my covering, to follow him and honor him with my trust. And theoretically if your husband loves God and is pursuing a relationship with Him then his decisions will in turn reflect more of God, which is of course, always right.
Now this goes without saying but I’ll say it anyway, if you’re in an abusive or ungodly relationship, and your spouse’s decisions are causing harm to you or your family (in any sense), there are different verses for that. And God by no means endorses women (or men) to be victims. So if that is your situation, please have the courage to change it.
With that being said, that is not my case at all. And I suppose what I’m trying to get at is, although he might make the wrong choice and fail, knowing that he’ll be loved and trusted anyway, makes a world of difference. And me choosing to accept the fact that I am not the leader of my home, and though contrary to occasional belief, I DON’T actually know everything, maybe it will make those moments easier to tackle.
Hell, No.
I had the pleasure today of re-realizing how much the enemy hates us. You know, this is the guy that used to have a seriously cool job. If one third of the angels left with him, then he MUST have had a major influence over heaven. So this was no mere “oopsie”, this was like a for real God damnation type of thing. God took this so seriously that one day, yes he will be defeated but not just that… oh no God doesn’t stop there, Satan will bound for one thousand years, he’ll come back and deceive the nations again and then he will be cast into a lake of fire.
A. Lake. Of. Fire. That’s just about as intense as it gets. And he will be tortured forever. I’m sorry, because I know this is a little graphic but I just want to illustrate a little how God handles someone who has been lying to His people for thousands of years. He does not like it.
I wonder if maybe Satan doesn’t know this will happen, or maybe he thinks God is kidding or something or what must be going through his mind in all of this that keeps all the evil going. Misery loves company, perhaps? Maybe he ultimately knows what’s going to happen and just hates God so much that he wants to pull as many people down with him as possible. If you notice, Satan has very common themes. His strategies have been the same all throughout history and this guy is constantly trying to get us to relive all the same mistakes. And he deceives, he doesn’t bring anything new to the table whatsoever, he just takes God’s love, His word, His promises and twists them. He turns it around and makes it look and smell and taste like truth but it really isn’t.
This little booger is a tough one though, and rather than take all the credit for the crap in the world, he would much rather us blame ourselves and God. And so that’s been basically our whole lives, back to Eve in the garden, we have been living in a world of false comforters, false Love, false gods, false truth and false hope.
So as you read, a blog ago, Phil and I went to a Marriage Retreat in Thomaston, GA with a ministry called Be In Health, last week and we were so excited to find out that a lot of the things that we’ve struggled with are issues that can be dealt with by recognizing the enemy’s plan for our lives and choosing not to be in agreement with it. Which, that may sound really simple and maybe every other couple but us has realized this before, but I know for me, this was a huge breakthrough. When things aren’t right, something in your spirit knows it, but not having a name for it can be very frustrating and can really prevent you from getting healing and resolve. Knowing what you’re working with can be very relieving. I may be having a really hard time with believing a lie that Phil is going to walk out on me one day, that he doesn’t love me how he says he does, that I’m not mysterious and beautiful and worth pursuing and that my efforts are going to go to waste… but really, I could just be having a hard time trusting God. Doubting that God put us together, doubting that God made me in His image, and really all I need to do is, repent of course, and work on trusting God.
Again, maybe this is just a “me” issue and if so, I guess I’m a little late to the game, and thank you for reading my struggles. But I think there are more couples out there with the same issues. Who feel like things are wrong, but can’t figure out how to change it or make it better. Finding roots to your problems helps so much in getting rid of them, for good.
It really inspired me to remember that Phil isn’t my enemy. To know that he struggles with his own set of lies from the enemy and he truly loves me and wants to be the man God made him to be.
So today is our first day back since the Retreat and I will say, it definitely started off rocky. We just could not stay at peace with one another. He said the wrong thing or I said five wrong things and our hearts were NOT really having a good time. We were talking on his way to work and we were just really getting into it and I just prayed, I prayed that we would realize what was going on and I could feel him praying too and after a minute God started to talk to me.
We got this teaching on passivity called “Overcoming Passivity”, and one example mentioned was a particular incident where this couple was at the playground with their kids and kind of suddenly, one of their kids fell off the playground and started bleeding, and another one at the same time fell down while he was running (or something like that. There was some chaos, I know that) and they just felt like, “what’s going on, why is this happening to us??”. And then looking back on that incident later they said, that was such a passive approach to the situation. That they should have risen up and said; NO! You are NOT going to do this to our family, I tell this to stop!
And it’s so true, I find that so much of the time, when bad things seem like they’re just sort of raining down on you all at once, one right after another, our first instinct is to go into self-pity. Oh woe is me, why is this happening, and just when I was doing so good, how could I be here again, and I was working so hard, I really thought this time would be different, why me Lord, why me… can you taste the lie in that? When we should be standing up and saying, oh wait a minute, I recognize you, you’re the thing that wants to destroy my trust in my husband, you’re the thing that makes me feel unworthy, you’re the thing that tells me God’s word is a lie. I reject you, and I call you a liar and tell you get away from me, you’re no good, you’re a wimp and I hate you.
I think so much of the time we are so afraid to get in the enemy’s face and call him out on what he really is. He is a coward, he is a liar, and he has no place in our lives or our marriages, or relationships or children or hearts. And it’s about time that we become overcomers. It’s about time that we rise up, that we speak to each other as spiritual beings, that we shake passivity and we defend one another.
The enemy totally already had his chance, and he blew it. He blew it big time. And now it’s my chance. And I don’t want to give him my chance too, in fact I refuse to. He cannot have it. Because I already know what he’ll do with it, and I don’t like his options. His options for my life suck.
Instead of death, let’s choose life. Instead of rejection, acceptance. Instead of hate, Love. Instead of being passive, let’s be active.
Let’s tell hell, no, and to go back where it came from. And take our lives back!
Chew On The Write Words 