It is true that marriage clearly isn’t always about rainbows 🌈 and butterflies 🦋,
Some of our marriage days require harder works than ever.
We are thankful we marry the one we love, but “love” especially origins within our own self is fickle.
SELF is often prioritised, especially when we are faced with difference in expectations.
However, tension-causing differences can become blessings in disguise where we learn to complement one another. After all God did not mass produce us, including our husband/wife. I need to learn to respect and value the differences in characters between I and my husband, instead of complaining against it (need a changed and renewed perspective by His Spirit!).
One also says, “I can be selfish and married, but I cannot be selfish and HAPPILY married”.
How true is this!
Marriage is one way God interrupts our preoccupation with ourselves.
As we grow as a couple, I need to learn to focus on meeting my husband’s needs (believe me, although I love him, sometimes this is still unnatural for me to do). But I mustn’t give up!
Because when I focus on getting my needs met, I end up swimming upstream, against the current.
And swimming against the current, as you can imagine, is VERY EXHAUSTING over time!
I learn that there are two keys to changing the current: #HUMILITY and #PRAYER.
When we stay humble and stay hungry, there’s nothing God cannot do in us and through us! That certainly applies to marriage. When I walk in Christ-like humility and have a desire for oneness, I gain wisdom and experience — instead of repeating my same selfish patterns.
Ephesians 4:2 reminds us,
“Be completely humble and gentle; be patient, bearing with one another in love.”
Humility is the key to unity.
And prayer is the key to humility.
It’s recognition that I cannot do this in my own strength, with my own wisdom.
I like the NKJV translation for the above verse, “..with long suffering, bearing one another in love”. LONG. SUFFERING. It takes time, it takes process, it’s not an instant!
If you want a beautiful garden you have to work on it! Plant the seeds, cultivate the soils, fertilize, pulling out the weeds (what gardening teaches me practically).
You certainly cannot just “sit and relax” and expecting the soil to grow flowers by itself 😉
Last but not least,
PRAYER is as important to marriage as anything we’ll ever do. 👉🏻I’ll never be a perfect spouse, but I can be a praying spouse 👈🏻
There are moments in marriage when prayer is all we have left, but that doesn’t mean it should be a last resort.
And “funnily” (and I sometimes say “annoyingly” haha) enough, when I pray and surrender my marriage into God’s hands, PRAYER changes ME most instead of my husband!
Isn’t that just wonderful the way God works in our sanctification process!
If you’re a married couple (or soon 😉), let’s not aim to have a “smooth sailing marriage” (because there is none!), but to have a marriage that glorifying Christ, a place where husband and wife are committed to worship Christ THROUGH marriage.
There will be tensions, but as each of us committed to obey God’s wills, not self, we will enjoy the sweetness of the marriage for many many years to come ❤️
God bless you friends 👫
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