My husband and I met in person at Central Park. Our business conversation quickly turned into a conversation about everything else. As he walked me to the train (after his attempt to kiss me) he stared at every movement my large lips made. I kindly asked him not to do that because it made me uncomfortable as most full-liped ladies would know. Now that I think back to that encounter, I wonder if he was looking at my lips or mesmerized by the things I said to him.
As I said in a previous article, he told me he loved me just days after meeting me. Thinking back now, I know that we were at the most vulnerable points in our lives and were able to be honest. Honesty is most important when trying to develop a relationship with someone. It is even more important than having things in common and spending quality time. It’s definitely more important than playing the so-called game of “trapping the man.”
We’ve all done it: try to find ways to get him to put a ring on it. But it is impossible to make him want you if you aren’t being yourself. The best way to show him who you really are is by the words you use. Don’t be afraid to voice what you are looking for in a relationship. You don’t want to run him off with your long list of demands but be candid about the type of relationship that you want. Make sure that you are clear that you want a monogamous relationship that can possibly lead to marriage. Why waste time? In the past, I’ve told guys that I just want to keep it casual when I really wanted to say, “I want to have your babies.” Although, God allowed me to be fearless enough to say that to my husband on our first date, I could have kept that to myself. The thing that I did let him know, which was the right thing to do was that I was tired of mindlessly dating. Yes, I was young (20) but I was tired of having a broken heart. I made sure to let God know and let him know.
I was honest but I wasn’t demanding—not at first anyway. I simply explained to the man I knew I wanted to marry, that I don’t casually date and that I hoped that the next man I was monogamous with was going to be the last person that I was with. I assured him that I was not pressuring him into anything but I wanted to be open with him. I didn’t want to date him under false pretenses and I didn’t want him to do that to me either. He appreciated my honesty and felt like he could be honest as well. It turned out that he was tired of just dating too. He was actually considering marrying someone else if he didn’t meet the right one by age 30. He appreciated that he met me before he made the mistake of marrying the wrong one.
Though it may be early in a relationship consider that the early days are your building days. These are the days that you are constructing the foundation for a long-lasting love. Love can only exist in an honest place. Its foundations must be biblical in order to thrive. “The tongue can bring death or life; those who love to talk will reap the consequences.” (Proverbs 18:21) You have the power to speak life into your relationship by being honest so be mindful of the words that you speak to your potential spouse. Also, be careful not to be demanding; that is a good way to run him off. Don’t think that as soon as you talk about your intentions for your future that you should start planning your wedding. “4Love is patient and kind…6 It does not demand its own way.” (1 Corinthians 13:4-6) It just means that you’re not wasting anymore time in relationships that aren’t going in the right direction.
Tag: relationship
I was still a teenager when I officially “went crazy,” according to my friends. I literally went from graduating from high school to planning a wedding with my beautiful young fiancée. Six months later I was waiting for her at the altar.
Why did my friends think I was crazy? Because in their well-pondered logic, I was still in the infatuation phase of the relationship. From their perspective, there was a likelihood that I was marrying Sarah because I still had the “warm fuzzies.” Good analysis, guys, but your logic was flawed!
We had invested seven years of friendship into this relationship already. We had fights where we got so mad at one another that we couldn’t even speak. We laughed so hard that we gasped for precious oxygen between intervals of embarrassingly high-pitched guffaws. We wiped away tears that we had caused one another to shed.
My point? Infatuation was not the engine driving our decision. Love was. Love anchored me to her bedside when she had her wisdom teeth removed and I helped her up from her bed to the bathroom door because she was so nauseated she couldn’t stand. Undiluted, ever-increasing love planted her feet before that altar and emboldened her tear-jerking vows to me—me—on our wedding day. Yes, it was love, but also peace. It was the perpetual peace of God in us that evaded well-intentioned skeptics and hand-wringing nervousness of people around us.
Though the objective of marriage is not to fulfill my needs, these are five reasons that I needed marriage—and still do:
1. I need what God hid for me to find in my wife. God has graciously and humorously deposited attributes of Himself throughout creation. My wife is a treasure trove of beauty that contains pieces of the mysteries of God that I am privileged to unearth, through the inexhaustibility of Christ in Sarah. (2 Corinthians 4:7)
2. I need to love someone even when there isn’t immediate gratification. Godly marriage is an invitation to invest into a something big that doesn’t only benefit us. I need to love outside of myself, my ambitions, my rewards. I need marriage because it evokes an “other-worldly,” supernatural, bond-breaking love that “covers a multitude of sins.” (I Peter 4:8)
3. I need my wife’s tenderness. I need my wife’s feminine tenderness. I get into “warrior mode,” slaying dragons, and hunting beasts to protect and provide for my family. But God gifted man with wives to bring the beauty and tenderness of His nature to man. My wife does that for me.
4. I need my wife’s relationship with the Lord. My wife is such a worshiper! She is prone to enter into the presence of God and man, waving the banner of His majesty. She brings to my relationship with the Lord the reverence and awe of Him that I so often neglect.
5. I need my wife’s friendship. I need an encounter, in the flesh, with true unconditional love. My wife knows things about me that none know, besides God Himself—and she loves me and approaches my weaknesses with patience and faith in the God Who “works all things together for the good of those who love Him.” (Romans 8:28)
Every night I kiss the face of a fellow pilgrim who nudges me ever-closer to the shores of Heaven. In the end, we will reach those shores together and look more like Jesus because of our journey in marriage. I needed marriage then, and I need it today. And I accept this certainty with a smile on my face.
Does marriage provide God-ordained solutions to your shortcomings? How does it push you closer to Christ?
A man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and they become one flesh. This births the next generation. The launch of a new household starting from ground zero to structure what will become their family.
But we all have a past of people and events that have significantly shaped and influenced our lifestyles possibly more than we ever took the time to realize. Our entire life, our behaviors and thought patterns have been mentally conditioned since we were little children; most of which takes place in the home.
It’s called social learning. Social learning is something we learn to adapt by observation, imitation and practice. And our families have possessed the most influential power over us because we’ve been raised constantly observing them in natural settings, specifically in the home, every day sometimes all day. No matter how destructive, unhealthy or dysfunctional, when it’s been seen as a natural attitude or behavior at some point we accepted these as a normal way to live because we’ve grown so familiar to them.
Now wait a minute Brittney, are you trying to say my family is crazy?
I don’t know. Maybe they are!
Look, maybe your parents, your family did everything they could to ensure your survival and I wouldn’t take away from that for one second. Surviving gets real. As a young mother, I already know. And I’m not saying they were bad people, because we can be well intentioned people with terribly conditioned mindsets. There comes a time as we begin our own families that we have to really stop and analyze some of the unhealthy habits that we were exposed to in our childhood so that we don’t repeat the cycle in our own family. We have the opportunity to completely start anew and give our children a better trajectory of life. No, we won’t be perfect, but we can be preventative.
For example,
Maybe you were raised to see the first reaction to frustration or misunderstanding acted out in anger and hostility; and maybe primarily towards you. Well what does that do as we get older? It teaches us through social learning to handle all our frustrations in anger rather than in wisdom. Nothing’s wrong with being frustrated or upset but when we automatically cloud all judgement in anger or by fighting physically it shows that we haven’t learned how to communicate ourselves in a way where there’s understand that could result in a solution. If we’re yelling and screaming at our kids with no explanation as to why they shouldn’t be doing what they’re doing then it becomes a fluster of wild emotions. They’re confused, frustrated and in return learn that anger is the way to handle things, rather than a teaching experience that brings understanding and grows them in wisdom. We can break the cycle of destructive anger starting with our family.
Maybe there was a lack of affection in your home. Sure they worked, fed you and put a roof over your head so yeah that was a form of love by providing. But kids spell love T-I-M-E and A-T-T-E-N-T-I-O-N. And they need lots of it. What happens when this is missing? We grow up to feed off of the acceptance and praise of others in order to feel good about ourselves. For a young woman, many times it leaves you to try and recap that void by giving yourself to a number of men. We were created to love and be loved in an intimate way.
Or maybe you only got attention when you behaved badly, yet never received any acknowledgement for good behavior. “I expect you to do good.” is what we’re told. But human psychology tells us that we’re naturally conditioned to repeat behaviors that have a good response or positively affect us and we tend not to repeat behaviors that inflict harm or a bad reaction toward us. However, if there’s no balance of praise along with chastisement, we might continue to be rebellious because its bringing some form of attention, even if it’s not the right kind. It leaves us open to grab at any type of attention even if its self destructive. An absence of that can certainly condition our behaviors as we grow older. We can break the cycle of neglect starting with our family.
Maybe problems in your home were never really faced and talked out, but constantly swept under the rug as if everything was perfect or things would somehow “fix themselves”. But what usually happens is those things accumulate and have a snowball effect which leads directly into a crisis. By not learning to be responsible and have the character to face our problems and obstacles in life or in our households we create people who take flight once the going gets tough. You walk away from your problems and try to act like they don’t exist. You find yourself constantly stuck in life because you haven’t built the mentality of overcoming obstacles which are usually teaching moments that grow us.
These are just a few examples! But there are so much more out there.
So I want you to really take the time to think and talk about it as a couple. Get both sides. What are the unhealthy things that took place in my upbringing that have had an affect on my life in a negative way? Not only does that challenge us to make changes in our own lifestyle right now but it opens our eyes to the powerful changes we can make in ending these dysfunctional cycles so our kids won’t have to go experience them the way we did. We teach our children how to behave. They are watching us and developing our same habits through social learning. “Do as I say and not as I do” is not an accurate term we grew up hearing. They will do what you do.
On the other hand, what are new traditions and boundaries you can create with your family? Family game nights, sharing at the dinner table, disciplinary actions that are structured to help build wisdom and direction; even when they won’t always understand but it’s for their good anyway. Being able to do things over is an amazing experience.
Remember, we’re building lives here! Society is built on families and as the church, as the body of Christ we need healthy examples.
Your sister,
Brittney Moses
When We Become Nothing
by Sarah Westbrook
Love. We are exactly nothing without it. (1 Corinthians 13:2)
If you grabbed the most incredible person that exists on the planet (think of that person that pierces your heart and blows your mind), who has fulfilled jaw-dropping good things with God. If you remove love from them – they are reduced to nothing. Why do we fight so hard to be other things that we think are good and valuable? Probably because His love is so inhuman. It is radical. It is earth shaking. It is 1 Corinthians 13!
Where Is the Gospel In Our Marriage?
Five years ago, I was present when a man from Africa was asked “Why does your country see more miracles than we do here?” He replied, “Because we have no other options”. Because of their humble lifestyle, they reach for and experience His love and His power.
Our “options” and “negotiations” around His ways have so clearly crashed and burned in failure. If we would act like this wonderful people group from Africa and grasp that there are no other options for us, then we would have the gospel in our marriage. Power and love would be present and played out because we are grabbing ahold of it. I am beginning to understand that when God’s Kingdom comes to us and into our lives, it will probably look pretty foreign. It won’t look like anything we could ever do or be on our own.
Examine What Your Heart Treasures.
It’s not the outside world that wrecks us. Defilement happens inside our hearts. (Matthew 15:18-20) Where is our heart for each other? That is our ministry above all else. Allowing our feelings to call the shots and run the show has become so common. We freely judge each other.
We lean on our own understanding. (Proverbs 3:5-6) We forget all about speaking our spouse’s love language to them. We allow our love for them to get crowded out and turned off. We forget to recognize the good traits that God put in us for each other that we need so much. It’s not the outside world that defiles us. Defilement happens inside our hearts. (Matthew 15:18-20)
In my case, this especially takes place when the odyssey of raising children is underway. I get fixated on how uncomfortable I am, being pushed so far past my capabilities, riding a crash course of self-absorption obliteration, and living in the blazing reality that I feel no control of anything under the sun. I’m suddenly reminded that before I was my kids’, I was my husband’s.
A few ways to keep God’s love in your marriage:
1. Be in His presence to receive love. Be a person that interacts with Him minute by minute and therefore remains in His transforming presence. The Kingdom of God is ‘at hand’. He is at our fingertips. “The Kingdom of God is not a matter of talk; it is living by God’s power.” – 1 Corinthians 4:20
2. Fight for your spouse. War for them through prayer. Pray down His kingdom come in them and in the process your love for them gets turned on and you gain God’s unsurpassable heart for them.
3. Love your spouse from God’s perspective. Love them through their failures, incompleteness, and transformations. Tap into God’s feelings, compassion and plans for them.