Today my husband and I celebrate our 4th wedding anniversary. This is my third marriage and my husband's second. We both can honestly say that God has really blessed our marriage and protected it. It started off rocky. We both came into this marriage with so much emotional, relational, spiritual and relational baggage. My husband never had children before getting married to me and at that time, our children were 9 and 12. He instantly became a dad. He was never around children much either.
We're both firstborns, engineers, strong willed. I praise God that despite those things, God is making our marriage not only work, but thrive. Through various hardships we faced, the Holy Spirit gave us fortitude and perseverance to keep going on, to see past the immediate and to look to the future. At times, it looked bleak when our eyes were focused on right now or on our circumstances.
Thankfully neither he nor I have so much in common and have the same strengths & weaknesses that the other wasn't needed. My husband has a high emotional intelligence, which mine isn't all that high. But I have a persevering stamina and we were both life long learners. Though both of us are strong-willed people, we found that that doesn't always serve us so well in marriage. When one wins and the other loses, it really is a lose-lose situation in the end.
It really took me submitting to the Lord in what He said in His Word. Ephesians 5:22 says that wives are to submit to their husbands. Now, there is more to the chapter and I will do my best to not take things out of context, but that is one thing I did NOT do in either of my prior marriages. I Peter 3:1, Colossians 3:18, Ephesians 5:24 all say similarly. It wasn't easy and really took a lot of prayer, but also putting faith into actions.
As I've said in other posts regarding the prayer model I learned from Katie Souza, when I began repenting of things I've done, felt, or thought wrong, but also getting healing on all those soul wounds that those sins caused, I found my life changing. I knew intellectually I could not change my husband and the only thing I could do was to allow God to change me. So, that is what I did. I allowed God to change me. And, so He is doing.
Little by little as my own heart changed, my own perceptions and views changed, God began to change my husband. He's still doing that with both of us. And, now, 4 years later, we are enjoying the fruits of those labors. We continue to labor, to allow God more into our lives, being sensitive to what He is telling us to do, and then taking actions on those things.
Today it rained - this morning. I see that as a huge blessing from the Lord. It also rained yesterday. As we pick up on the first day of our 5th year, I look forward to see what God will do in our lives as we submit more to Him, conform to more of who He is, making Him an even greater part of our lives. It's exciting.
God is so good. Not only do I love my husband but I am so in love with him. And, I see it in the way my husband looks at me, touches me, loves me that he also is growing more in love with me as time goes by. We are way more in love with each other now than we were when we got married. He is my Mr. Right. And I am his Mrs. Right.
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