Marriage is a covenant, not a contract

I have a passion for marriage.

I love love. I love seeing people in love, and I hate it when I see issues in people's relationships that could be so easily fixed if they would just take the time to do it.

However, I realize that marriage is not easy. Relationships are not easy. Not everyone is as easy to love and get along with as my husband is! So I also love learning about relationships. I like Focus on the Family's podcasts about how to strengthen your marriage. It seems like as strong as I think Nate and I are that I always find some way that I can be more intentional about being a good wife.

I wanted to read a book called "Cherish" that I heard about on Focus on the Family, but our church library didn't have it. The librarians said they would order it but showed me the other marriage books in the little church library.

I chose a book called "Beyond Ordinary," by Justin and Trisha Davis. It's really for people who are struggling in marriage, but I figure if these people can show me what goes wrong in a relationship I can learn from it before going through it.

I took down a note on my phone that I wanted to blog about: Marriage is not a contractual agreement, it is a covenant agreement. When we decide to get married, we don't fill the agreement with clauses and exemptions. We swear to love the other person in sickness and in health, for richer for poorer, for better for worse.

Yet, especially in this society, we so often live our marriages like contractual agreements. If you provide me with this, I will give you this. If I make you happy, you must make me happy. If I cook you dinner, you must clean up. If I go to work and you stay home, you better get all the chores done before I arrive. If I bring you home flowers, you owe me a favor later.

If the other person doesn't fulfill our expectations for the contract, then divorce is the obvious answer.

"But they didn't live up to the agreement."

Is your spouse still alive? And you agreed to love and cherish until death do you part? Then, your spouse is living up to the agreement.

Marriage is a picture on earth of what our relationship with God should be. God also has a covenant relationship with us. No matter how badly we screw up, he loves us. We enter into the covenant when we accept Jesus as our savior, and that's it. There's no stipulations that would negate the covenant. Often we live as a contract with God --- I have to live a perfect life; God is supposed to bless me; life should be better when I'm a Christian. But that's not how it's intended to be, just like that's not how marriage is intended to be.

Contracts are broken all the time. There are consequences but we deal with them and move on.

Covenants are meant to last. Marriage is meant to last. Let's live like it.

Taco splurge

I started a book on marriage that details an "ordinary marriage" gone terribly awry.

However, the point of the book that an "ordinary" marriage is one gone awry. We shouldn't have ordinary marriages; we should have extraordinary marriages.

The book is aimed at people who are struggling, and we most certainly are not. I just am passionate about seeing how marriages often go wrong and working on not allowing ours to go there.

The first point that hit home with me was the fact that when we're dating, we're super intentional about making life awesome for our mates. We stop by and buy them coffee. We surprise them with their favorite candy. We buy tickets for them so we can go out to their favorite concert or a movie they want to see. When we're married, we stop that. I usually look at the budget and think, "We can save that money instead of spending it."

Where we live, a seasonal restaurant opens this time of year, and it's usually packed when it does. I was driving home from a radio interview for work and realized that the restaurant had opened. It was 11:45 a.m.

"I'll stop and get lunch for Nate."

"No. That's not in the budget."

"If we were dating, I would stop and surprise him with lunch."

That wasn't a conversation with someone else. It was the debate that went on in my head about 500 yards before the turn off.

I turned the corner, gauging traffic in the parking lot to make my decision.

It was busy. But I pulled in.

You know what, that lunch that we shared when we both came home from work that day and ate tacos we haven't had in months, that was an awesome lunch. We smiled and laughed.

I have to say, $17 in tacos was a splurge.

And it was totally worth it.

Mrs. Potatohead eyes

Sometimes women are like Mrs. Potatohead.

The pastor this morning was talking about qualifications to be a deacon or deaconess in the church, and one of them for women was the importance of being sober-minded. He said women should not live on an emotional roller coaster, comparing it to which eyes we have on, like Mrs. Potatohead.

I thought it was an interesting analogy.

There are many times when I can feel myself getting short. When people talk to me, I just bristle. For some reason, I woke up with my angry eyes in.

It could be that time of the month; it could be a bad night's sleep; it could be situations have put me on edge that day. Honestly, it could be for no reason at all. Sometimes women just have grumpy days.

However, I think the important lesson for us is that we have the choice which eyes we put in. We have a bank of facial expressions and eyes, just like Mrs. Potatohead does. If we wake up with a frown and our angry eyes in, we need to stop, take inventory and then go through our facial expressions to pull out our kind eyes and replace them.

Women naturally struggle with emotions, but we shouldn't see that as an excuse for bad behavior. When Paul instructed deaconesses to be sober-minded, emotionally stable, it's because it is an option. We can live by how we feel, but we can also choose to logically look at life and why we feel what we do, and we can change out our expressions and get off the roller coaster.

Next time your angry eyes are in, maybe thinking of Mrs. Potatohead will help you smile, take a step back and change out your expression for something a little nicer.

Paul's take on women in 1 Timothy

Normally, when we read 1 Timothy 2:11-15, we would skip it as an out-of-date passage about keeping women down, but the pastor this week took a deeper look into the culture and the original meanings of the passage, giving it new life.

"Let a woman learn quietly with all submissiveness. I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man; rather, she is to remain quiet. For Adam was formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor. Yet she will be saved through childbearing --- if they continue in faith and love and holiness, with self-control."

First, this passage was actually encouraging women to learn at church. In a time when women were allowed in the synagogue but were not encouraged to be there, telling women to learn was actually progressive. And the fact that they were to learn quietly in the original text simply meant to not be unruly. That seems fair enough.

The phase "in all submissiveness," meant to fall in line. It wasn't a demeaning phrase for women. In fact, those same words were used in Titus 2 when talking to a congregation and also in Philippians for how we are to follow Jesus.

The pastor also noted that when we look at the world, the places where women are actually valued and can go places are the places where the gospel has reigned. In places where Christianity is not prominent, women are covered, treated as property, used as sexual slaves, have no rights. Christianity is what has valued women through the generations.

The next part of the Bible passage about women not being able to lead and teach, well, that apparently is still self explanatory even in the original text. However, it was meant only for family and church life. Women are allowed to lead at work, in home Bible studies, in women's and children's ministries and can contribute through prayer and other service work. It just means pastors and elders are off-limits, and I think that is just fine. Well, it doesn't matter what I think if that is what God directs.

The question always comes up when women are limited of "Why is this so hard? Why do we rebel against these directives?"

Because that is what sin caused.

When sin entered the world, woman was cursed with pain in childbirth as well as "your desire shall be contrary to your husband, but he shall rule over you." Women have had to deal with the desire to lead their husbands since the beginning, but that is not what we were created to do. We were created to be helpers. So as much as we desire to rule, that's just not who we were created to be.

There was a lot to unpack in these four verses, and I think they are verses we often gloss over, thinking they are out of touch with the world today. But when we look a little closer, we see so much more value.

How much are we missing in our Bible on a daily basis when we just gloss over verses?

Cherish Your Spouse...Take a listen

For today, I'm going simple --- listen to this podcast. It is a wonderful podcast about cherishing your spouse, and I was convicted by a lot of things in it and part 2 of the show.

Focus on the Family podcast
Podcast part 2

Bro time

So many times when we were dating and first got married I was a terror when Nate wanted to spend time with his friends. I remember the night that I bawled on the floor by the bed when we got married and he was playing video games instead of cuddling with me.

Yikes.

The poor man so often let me crash his boys nights, and he still does, because I truly do enjoy hanging out with his friends. There were nights that his family or friends were over, and his parents were playing games with Nate and his friends and then his mom would go up to go to bed, leaving Nate's dad on his own. I truly thought she was selfish not staying up and hanging out with her husband. I thought I would never do that.

However, now, I've realized it probably had little to do with her. I think she knew that her husband needed some time on his own, with guys, even if it was just family or his son's friends.

The other day, Nate told me that it has been proven that men who have time with male friends, guy time, man time, were actually happier and more satisfied. I have realized that in the past few years that sometimes he just needs to talk to his friends. It's not usually anything serious, and it's not like he's keeping out of the loop so he can hang out with them. He just needs that bonding time.

So I truly have tried to get better about giving him his guy time without making him feel bad about it.

He did let me crash his family/friend ice fishing guy time this weekend a couple of times, but last night, I was sitting with them at 8:30 p.m. and I did something I never thought I would do when I was 16 years old. I pulled a 'mother-in-law.' I decided to head home.

It wasn't because I was tired. It wasn't because I didn't want to spend time with him. It was because I just thought that they wanted to play cards and be with the guys, so I said good-bye and headed out.

Live and learn I guess.

Moments around the fire

The same podcast that I wrote about last time had another point that I added to my notes on my phone to write about later.

The Smalleys mentioned that it's important to spiritually share together, and we do struggle with that sometimes. I wish that we would be able to do more devotions together, and I hope that's something we will work on in the future.

However, Gary Smalley mentioned that it's important to naturally bring up spirituality. We should look at our spouses and see where it is that they usually open up spiritually and then intentionally go to those places and use those situations to grow together.

Take my husband and put him by an open fire at night or on a porch as the sun sets, and boom, there you have it. It's in those moments that Nate opens up and contemplates the universe. It doesn't matter if it is with me, with his family, with his friends, the deepest conversations that I have been a part of with him have been in one of those two spots.

I guess this summer is going to include a lot more porch time. And we've already planned some camping trips on our land, so I'm looking forward to more moments around the fire.