Falling in love- after I got married

Love is something that many of us just don’t get. We don’t understand it. We think it’s all about butterflies, shooting stars and orchestra’s playing in the back ground when we kiss every time. 

The truth about love is it’s really none of those things. Sure they may happen in movies but in reality love is about sacrifice. The greatest love you’ll ever know happened from a sacrifice that God put in place.  He sent his own son to come here to die for us because he loved us. There were no shooting stars when it happened, no orchestra playing romantic music in the back ground and no butterflies.  The truth is the sky went black as night, people shouted blasphemy the whole time and the only things flying around were probably flies and vultures.

In this picture of love, it was the greatest love ever given to us. We didn’t deserve it! The same goes for relationships even here and now. Our marriages, boyfriends or other loved ones shouldn’t have to ‘prove’ their love for us. Honestly, I don’t deserve an ounce of the love my husband gives me. Don’t get me wrong I’m so thankful that God has given him the ability to love me, but I am so undeserving of it more than I am deserving.

My husband is awesome. Sure, he makes mistakes (he’s only human) but he sacrifices a lot for me. He sacrifices time, money and tons of effort to make sure our relationship works. Now, when we first got married I did not even care that most of this happened. I will put it out there. I was so selfish. I wasn’t even in love with him. I was in love with the idea of being in love. I was in love with the idea of being married. But honestly, and he knows this, I was not in love with him.  It’s sad, so sad I know but I learned so much from it. He was doing all of these things for me because he loved me, he seriously fought for our marriage.

I kept telling myself he didn’t love me that if he loved me he would be doing so much more for me, that he would fight for our marriage that he would do everything I wanted him to. I thought that there would be shooting stars and romantic orchestra music in my mind and that in all terms of romance he would be that wonderful guy.  The problem was I wasn’t living in reality. I knew that those things happened in fairytales but eventually real life would take over and that stuff wouldn’t happen every day.

When we started going to church and we both started living our lives for pleasing Christ and not others I really was struggling with myself internally because I knew that I wasn’t in love with my husband the way I should be. I wasn’t even sure I loved him all that much.  Sure I liked him and I could tolerate living with him and he was a great guy but, love, that one just had me stuck.  So I prayed and prayed and boy did I ask God to ever change my heart and my mind in the way I saw my husband.

A couple weeks into my desperation for God to change my heart regarding the way I looked at my husband and felt about my husband it dawned on me.  I saw him doing all of these things for me just simply because he loved me.  I had never noticed all the things he had done for me and for our child before. Yes, I will admit I was that selfish.  Sure prior to this I knew he was a great guy but in all honesty I really didn’t see him doing enough for us. But, in the long run he was doing way more than enough. Who was I to think he needed to fight for me? Who was I to think that the world and our marriage should revolve around my happiness?

In that moment it dawned on me ever so clear.  Love wasn’t about what he could do for me to get me to fall in love with him. It was about what I could do for Matt to make sure his happiness was fulfilled.  I stopped trying to be so selfish. I tried to make sure that I did my fair share of helping out around the house, and making sure he got him some alone time too and I started sacrificing things I wanted so he could have some things he wanted. I started actually fighting for his happiness. It was different than I had ever thought. When I started doing things for him because I was concerned about his happiness I realized that the more I worked and strived to make him happy and content the more I fell in love with my own husband.

There was no real defining moment of shooting stars and butterflies and rainbows and all the romance but there definitely was a day when I woke up and realized that I really had finally fallen in love with the guy I married. He was a great guy and I knew that from the start, but he became an even greater guy than I had imagined when I let go of my selfishness and started trying to actually love him. I stopped focusing on what he wasn’t doing for me and instead I started focusing on what I wasn’t doing for him but what I should be doing for him.

There still isn’t always romance in the air, but I do see it much more now than I did when I was the selfish one in the relationship.  I hear so often women who are like I was, saying that their husband’s aren’t doing certain things that they need to in order know that they are loved.  Here are my thoughts to that, start doing things for him and you’ll learn to find ways to love him, ways in which you never dreamed possible.  Stop looking for the fairytale and help write a new love story that would make the fairytale seem like a child’s dream because in all honesty that is what a fairytale is.  You have the ability to make a love story far greater than you’ll ever see in any movie.  You just have to stop trying to make your life a movie.  Man made movies and the dreams in those movies, and God can make so much better than that if you just surrender the idea of what you have and let him fulfill his dreams in your love life.

Learning to Pray

Prayer can be such a tough concept to really handle. I am not saying we don’t understand what prayer is, though I do at times still struggle with it. But the whole idea of talking to a God who we can’t see sometimes just seems a little overwhelming to our human brains at least if we were to be truly honest.

When I turned my life back over to serving God a little over a year ago I can honestly say that sometimes I wondered if he was even listening. I can even admit that there are times even now that I sometimes feel like he just isn’t really caring to hear my prayer at that moment. Though I know this isn’t true and God is always excited to hear our prayers.  However, this last sentence is always easy to say but admittedly for my feminine brain it’s not always easy for me to really believe.

A couple of months after I gave my life back to the service of living for Christ I had such a hard time coming to grips with the fact that God heard me or even wanted to really use my life. I felt like my prayers were only getting ceiling high and that was pretty much where they got stuck.  However, I am the first to admit I was not a strong person of prayer.

I believed prayer worked, but maybe just not for me. I had honestly turned my back on God several times in my life already so I often struggled with the idea that he even wanted to listen to me, after all he’s heard from me before how much I love him and then proceeded to walk away from him and ignore him for years at a time.  Why would this time be any different? I felt this constant question in my mind each time I prayed, so finally in desperation for God to really hear me I yelled at him to test my faith.  Ummm seriously that was DUMB!!!  Cuz boy did He ever take me up on that idea! And not only did he decide to test my faith but he took my family on a little joy ride with me.

So for about 8 months straight we have been in probably the low of the low.  Somehow my marriage became ever stronger than I could imagine, my faith became stronger than it’s been, and my prayer life well let’s just say there wasn’t an hour in my days that went by unless I was sleeping that I wouldn’t at some point stop to pray.

Now, this is the part where the idea of prayer really started to sink in. God was doing this awesome thing with teaching me more than one lesson at a time.  He’s cool like that, trying to kill two birds with one stone.  My faith was tested a lot to the core. And my prayer life also began. I of course started just by coming to God begging him to help us out, to help us make ends meet, to help us find a way to make sure Alex got to eat at night and we could find a way to still pay our bills.  It was amazing watching God come through time and time again right on time and just when we needed. This was when I started to realize I needed to trust him because he always answered my prayers just in the nick of time.

My prayers did start off each time being really selfish.  They were never huge elaborate prayers.  They never last probably more than 2 minutes but they were directly from my heart asking God for guidance through my day or help with the finances. 

A few months went by that God was always answering prayers and turning another fiasco into a miracle for us before he finally reminded me to use some manners. So each time I got an answer to a prayer I realized I needed to add to my prayer life. All he needed and wanted was a simple.  “thank you GOD!”  Usually I would add in an “your awesome!”  Just because that is how I felt. Each time my heart really was thankful and each time it was like new all over again he truly was AWESOME!

How funny though that over that period of time I really did learn how to pray. I still don’t pray long elaborate prayers, partially because my brain is ADD and I can’t stay on one topic of conversation for more than 5 minutes without completely getting distracted and usually thinking of something else entirely different.  Towards the end of my wonderful life lessons of faith and prayer and constantly seeing the amazingness God I started knowing that he will continue to be evident in my life as long as I stay faithful to him always.

But the big part of my learning experience I had was after the struggle we went through subsided a bit. I realized for a while that I started backing of on my prayer life. I was missing out on my every day little chats with God and I was starting to desperately miss him.  It wasn’t even the miracles I was missing it was just feeling the few moments of peace and love I would get whenever I would go to him with a quick prayer.

 I realized that my prayer life could be more than just requests for things I need or thank you’s for answered prayers.  God created prayer to be an open communication with him always.  He wants to hear my every heartfelt comment for him, such as “I love you.’ Or “good morning God, the sunshine is so nice, Thanks for making it a sunny day,” or even, “God, that was wrong of me please forgive me.’  One of my most common prayers during my day is, “God, please help I am angry help me control my temper and anger.”  God seriously wants to hear it all, and he wants to be a part of my life just like my husband is or my friends are.

When I hear the verse I Thessalonians 5: 17 “pray without ceasing” I think this is what Paul really meant when he was instructing them to pray.  We need to keep our daily lives open to God, inviting him into every detail.