Marriage Year 3: Meet Ruth and Philip Boshoff

Philip and I were married on 2nd April 2011, a glorious day and a fabulous celebration of the beginning of our life together. God brought us together, He had confirmed to each of us that He wanted us together, and He keeps us together.

In our first year of marriage, as a newly-wed farmer’s wife, I got to experience in a really practical way what it means to be his ‘helper’. There’ve been countless times when Philip called me to count sheep, fetch cattle, and in fire season, jump up at a moment’s notice to go fight a fire with him (often at night), and I loved it! During one of the fires, I got to thinking about trust. I was at the one end of the fire, Philip was down the other end and I couldn’t see him. It gave me a picture of trusting each other as we battle problems together. You can’t always see what the other person is doing, and if you keep running off to check up on them, your part of the fire gets neglected. You’re both working towards the same thing, trust each other, keep going (and pray a whole lot!), and you meet in the middle with the fire out.

It’s not easy deciding what issues are worth making a big deal about, and what you just have to let go of. But either way, pray about it and give it to God, I’ve seen so many times where I’ve chosen to talk to Him about it rather than Philip, God shows Philip in ways I never could, what the problem is and how to solve it. In our second year of marriage, we paddled the Orange River together (a marriage-tester if ever there was one!), The one day was particularly rough with a monster of a headwind and a few trickier rapids. Our guide wanted to get us to a particular camp and we had to paddle hard to get there. It was horrible and we were at each other’s throats the whole day. By the time we reached the camp (an hour earlier than our guide expected! Yeah! Go team!) I was in tears and had moaned to God that Philip was so mean I never wanted him near me again. Then he came to me and said “Ruth, I’m so proud of you! I don’t know any other women who could’ve done what you did today”. Heart – melt!! Nine months later our baby boy was born, so I guess those words worked! 😉

Life has changed drastically in our third year of marriage with the birth of our son, Neil. With a baby to look after I can’t jump up at the drop of a hat to help out with the farm, and time just seems to disappear. It’s both unbelievably wonderful and incredibly hard at the same time. I haven’t yet sat and pondered what my lesson from year 3 is, but I’m grateful for this exercise of thinking back and writing down things I’ve learnt before. I need them now just as much (and possibly more) than I needed them then.

[To read the next story of Marriage Year 3 with Shaun and Samantha Brauteseth, click here]

Marriage Year 6: Meet Colette and Andrew Tennison

I read somewhere the other day that marriage is easy when you’re married to your soul mate/best friend – THEY LIED! 5 years in and it does get easier but it still takes a lot of work. Andrew and I got married on the 3rd of January 2009 and there are still times when I get completely frustrated and I know he does too.

But that’s ok! The longer I have been married, the more I realise that it will take a lifetime to fully get to know my husband completely. But that’s the fun part – I’m constantly discovering new things and being surprised because nobody stays the same and as we develop new things come to light. And no matter how frustrating the rough times are (and we have had our fair share!), I choose to keep loving him and finding ways to show it. Am I perfect? Absolutely not – Andrew can testify to that! But we learn to accommodate each other as time goes on and we have learnt that we make a good team. And really, the love that we share is a solid, gentle, kind of companionship that doesn’t need fireworks to survive. Because, in the end, these three remain: faith, hope and love – but the greatest of these is love. (1 Cor. 13:13).

[For a story from year 7 of Marriage from Leanne and Hilton Bennett, click here]

Marriage Year 6: Meet Karen and Alex Powell

Alex and I have been married for 5 years.  29 November 2008 seems like a lifetime ago.  Since we got married we’ve studied further, travelled the world, moved house and started a company together- all activities that are guaranteed to bring you closer together.  Sometimes I struggle to remember what it was like before we met – now 12 years ago. It feels as though this has been my life forever.

This past weekend we were doing some much needed spring cleaning.  Two people blessed to live in a lovely large home means we have WAY too much place to store things we really don’t need and we’re on a minimalist mission- especially after visiting friends in London who have a minute 2-bedroom home, yet everything that they could possibly need folds out of a cupboard, is stored as a wall-hanging or can be pulled out from under the couch.  Anyway, during the clean-up we came across a box of souvenirs, scraps and love letters from while we were dating.  What a fantastic trip down memory lane! 

All cleaning ground to a complete halt as we pulled out random cards, letters and diary entries.  There were commemorations of what seemed like big anniversaries at the time.  There were 21^st birthday and Christmas cards.  We found multiple letters that had been posted back and forth during my community service year, and day-by-day notes for when we were apart for more than a few days.  The bits and pieces were cute.  The notes, sweet.  But what really got to me were the longer letters – the ones where either Al or I had needed to get something larger off our chest.  I was comforted to see that after all this time, the basics of who we are and what we believe to be important have not changed.  Not even one little bit.

There were also other memory-joggers amongst the 21^st and wedding invitations from the last 10 years, including funeral notices. We’ve lost a significant amount of people over the last few years, but the one that left the biggest hole was definitely Alex’s mom.  She was sick at our wedding, although we didn’t realise how sick.  She ended up in hospital while we were on honeymoon and wouldn’t let anyone tell us.  She passed away 2 weeks after we got back.  As I paged through photos, some notes she’d written and read her rusk recipe, I was reminded just how much we lost that day.  We hope for children sometime soon and it really saddens me that they will never get to know this special granny.

Of all the things we’ve learnt about marriage and give-and-take, compromise and loving even when you don’t feel lovely, cherishing family is right up there on our Most Important list.  They’re the ones who’ll support you through the unknowns that married life throws at you.  And they’re the ones you’ll miss the most when you watch your friends celebrate milestones with their extended families: engagements, weddings, anniversaries and the arrival of children.

As we’ve learnt more than ever in the last year, even the oh-so-smooth looking relationships will be thrown a curve-ball at some point.  It’s good to know that my partner-for-life and I are in this together.  We might not write long letters anymore, but we’re still having the conversation. Now we are able to talk about the big issues face to face rather than jotting them down in a letter, but in essence, nothing has changed.  Without wanting to sound old, I hope that the next generation will not miss out on the joy of finding a yellowing page and reminiscing with their spouse of that exciting time of dating before Facebook!

[To read another Marriage Year 6 story, this time with Colette and Andrew Tennison, click here]

Marriage Year 3: Meet Shaun and Sam Brauteseth

I married my lovely photographer wife Sam on the 28^th of January 2012, on a beautifully sunny day under some trees in Port Elizabeth. We’d led our church’s youth group together but had never been interested in each other romantically, and it felt like God just opened our eyes at the right time.

There’s honestly so much to say about marriage – so many lessons, metaphors, parallels. One thing I know, though, and it applies to any relationship or any task: If my eyes are on Jesus first, I’ll be able to do it right. When I’m captivated by who He is, I just want to please Him in everything I’m doing. In the kitchen, in the bedroom, at work, on the beach, during disagreements – I want to please Him.

It’s my main goal – not just as a husband, but as a person – to let my thoughts and my actions flow out of a sincere devotion to Jesus. From that place it’s easy to say sorry, to be accommodating, to be understanding, to love freely, to be gentle and kind, to look for ways to serve, to build up, to be teachable, to consider someone else more important than me.

I’ve found that the only way I can be a man who walks with the Holy Spirit and has any kind of impact is to be so focused on Jesus that I’ll do whatever it takes to please Him. It’s all done with His strength, it’s all because of Him, and it’s all for Him in the end.

My wife isn’t perfect, but she’s very easy to love and has made my job as a husband so easy. She’s very kind and gentle, very understanding, full of grace and a lot of fun to be with.

Single, married, whatever – one main thing: Eyes on Jesus.

[To read a story of Marriage Year 4 with Jade and Sean Poole, click here]

Marriage Year 5: Meet Candice and Matt Fourie

This year I’ve been married five years. WHOA. It seems really long but at the same time, it seems to have passed by so quickly. Mine was different to most because Matt and I started out our married life by having a baby one month into being married. (Long story for another day but God used and still is using our journey through that immensely for His glory!) If that’s not being thrown into the deep end, I don’t know what is. 

The essence of marriage is that it’s not about you. You’ve taken vows with someone whose happiness you put before your own, whose well-being you attend to before anything else. Making them happy should essentially make you happy. But it doesn’t always work that way.

Marriage of course, is going to have highs where you feel like all is right with the world, there are butterflies in your tummy, there’s walking like you’re floating on the clouds, where you see everything in the world through your rose-coloured, love-tinted glasses but marriage starts to get difficult when you’re in the valleys. And believe me, they’re going to come if they haven’t yet.

There are so many pieces of advice that people give you when you start and while you’re walking through, your marriage journey. Funny though, the best piece of advice I’ve ever got was yesterday.

Here it is and it seems so simple: when you believe you’re struggling in your marriage and you start to feel discontent about how your relationship is panning out, you’ve taken the focus off your husband/wife and started focusing on your own wants and needs, making them more important that your spouse’s. Other-centeredness versus self-centeredness ~ that’s the basic idea.

How true is that? I can just think about that in the context of my marriage. If I start to feel like I’m unhappy or I start grumbling, it’s usually because I’m not getting what I want, not fulfilling one of my needs instead of caring about what’s best for Matt or what Matt wants. When I heard this yesterday, I looked back at my marriage and when it’s been tough, I’ve always tried to fight to make myself happy or make my needs more important than Matt’s.

Jesus is the ultimate example of other-centeredness. He put others before Himself in all things. The cross is a perfect picture of what it looks like to sacrifice self. That’s what marriage is about. Sacrificing selfish desire DAILY, and putting the focus on your spouse.

I was totally convicted of this yesterday so I’m talking to myself here, more than anyone. We’re all a work in progress and of course, marriage is a covenant between two flawed human beings so there’s bound to be times of hardship and misunderstandings but I believe this could help me going forward:

When marriage gets tough, I’ve probably shifted from other-centeredness to self-centeredness. I need to turn the spotlight off myself and onto my spouse. Prioritizing my spouse again, and not myself, might just start to fix things.

“Marriage is meant to be more about your surrender than about your satisfaction.”

[To follow Candice’s amazing blog, Moments with a Mom, click here]

[To read a Marriage through the Years story from Year 6, meet Karen and Alex Powell over here]

Marriage Year 4: Meet Jade and Sean Poole

The relationship between Sean and I, like all couples like to affirm, is unique. We got married when I was 21 and he was 24, he had just returned from a working year in Norway and I had just completed my first year in theology, he was bearded with scruffy surfer’s hair and I was clean and caffeinated.

People said things would change, that living together would be a huge adjustment and that the first two years of marriage would be the hardest, but to be honest none of that really phased us nor was it our experience. We spent more time with singles than we did with other couples, we had numerous people staying in our home for extended periods of time and our weekends consisted of late night movies, sleepovers on the floor and Catan. All of that changed when we moved to PE…

Port Elizabeth is a beautiful place with beautiful people, but it is very different from life in Cape Town. Making new friends who you can share life with is difficult, especially when all your time is engaged in work and ministry – and so it seemed that year 3 would be the one to introduce new challenges and trials into our relationship.

Evenings with friends and Catan sleepovers were exchanged for early nights in watching Modern Family and finding new 2 player board games (it must seem nerdy but Carcassonne is pretty good). Communication became more important than ever and keeping peace in the home (the virtue and the plant) became more difficult. We would get into arguments about silly issues of no consequence and things that really mattered were sidelined and ignored.

I remember hearing of how a few young couples got divorced that year, and feeling sore and sorry that such brokenness would come from love relationships. Consequently, it was on my radar of common occurrences in the world and so it worked its way to the forefront of my mind as something we could never let happen. Strange isn’t it, having a goal stated in the negative: not to get divorced. The more I thought about it, the more it worried me.

And then it occurred to me that so many people view marriage like this, “staying together equals success, divorce equals failure!” Unfortunately though, there are so many other worse ways of failing in marriage, and the only way we will notice them is if we change our goal of marriage to something far more positive and infinitely more important – glorifying God!

We don’t stay together so that we don’t get divorced but rather we are together to glorify God. Divorce is not the ultimate failure but rather withholding God’s glory in the way we live out our marriage is failure. It means that our marriage becomes so much bigger and so much more than just Sean and I; our entire lives, the way we interact with one another, share life with others, model marriage and love, teach forgiveness in how we forgive, display love in the way we act, and acknowledge God in all we do – all of it contributes to the success of our marriage because it is in how we love and treat one another in community that we can give God glory.

Practically it means that we need to help one another be the best God-followers we can be, encouraging good practices, helping in love to iron out bad character flaws, and growing in a deep understanding and love for our Lord Jesus. For me it has meant being more supportive of Sean’s out-the-box ideas and hobbies and trusting him to make decisions I might not agree with. For Sean it has meant giving up his time and weekends without complaining to support me in the time-consuming ministries I am involved in. I have had to work on my willingness to be intimate; Sean has had to work on the way he communicates love to me. There are many character flaws we face every day, but it is the goal of glorifying God and not ourselves or each other that helps us to change and be better.

And so for us, we are not working toward a long term future goal of 50 years together (as wonderful as that would be), but rather we are working toward a very imminent reality that we can glorify God today in our marriage and make year 4 a success every day!

BIO: 

Sean is an engineer concurrently working and studying towards his PHD in renewable wind energies at NMMU. His interests also include surfing, kite-surfing, RC planes and designing interesting things with his best friend Greg.

Jade is the associate youth pastor at Trinity Baptist Church and spends most of her time teaching the Bible to teenagers and young adults. Her interests also include music, media and coffee

[To read the next story of Marriage Year 4 with Emma and Willie Cocklin, click here]

Marriage Year 5: Meet Lindsay and Nate Brown

Challenges seem to be our forte. In the 4 years we have been married, Nate and I have struggled through some pretty rough times. We both agree that last year was the hardest time in our lives. In the same week in February, Nate lost his job and I was diagnosed with an incurable disease, a disease that was threatening to kill me. If I were to tell you that we just turned the other cheek and praised the Lord for our misgivings I would be lying. It was a heart-wrenching year to say the least.

It took Nate a long 4 months to get a new job. One that he is thankful for each day. He loves it and feels as though that process taught him a lot about his career choices. I have struggled through the process of learning to change my life to accommodate the healing process from this disease and fight for my sanity. Thankfully the Lord is bigger than we are. God has blessed or marriage through this time and Nate and I have learnt a great deal about learning to love each other through the tough times. Marriage in my opinion is a path we get to walk with someone else. Remembering that our spouse is on the same rocky road allows grace when grace is needed and comfort when comfort is needed. It is not always easy to give comfort or grace when you are hurting too but allowing others to support you in that journey often helps with giving you strength to face the day.

[To hear another story from Marriage Year 5 from Candice and Matt Fourie, click here]