How to Love your husband/wife better: The Parts

these are a series of posts i am sharing that i have taken from a series called ‘How to Love your Woman/Man better’ from a while back and also a series titled ‘One way to Love your spouse better’ that i ran more recently [with the input of some friends] – there are many incredible gems here that can help you as you look to contribute to a healthy and thriving marriage and i hope you will find them useful and if so, please feel free to share and pass on…

Arguing Well

The Defining of Love

Small Intentional Sacrifices

Verbal Blessing

Halting the Movement of the Sun

Amnesia

Choosing This Day

Saying It

When my “yes” sounds like a “NO!”

doing the next right thing [Dalene Reyburn]

my beautiful wife Valerie [tbV] wrote a couple of thoughts on how to love your man better and so i thought these would be good to include here as they have a distinctly different flavour:

How to love your man better – “Just love him…”

How to love your man better – “Respond to his character”

How to love your man better – “Be Nice”

love, prayer, feet

i’ve mentioned this site before but i’m still really enjoying the simple daily prayer thorts they put up there so if you looking for a place to help you meditate and reflect and prepare for prayer and for the day check out this daily prayer site commonprayer.net

just some of the thorts on there today:

When we love and learn to share : when we love, Christ is there.

Elizabeth of the Trinity, a nineteenth-century Carmelite nun, said, “Let us ask God to make us true in our love, to make us sacrificial beings, for it seems to me that sacrifice is only love put into action.”

God of love, forgive us when we make a mockery of love by only speaking of love. Burden us with your embodied love so that our first response may be to love with our hands and feet. May our love take on the flesh you so humbly bore. Amen.

how to Love your Woman better part small intentional sacrifices

i’m not a big fan of commercialised Christmas vibes and in particular Christmas carols – woergh – kinda hate them with a passion…

my wife, TBV, is a big fan of Christmas and Christmas-related stuff though (although she says carols aren’t huge for her either!)

and i realised the other day that in my adamant ‘we will fight carols on the beaches, we will fight them on the shores, we will never surrender’ and ‘i have a dream of a Christmastime where all carols will be banished to the basement of society’ and ‘you want Christmas stuff? I think i’m entitled to it. You want Christmas stuff? I WANT THE CAROLS! You can’t handle the carols!’ speeches she may have got the vibe that i don’t want any Christmas stuff.

fortunately i figured it out just in time and, even though i’m not the hugest fan of all the Christmas stuff i realised this is important stuff to her, because it means more to her to have it than it does to me to not have it i quickly messaged her and told her ‘of course we’re going to have stuff and start planning and if we need to buy any stuff then let’s do it’ – let’s just say that it went down well.

one of the secrets to loving your woman well is to know what means a lot to her and even if it does mean some small sacrifice (and this one really isn’t a huge sacrifice, something i’m less interested in getting around to or making an effort for as opposed to being set against so really not a big deal) to take many opportunities to go out of your way to provide that for her.

i think sometimes in relationships we can caught up in doing only stuff that benefits both of us – so buying a slab of chocolate or bag of chips or renting a dvd that i like so it feels like i’m doing something for her, but actually i’m just selfishly including her in something i wanted for myself… and then never sacrificing anything for the benefit of something she is actually very much wanting because it doesn’t do all that much for me.

there is an amazing picture of this kind of love in the story of King David at a time when he has sinned and God is busy punishing Israel with a huge destructive plague and David goes to this man Araunah to offer a sacrifice to God on his plot of land and Araunah offers the place and the wood and the offering free of charge to the king and David refuses to take it for free saying, “No, I insist on paying you for it. I will not sacrifice to the Lord my God burnt offerings that cost me nothing.” [2 Samuel 24.24]

how much sacrifice exists in the love you have for your wife or girlfriend?
is it time you changed the way you ‘love’?
when last did you buy her some flowers?

for the next part of ‘How to Love your woman better’ – Verbal Blessing – click here.

the double tease

so i recently was on an orange river trip with a bunch of youth okes linked to a southern suburbs church youth group…

two of the guys on the trip wore t-shirts (which i addressed with them both – one directly and one a little more indirectly cos i couldn’t remember who had been wearing it) which distressed me a lot

[1] cartoon picture made up of two blocks – in the first block a guy and a girl figure [similiar to toilet man and woman stick figures] standing next to each other – in the second block dude has shoved his arm out and girl is falling through the bottom of the block – caption reads “PROBLEM SOLVED”

[2] second was a block with a cartoon groom and a bride, similiar stick figure vibe to first pic – bride is holding bouquet and smiling, groom has big sad face – caption reads “GAME OVER”

both of them saddened me in terms of the message they were delivering and in terms of the fact that young guys would choose to wear them [the ‘problem solved’ guy told me that he had been given the t-shirt by a bunch of his girl friends which made me maybe even a little more horrified]

are they funny? yes, i guess so, clever word play, well done

but they are horrible, horrible, horrible, especially the ‘game over’ one

the statistics for divorce are something like 1 in 3 marriages or maybe even closer to 1 in 2 these days – and they are largely the same in so-called christian and non-christian marriages – how much of this is due to the fact that marriage has largely become a joke, or at the very least a joked about thing

when i marry people [two down, one to go next weekend] i marry them with my shoes off, linking back to the moses story and the fact that he was standng on holy ground, because i truly believe that is how God views marriage – it is a holy and special and spiritual and sacred thing – when we return to that point of view, we will have a starting point towards having healthy marriages which – altho not necessarily easy, because marriage is not always easy, it requires work and effort and sacrifice and humility and service and surrender on a continual daily basis – can and do work and will be an effective role model in a world where relationships have largely become a selfish endeavour, reduced to a me-me-me-me enactment, or a joke on a t-shirt…