The Highs and the Lows of Marriage

Many of you know that one of the biggest passions of my life is marriage. I believe that God started that fire in me at a very early age. I was a child of divorce and it was very hard. Being the oldest, I felt a huge responsibility and a major sense of loss when our family became broken. Over the years, I have had to work through a lot of pain associated with that time of my life. I have learned many things along the way. I have learned to not be judgemental over anyone's circumstances, I have learned to have empathy for everyone involved, but unfortunetly most of all, I have learned the habit of fear in my own marriage. For many years, I allowed my fear over what happened with my own parents to affect my own marriage. I thought that as long as I had control over my husband, he wouldn't leave. It was a very suffocating way to live I promise. I have talked in some detail about the hard times of my own marriage. There was a time in my life where I didn't think we would make it but I learned a huge lesson through that time. I had to stop making my husband a god in my life. In other words, I had to stop putting such high expectations on my husband that he would never be able to meet. I started letting God be God and my husband be my husband. I had my priorities out of alignment and had to realign them. God became the most important thing and Josh and I allowed God to be at the very center of our marriage. After I got to that place, the rebuilding happened, and today I can tell you, we are in the best spot we have ever been in. We have a mutual respect for one another, we honor each other, and we are best friends. I say this is in the most humblest of ways. We were on our way to being a statisitic but because of God's grace and mercy, we are a living testament today that anything is possible. I found a book today that I will start reading soon. It is called "What Women Fear" by Angie Smith. There are many fears discussed in this book: Marriage, Children, Dying...etc.. I will start posting about this book, but if any of you would like to join me in reading this, let me know and maybe we can start a little coffee house book club of some sort. I also found a wonderful website on marriage that I wanted to share with you. Please read these if you are interested:

This is a website to go to that is awesome for marriage

http://refineus.org/

These are also great tools:



8 Things that Destroyed Our Marriage

8 Things that Restored Our Marriage