Grounded in Grace

After a wonderful date with my husband last night, I sat quietly with tears in my eyes.  I was thanking God for allowing us to be where we are today in our marriage. We have a far from perfect marriage but we are happier and more in love with each other today than ever before.   I suppose when the Lord lays it on your heart to write a Blog and leads your words you write, your life becomes transparent.

On September 30th 2014,  Lance and I woke up as usual and went through our normal morning routine.  The past year in our marriage had been very rocky.  There had been a lot of damaged feelings and things done and said that I am not at all proud of that deeply hurt my husband (and me for that matter).  On that morning,  I sat at our kitchen table and completed a bible study that I was doing on Praying for Your Husband.  That particular morning, the prayer was on deliverance.    I did the study and wrote out my prayer as I did every morning.  I was still sitting at that kitchen table when my husband walked in the door and said, “I can’t do this anymore, I cannot stay here another day and I am leaving!”  Talk about a blow!!!!!  Not the answer from the Lord I was looking for.  Lance packed the back of our Yukon and left….That was it.  Another failed marriage.  The pain was overwhelming.  I felt paralyzed.  I was so angry with God.  I wanted my husband to be delivered from all the hurt, anger and bitterness that he had been harboring not only for the past year, but  all of his life.  I wanted him to be freed from all of that and leaving me was NOT the answer I was looking for.  As I laid in bed that first night without him, I prayed.  During my prayer the Lord spoke to me and said, “I gave you exactly what you asked of me.”   At that time I did not understand that at all.  Looking back now, the Lord was right.  Imagine that?  God knew what he was doing! HE knew what I asked for and HE knew that my prayer could not be answered if Lance stayed here with me.  My husband needed to go away, he needed to be in a place where God could have him all to himself without me interfering.  And that is where the transformation began.

During our time apart God taught Lance and I both so much about love.  Love has been described as a verb, a feeling, a choice, a spiritual force and many other things.   We learned what love was according to biblical principle.  We learned about love according to 1 Corinthians 13:3-7 “Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant  or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.”  We have heard this verse many times before, It was even quoted at our wedding. But when you really study that verse you learn to love as Christ HIMSELF loves.  In a study that Lance and I agreed to do while we were apart, it told us to take the word love in the above scripture and replace it with the words Gods love in you. When you read the same scripture that way it reads, Gods love in you is patient and kind; Gods love in you does not envy or boast; Gods love in you is not arrogant or rude. Gods love in you does not insist on its own way; Gods love in you is not irritable or resentful; Gods love in you does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Gods love in you bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. This really taught us that we cannot love each other without Gods love in us.

I think we truly learned that God is the vine and we are the branch. As the bible says in John 15:5 “I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing.”   As much as we both thought we were living “right” with God, the part of that verse that stood out so loudly to both of us was “APART FROM ME YOU CAN DO NOTHING”.  How could we fix what was broken in our marriage if we were not allowing God to be a part of that, not just as individuals but as a couple.  We were constantly trying to fix things on our own, not submitting 100% to Jesus.

The day we separated we stood crying in our kitchen telling each other how much we loved each other and how sorry we were that it had come to this point.  Neither of us wanted or dreamed that we would be in this position. We had let life get in the way of….well life.  It happens every single day.  We get wrapped up in work, kids, friends, sports, social media, etc…. and the next thing you know there is a broken marriage and you stand wondering how you got there.  It is by Gods grace that we learned to heal ourselves which in turn allowed us to heal our marriage.  We allowed God to work through us and be the love in us. As I said before,  Lance and I are stronger and happier today than we have ever been.  Together, we now make a conscious decision each every day to choose God to be the leader of our home, our marriage and our life. We put HIM first and without HIM we can do nothing!

1 Corinthians 13:13  And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.