When it's time to reset your marriage and heal
(and other things I have learned these past 35 years...)
Today is our anniversary - 35 years and counting!
So, I thought it would be good to take some time and reflect. I hope this will resonate with you as it pertains to marriage, relationships, and your need to heal. Because this is the thing, whether we are talking about real friendships, a deep relationship with God or a growing marriage, it takes the same thing - it requires our presence and an intentionality toward wholeness. And with everyone’s lives so busy, we can often miss doing this.
Joe and I had a regular practice in our marriage that we called - pit stops. (And yes, it’s always a good idea to use sports analogies when you’re wanting to engage a man’s attention!) Pit stops is where we would sit down and reset rhythms in our family or marriage that needed our attention. They weren’t on a calendar or systematic ie. not every month etc. just as often as things arose and someone or something needed our attention. This applied to so much of our parenting and married life, we did what we could, when we could. This reset helped us to review how we thought things were going and they gave us the intentionality to communicate together.
VULNERABILITY ALERT:
During this season, I was having a regular time with God, I was involved in a growing (yet hard) ministry, I was attending Bible studies, but I still felt like something was missing. I was struggling with a restlessness inside of me. I was dissatisfied in our marriage, in my life and in my friendships. Joe and others were letting me down and I felt like God didn’t want me to succeed in who I was becoming. Almost every other day it felt like Joe and I were in an argument and I was hurt. I was frustrated with myself and with him and I wondered which of us was to blame. Our kids were going through their own struggles and I was feeling disappointed with God. After all, we were committed to serving him for years in ministry and we tried our hardest in both parenting and in our marriage, but it didn’t matter. Regardless, of how “faithful” I believed we were life was still hard!
Then one Saturday morning, as Joe was studying at the church for his upcoming sermon, I sat myself down in our family “time-out chair” and I gave myself some time to think. I begged God for his help to stop initiating arguments with Joe and to be kinder in our marriage. I longed to love him the way I wanted to, but every time I tried I seemed to fail.
As I sat there that day I journaled, I prayed and I read about healing from your past. And it was that day that I did the hard work of digging deeper into what the cause of our arguments might be coming from. To my surprise, I uncovered something significant that became a catalyst for my healing and for our marriage.
It was this: Whenever Joe and I were in a conversation about ANYTHING and I felt overlooked, unseen, or ignored - this became a trigger and then the hurt and anger would surface, and that’s when the ugliness in me would come out. My heart would bleed all over Joe without him ever knowing what I was really dealing with, because honestly I didn’t even know…
This insight became a game changer for me.
So, what I did with this information was this:
I dug into the origination of this wound, which happened to derive from some childhood trauma in which I didn’t receive the attention I needed to heal. (I share this with you to know that the source of my hurt was something Joe didn’t even cause. Yes, the situations of today are real, but the intensity of my pain came from something hard in my past.)
I asked God for his help and healing, and then I shared this with Joe. I became vulnerable before him so that he would know my struggle and understand where my hurt was coming from.
Then, I began a new habit. I began reading 1 Corinthians 13 every day. This has been huge as my heart and mind are relearning what love is and what it does.
Friend, I don’t know where this letter finds you. I don’t know what hard things you’re navigating or feeling. But in it all I pray you will find God there, and ask him for his help and his healing. He longs to walk with you!
And lastly, thank you for following along with me here. For supporting my work and for cheering me on, I humbled and I can’t say thank you enough!
Love & Blessings,
Ruthann xo