Monthly Archives: September 2019

Marriage Monday- Week 1 The Foundation

30 Monday Sep 2019

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Thought for this week:

Let’s start our marriage journey today by reconnecting and reestablishing the foundation of our marriages.

You see, Marriage is meant to be a blessing from God. As we begin to reconnect in our marriage, it is also important to put our marriage back into God’s hands. By recommitting to God, we have given our marriage new life and new hope. Remember, apart from God we can do nothing, but with God all things are possible. If you have a great marriage today, that’s awesome, let’s make it even better, and if your marriage is struggling, that’s ok too; these weeks are designed to give you the tools you need to have the marriage you always wanted.

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How can we reconnect with God in our marriage?

Although we will be digging deeper into many of the topics we are about to mention- it’s important to start somewhere. Whether you are doing these weeks together (which is always best) or apart (gotta do what you gotta do)-

1. Start with prayer. Pray for God to become the center of your relationship again. Then pray for your spouse. Pray for healing in those places that have been damaged by life, by mistakes, misunderstandings, and challenges. Pray together and for each other.

2. Start doing a short devotion together. Maybe pick a book of the bible and read a verse or two in the evening and discuss it.  There are also some great apps out there that can do the hard work for you. In fact, this summer my husband and I used the “You Version Bible App”. Through this app there are short devotionals that are only a few days long up to many weeks. The topics they have for marriage are really awesome. At the end of each days devotion there is a question for you to answer that you both can see. For us it was awesome to be able to continue our devotional time together even while one of us was on the road somewhere. These devotions didn’t take a ton of time and really caused us to think about parts of our relationship we may have neglected (and that was a good thing!).

3. Finally and simply- just begin. This isn’t about being perfect, if you don’t pray or do a devotion every single day- it’s ok. The point is to begin somewhere. There are no “rules” to follow, only suggestions to get us back on the roadmap that God created for us.

Scripture reference:

Genesis 2:18 (NIV) The Lord God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.”

Genesis 2:23-24 (NIV) The man said, “This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called ‘woman,’ for she was taken out of man.” That is why a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and they become one flesh.

Prayer:

Lord, we release our marriage to you today. We ask that you become the center of our marriage, our family and our lives. We commit today to allow you to change us, teach us, and mold us into the people you have called us to be and to allow you to work in this marriage to improve it. We know that you created marriage; and it was you who gave each of us our needs and desires within our marriage relationships to bring us balance. We are no longer going to look at our spouses differences as a negative, but as a complement to our own unique personalities. We thank you for this fresh start in our marriage Lord and we look forward to the days ahead with you as the center of it. In Jesus name, Amen.

My Marriage & Yours

25 Wednesday Sep 2019

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 “I love you. You annoy me more than I ever thought possible, but I want to spend every irritating minute with you.”

  This is the message that my husband sent me on a random Wednesday morning just a few weeks ago. 

It’s apparent that he could use some work on his skills with the ladies, but after all these years I already knew that. (jk) (well sorta).

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Today is our anniversary and I have to say this sums up our marriage pretty perfectly. And yes, I do plan to irritate him every single minute of the day for the rest of his life- especially now that I know how much he loves it. 

Photo Via Pixabay

Seriously though, marriage can be super annoying, and fun, and frustrating, and full of so many different challenges and joys in life. It’s a chance to laugh together, cry together, and work through some of the best and worst of ourselves.

I frequently tell my husband that at this point, whether he wants to or not, he has seen far to much of my “worst” so he can never leave.

As much as I hope you know that I’m joking, I also really mean it. Listen, we all have those moments we’d like to forget and being married often means there’s a witness to our crazy.

Photo Via Pixabay

I love posting about the great days and putting the biggest smiles on social media but as for the skeletons in my closet, those need to stay locked up tightly.

A few years ago my husband and I were asked to lead a marriage conference. It was some of the hardest work we have ever done. I personally had no idea how writing, speaking, and planning together would cause us to really re-evaluate our own relationship. Now, if you’ve read this blog for long, you fully realize that we are not experts. However, you also know that life and all its challenges often causes us to grow and learn and change in ways we never thought we could.

And that’s what we have to give.

The tidbits we have learned over the years have taken us from that immature, selfish, ridiculous young couple to having a much more content, happy, and most of the time skeleton free life.

So that being said and in honor of our anniversary we have decided to share some of those tidbits with you. Each week we will post a little excerpt from the teaching we did and hopefully you will gain some great grains of wisdom for your own relationship.

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So, Happy Anniversary sweetheart, here’s to helping other couples irritate each other in the happiest way possible for the rest of their lives too.

See ya next week.

Our Journey Back to Health: It’s been a while!

05 Thursday Sep 2019

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As summer has come and gone life has gotten extremely busy. We started off this summer by going on a cruise. Oh what a wonderful trip it was. We relaxed, we played hard, we enjoyed time with friends, and we ate. If you have ever been on a cruise then you know how easy it is to go way overboard with meals… and snacks… and buffets.

Our view from the ship.

I’m not going to lie. We loved every single minute of it and when we came back from the cruise we jumped right back into our healthy eating plan and all was going so well. I have to be honest, I was even a bit smug about it to myself. NOT GOOD.

Pride comes before the fall.

I admit I’m laughing while I type this because soon after my smug little attitude had me feeling like I had this whole healthy lifestyle thing in the bag, I took another trip. An amazing trip that was filled with family, food and tons of fun. Did I mention the food?  I ate at some really great restaurants, experienced some of the most amazing food trucks, and really just ate myself to utter bliss.

Delicious…

Honestly I don’t think that my couple weeks of gluttony really were the problem. After both of my trips, I came home and got back to business and began to eat right again. BUT, and it’s a big BUT (pun slightly intended) when I came home from the second trip, I started slipping back into my old ways. I ate good, then not so good, then good again. The scale wasn’t moving a ton and I wasn’t very concerned about it. My husband was also slipping so we weren’t holding each other accountable like we had in the past either. (I guess this is all his fault then right?)

Finally we began talking about getting back on our plan. We talked a lot. We would tell each other that after this next picnic we would get serious about it again. I never realized how many next picnics there are in one single summer.

Sooooooo good.

Do you know how fast the weeks fly when you’re making excuses?

Finally, we sat down and came up with a date and stuck to it and I’m so glad we did. Now I’m going to be completely honest with you- the thing that really made us realize how much we missed eating better was how we were beginning to feel. The weight loss was nice, but how we felt was so much better. By the end of a summer of bad food choices, all that extra energy was starting to diminish. I noticed that I was weighed down, tired, my stomach was off, I just wasn’t feeling like myself and neither was my husband.

We’ve been back on our healthy plan now for a couple weeks and I can’t believe the difference. Why did we ever go backwards in the first place?  As for a quick update- when summer started both my husband and I had lost approximately 23 pounds. As fall quickly approaches we have both gained back around 7 pounds. What I realize is this- we didn’t ruin what we started. We just had a setback.

It’s a long road but we will get there in the end.

Lesson learned.

Can we have a vacation and let loose a bit?  SURE. But there has to be accountability too. Our choices today really do affect our tomorrow and we need to not lose sight of that. I’m also very proud to say that those pounds didn’t upset me in the least. They are a reflection of some not so great choices but they are not any indication that our goals will not be met. In fact, they are motivation for me to get back on the wagon and start again. I’m making progress in this journey even if I take a wrong turn from time to time. You can do the same. Don’t give up, don’t give in, just keep going. Sometimes the journey is more important than the results at the end anyway.