In a marriage, we both have routine chores or hobbies that we can do together and turn them into times of conversation, encouragement, fun, and moments of intimacy. Cooking, shopping, lawn care, gardening, hiking, visiting garage sales, etc. are just a few events we can turn into a highlight of our day.
These casual times together give us opportunities to intimately share our concerns with one another, rather than to allow them to develop into slights, a cold shoulder, sarcastic barbs, or criticism. God will enlighten us with understanding concerning our buried hurts, slights, and resentments that may have erected walls around our heart.
We simply need to make time to lovingly express our repressed emotions, and to pray about them together to find God’s alternative methods for us to relate to each other in these difficult situations. Our Father God’s compassion for us is new ever single morning, and we can adopt this merciful attitude with our spouse as well (Lamentations 3:22-23).
We usually get irritated with one another over our differences, but God’s Word gives us encouragement to react more patiently (Matthew 7:3-5). Our differences may turn out to occur as gifts from God that give us more compassion for one another rather than feeling irritations that separate us.
We often love our spouse the way we want to be loved, but this leaves them cold, hurt, and lonely. We wonder why they do not react to our attempts with more enthusiasm, and we eventually stop trying. The key here, however, is to love our spouse in their own particular love language.
If we carefully listen to him/her, our mate will reveal his/her love language to us through their words and body language. Adjusting to our spouse’s personality, preferences, love language, needs, and differences helps us to grow closer as a couple, and to feel more unity and intimacy in our marriage.
Prayer:
Father God, rekindle in us our first love for one another – that love that blindly accepted our date’s differences as their uniqueness rather than as an irritation. Satan attempts to drive wedges between us by using our differences against us, but You brought us together so that our spouse’s strengths can aid us in our weaknesses.
Teach us to value and to change our focus about the aspect of our mate’s personality that gets on our nerves (1 Corinthians 12-14). Help us to see things in our spouse to admire, and to resist Satan’s attempts to cause us to allow our differences to put walls around our heart. We want to bring glory to You through our union, and to help others to learn to adjust in their marriages as well.
Thought for the Day:
Love flourishes in marriages that accept one another just as we are, or to help each other to overcome negative issues that are not healthy for our unity or for our individual health; our wellbeing in body, soul, and spirit increases as we adjust to each other and encourage one another’s differences.
