If we were sitting down over coffee talking about relationships, I'd share these things I'm learning on my marriage journey with you. I'm no expert, in fact sometimes I feel so massively unqualified to even write about marriage. But God keeps reminding me that marriage is something that requires constant cultivating, and that mistakes are part of growth. We've crammed a lot of life into our short time as a married couple - a baby, job loss, illness, the death of my father, daily joys and trials. So many blessings and major life changes, all rolled into four short years. I spent some … [Read more...]
10 Ways to Choose Love When Marriage is Hard
Love isn't a feeling, it's a choice. I probably heard that a hundred times leading up to my wedding, but didn't really understand it until the first big hurdle we faced as a married couple. We've walked through job loss and unemployment, sickness, difficult work situations, death and loss in our short 4 years of marriage. And I'm finally starting to understand the idea that love is in fact a choice. I choose how I respond to my spouse when things get hard. As I was thinking about this lesson God is teaching me, I made a list of 10 ways to choose love when marriage is hard. You can read … [Read more...]
Loving Your Spouse Well In Difficult Seasons
I've been pretty open about the difficult season we've been in as a family. Some days I feel like our entire marriage has been a difficult season - not just because the blending of two lives is messy but also because of all the external factors we've encountered in our short (almost) 4 years together. Job loss, illness, depression, death - these things can easily cloud the last few years of our lives and make it seem as though there weren't any good seasons. I'm learning that there is an ebb and flow to marriage, as there is in life. Just like the tide comes in and goes out regularly, we … [Read more...]
The Perfect Wedding
There is no such thing as a wedding that goes perfectly according to plan, but there most definitely IS such a thing as a perfect wedding. Our wedding weekend was the most amazing marathon two days, despite the mishaps that we came across at the time. I am sharing this with you because I struggled for months after our wedding with feelings of failure and frustration that our day didn't go "just so" or that my DIY ideas didn't come off the way I'd pictured. I'm known for being organized, and I felt like I had let people down because I wasn't organized enough. I was worried that people saw … [Read more...]
Newlywed Bliss – Delighting in Your Spouse
We got married on Friday the 13th. We had a wedding weekend instead of a wedding day. We had two wedding receptions. … [Read more...]