A Woman After God’s Own Heart

We had another relationship night at the Brook. It was pretty much amazing. Four couples from the church talked to us about what qualities you should look for in a partner as well as how to be a Godly partner. It was really neat hearing everyone’s opinions on marriage, and I really learned a lot. Here are the couples so you have a better idea of where they’re all coming from (I included only their initials because I’m not sure if they would want such personal information floating around the internet):

R.V. & R.V: early-mid 20’s; married 3 years

D.M & A.M: mid-late 20’s; married 4 years

B.S & M.S: mid 30’s; married 16 years

J.W & R.W: early-mid 40’s; married 21 years

We split up into guys & girls, and the married women talked to the girls about what they looked for or what they love about their husbands (and the married men talked to the guys about the same thing). Then, we switched, and the married men talked to all the girls about what they love about their wife and, basically, how to be a Godly woman (and the married woman did the same with the guys). Here is what I took away from each person. The information may not seem very cohesive, but it’s good stuff 🙂

QUALITIES TO LOOK FOR IN A HUSBAND:

R.V: (1) Make a list of the qualities that you want in a husband. Then, flip the page over and make a list of the qualities of the woman that would go with that man. Then, work on becoming the woman that goes with that man. You need to become the person you should be in a marriage before you find your husband. (2) Find someone who is passionate about God and helping lost people and who you can share the gospel with. Unless you’re both working for God, it won’t be the marriage you want it to be; you’ll both be going in different directions, and it’ll be very hard for you as a Christian woman to submit to and follow a man who isn’t putting God first. (3) Find someone who has a genuine kindness about them and who has a serving spirit. How do they treat their mother? How do they treat their servers, cashiers, and other people who are helping them? These are all very big indicators of how you’ll be treated after the “honeymoon stage” is over.

A.M.: (1) Look for someone with integrity, who you can trust with big and small things. A man who is willing to lie or neglect to tell you about the small things won’t be easily trusted with the big things. (2) As a Christian, your relationship is something people are going to watch to see what you’re doing; be aware that you’re both very visible. For this reason, let your relationship be a good example for both Christians and non-Christians of what an appropriate dating relationship should be like (i.e., no sex, no sleeping over, etc.) (3) Find someone who cherishes you, loves you, and serves you no matter what. While A.M. was pregnant with their daughter, D.M. would make it a point to bring her flowers & tell her she looked beautiful just as he did before she was pregnant, especially when she was nearing the end of her pregnancy when most women feel far from beautiful.

M.S.: (1) Find someone who will be committed to you for the long haul. When B.S. realized their relationship was headed toward marriage, one of the first things he told her was that divorce was not an option and was never going to be an option regardless of what happened. He expected them both to be in it for life and to keep the promises they made to each other on their wedding day. (2) Find someone who has a desire to grow spiritually & continually improve their relationship with Christ. This does not mean they never have questions, doubts, or struggles. It does mean, however, that they will always fall back on their relationship with God and have an inner desire and drive to improve that relationship.

R.W.: (1) Find someone who will be a spiritual leader; your husband will either lead you toward God or away from God. (2) Find someone who is gracious. No one is perfect; everyone will mess up from time to time, and you need someone who will forgive you, who understands that they should give the grace that has been given to them by God, and who will let you be imperfect. (3) Find someone with an unwavering eye. As mentioned in my last post, a man’s standard of beauty should be his wife; he should only have eyes for you. (And yes, there are men like this out there. They may be few and far-between in some settings, but they are there.) (4) Find someone who will be a missionary to your family (if you don’t come from a Christian home).

HOW TO BE A GODLY WOMAN:

R.V.: (1) Shortly after becoming engaged, R.V.’s wife said to him, “You’re not my God. I don’t have an overwhelming need for you in my life. I’m never going to hold you at a standard you’ll never be able to meet. If you mess up, my world isn’t going to fall apart.” The point is that a guy isn’t the end-all, be-all to a girl; you are complete in Christ. No person will ever be able to fill the need you have for a relationship with God so you should never hold them to that standard. (2) As a woman, you need to be willing to stand up to your husband (respectfully) and be the voice of reason in your marriage. Most men, especially younger ones, have a tendency to let their imaginations run wild and come up with all kinds of ideas that may not be the most practical for real life. When this happens, don’t be a pushover; you should be able to go to your husband and bring him back down to Earth. (3) Make your marriage a ministry for others. This is somewhat related to what (the female) R.V. (:)) was talking about when she said to look for someone who is passionate about serving God and helping lost people. As a couple, you have 2 brains, 2 hearts, 4 hands, and 4 feet to serve. Use those to your advantage.

D.M.: (1) Make sure you are intentional about not manipulating your husband; this means no games, no eye-rolling, no silent treatments, and no working for yourself in the marriage. Women are very good at manipulating men, especially when men are emotionally involved. (2) Don’t be materialistic. D.M. said one of his favorite things about A.M. is that she doesn’t like “stuff.” She doesn’t place too much value in possessions or spending money when she doesn’t need to. She would rather use that money to serve and help further God’s kingdom.

B.S.: (1) Just as M.S. said, be committed to your marriage & raising a Godly family. (2) Try your best to continually improve your relationship with God and to honor God in everything you do; as you work to honor God more, your marriage relationship will automatically improve.

J.W.: (1) Give grace freely, even when your husband doesn’t deserve it; understand that he is only human and will mess up just as you will. It’s inevitable. (2) Fear the Lord. (This does not mean to literally be scared of God. Although His wrath is part of Him, His love far outweighs it.) This is what J.W.’s favorite thing about his wife is. R.W. is constantly pursuing God and showing her respect and reverence for Him by reading her Bible, praying for people, helping with church functions, mentoring young women, and spreading the Word whenever she can.

Blue Like Jazz

The last few weeks have been interesting, to say the least. I was having a really difficult time with my faith, or a “crisis of belief,” if you will. (Hence, the post on Feb. 10th). I felt very disconnected from God; I couldn’t “feel it” anymore. I felt guilty, somewhat lost, and extremely discontent. When I prayed, I felt like I was talking to myself, like God was maybe screening my prayers or something. I was still going to Sunday school, church, Bible study, and a theology class, so why didn’t I still feel it?! Isn’t that how it was supposed to work? I couldn’t bring myself to pray very often or read my Bible on my own. It was a very weird feeling, and I’m still not completely sure how to describe it. One night, I picked up Blue Like Jazz by Donald Miller. I had never read it before, but I had heard really good things about it. Not wanting to work on anything for school, I began reading Miller’s book. While reading it over the last couple of weeks, I’ve come across numerous passages that seem to be speaking directly to me. Reading this book did amazing things for my sense of spiritual security and seemed to restore my faith and ease the anxieties that I had been experiencing. Here are some of the passages that really stood out:

“I don’t think you can explain how Christian faith works. It is a mystery. And I love this about Christian spirituality. It cannot be explained, and yet it is beautiful and true. It is something you feel, and it comes from the soul.”

“I am too prideful to accept the grace of God. It isn’t that I want to earn my own way to give something to God, it’s that I want to earn my own way so I won’t be charity… Who am I to think myself above God’s charity? And why would I forsake the riches of God’s righteousness for the dung of my own ego?”

“Every Christian knows they will deal with doubt. And they will. But when it comes it seems so very real and frightening, as if your entire universe is going to fall apart.”

“Don’t complain about the way God answers your prayers. You are still living on an earth that is run by the devil. God has promised us a new land, and we will get there. Your problem is not that God is not fulfilling, your problem is that you are spoiled.”

“God is not here to worship me, to mold Himself into something that will help me fulfill my level of comfort. I think part of my problem is that I want spirituality to be more close and more real.”

“I suppose what I wanted back then is what every Christian wants, whether they understand themselves or not. What I wanted was God. I wanted tangible interaction. But even more than that, to be honest, I wanted to know who I was.”

“God is up there somewhere. Of course, I had always know He was, but this time I felt it, I realized it, the way a person realizes they are hungry or thirsty. The knowledge of God seeped out of my brain and into my heart. I imagined Him looking down on this earth, half angry because His beloved mankind had cheated on Him, had committed adultery, and yet hopelessly in love with her, drunk with love for her.”

“I am a human because God made me. I experience suffering and temptation because mankind chose to follow Satan. God is reaching out to me to rescue me. I am learning to trust Him, learning to live by His precepts that I might be preserved.”

“Believing in God is as much like falling in love as it is like making a decision. Love is both something that happens to you and something you decide upon.”

“People hardly care what you believe, as long as you believe something. If you are passionate about something, people will follow you because they think you know something they don’t, some clue to the meaning of the universe.”

“What I believe is not what I say I believe; what I believe is what I do.”

“Marriage is amazing because it is the closest two people can get, but they can’t get all the way to that place of absolute knowing.”

“I no longer think being in love is the polar opposite of being alone, however. I say this because I used to want to be in love again as I assumed this was the opposite of loneliness. I think being in love is an opposite of loneliness, but not the opposite. There are other things I now crave when I am lonely, like community, like friendship, like family. I think our society puts too much pressure on romantic love, and that is why so many romances fail. Romance can’t possibly carry all that we want it to.”

“The most difficult lie I have ever contended with is this: Life is a story about me.”

“There is no addiction so powerful as self-addiction.”

“If we are not willing to wake up in the morning and die to ourselves, perhaps we should ask ourselves whether or not we are really following Jesus.”

“We don’t need as much money as we have. Hardly any of us need as much money as we have. It’s true what they say about the best things in life being free.”

“When we worship God we worship a Being our life experience does not give us the tools with which to understand. If we could, God would not inspire awe.”

“The little we do understand, that grain of sand our minds are capable of grasping, those ideas such as God is good, God feels, God loves, God knows all, are enough to keep our hearts dwelling on His majesty and otherness forever.”

“We are too proud to feel awe and too fearful to feel terror. We reduce Him to math so we don’t have to fear Him, and yet the Bible tells us fear is the appropriate response, that it is the beginning of wisdom.”

“Too much of our time is spent trying to chart God on a grid, and too little is spent allowing our hearts to feel awe. By reducing Christian spirituality to formula, we deprive our hearts of wonder.”

“I need something mysterious to happen after I die. I need to be somewhere else after I die, somewhere with God, somewhere that wouldn’t make any sense if it were explained to me right now.”

“It is always the simple things that change our lives. And these things never happen when you are looking for them to happen. Life will reveal answers at the pace life wishes to do so. You feel like running, but life is on a stroll. This is how God does things.”

“I used to love like money. The church used love like money. With love, we withheld affirmation from the people who did not agree with us, but we lavishly financed the ones who did.”

“I hoped that love would work like a magnet, pulling people from the mire and toward healing. I knew this was the way God loved me. God had never withheld love to teach me a lesson.”

“Nobody will listen to you unless they sense that you like them.”

“I loved the fact that it wasn’t my responsibility to change somebody, that it was God’s, that my part was just to communicate love and approval.”

“We have the power to bring a little of heaven into the lives of others every day.”

“Your value has come from God. And God wants you to receive His love and to love yourself too.”

“God’s love will never change us if we don’t accept it.”