“You’ve been so quiet ever since you got back.”
“Really?”
I hadn’t noticed anything different.
“Are you okay?”
Then I realized- God had answered my prayer.
In the middle of my deployment to Africa when I was running out of books to read, I had prayed for God to help me find a bookshop.
The evenings and weekends were heartbreakingly lonely, and reading helped me get by.
One day, while standing in front of a shelf at the office, taking a phone call, I caught a book title sandwiched in between books on polio and HIV.
I frowned, bewildered, then all at once in awe of the moment- “Creating an Intimate Marriage.”
This was no coincidence, but a carefully-orchestrated God moment.
I began to tear. It wasn’t that our marriage wasn’t good. It had been. It was.
But I knew that somehow- it wasn’t the same after ten years.
While Cliff and I continued to field speaking engagements on dating and marriage together, deep down, I knew we had worn each other down with the burdens of everyday living.
As I read it, I wept, hearing the words of God leap right off the pages. Words that Cliff had alluded to before but I hadn’t heeded.
“Can you not bring your work to dinner?”
“But I don’t know who else to talk to about this.”
When I read how important creating an atmosphere of AWE (affection, warmth and encouragement) is in a home, how so many wives make the mistake of sharing all her problems with her husband, I wept.
That was me.
I had bled out the problems of my work onto every meal time, car ride, and elevator talk, barely holding myself together when we had a rare date.
My self-centredness had become a stench, a foul smell that permeated our home.
As I repented, a part of me knew THIS was God’s mercy.
For 50 days, I had only a short 20 to 30 minutes or so a day to talk to Cliff, under WiFi-constraints.
In that short time, when WiFi was consistent, I could choose to complain or encourage. I had a choice to make a deposit into our relationship or a withdrawal. Cliff always chose to encourage, to deposit.
Time passed, and God showed me that I could, in spite of life’s challenges, indeed choose what I wanted to share with Cliff. Unlike what I believed, it did not kill me not to share all of my problems with him.
Wives, if you, like me before (and I’m sure some time in future too), are struggling with holding back how you feel and think – remember this, that our husbands, however much are our best friends, are not, cannot be our all in alls.
To treat them so would be unfair, and forcing them to bear the brunt of our burdens meant only for God to carry.
I began to ask myself- If I had only 20 minutes a day to interact with my husband, what would I want to convey? I distilled that into lines of love, and decided I could give the rest to God.
“You really have nothing to say?” I lay on the sofa, reading a book, while Cliff inched closer, pressing his face into mine.
“I’m good, sweetheart.”
“OK, maybe you’re processing?”
“I’m just happy to be home,” I smiled.
“Me too.”
