ARE YOU SECURE IN YOUR MARRIAGE?

In sharing your innermost feelings with your spouse, especially those things that hurt you, your failures and fears, do you feel safe or scared? Do you make your spouse feel safe or scared to share with you their innermost feelings? Do you know what your spouse’s greatest fears are and why they struggle with them? Are the secrets your spouse knows about reasons for shame, or reasons for drawing you closer?

So why do we struggle to share with our spouse our innermost feelings? The fire and the fear of marriage is the fact that we can know each other so intimately yet this great blessing can also be the site of its greatest danger. Someone who knows us this intimately can either love us at depths we never imagined, or can wound us in ways we never fully recover from.  So often it is our spouse who can hurt us so badly till we resolve within us never to share with them our struggles or stresses. We fear they will reject us or look at us differently because of what we shared with them. We even fear that what we share with them at our most vulnerable state might be used against us at a later stage.

Sometimes those fears have nothing to do with our spouse but everything to do with our past. Probably your best friend, brother or sister or even parent betrayed you, laughed at you, belittled what you told them when you shared with them something so intimate to you. So you vowed never to do that again no wonder you are struggling to open up to your spouse.

How can we get to open up? We need the courage to do so knowing that this might just be the door to greater intimacy. Where our fear lies so often is where our greatest opportunity lies as well. What you fear might just be an opportunity for your spouse to get to know you better, empathize with you and even forgive you. It might just unlock that door into a greater intimacy. We can also on the other hand offer a safe space to each other by loving our spouse to the point that they are safe with us.

“There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear.”- (1 John 4:18)

God knows us so intimately, He knows secrets about us that we even hide from ourselves, yet He loves us at a depth we cannot even fathom. He accepts us the way we are. The atmosphere in your marriage must be one of freedom not fear. Like Adam and Eve in the garden, your closeness should intensify your intimacy. Being “naked” and “not ashamed” (Genesis 2:25) should exist in the same sentence, right in your marriage – physically and emotionally. In marriage we have the opportunity to wrap all the private information about our spouse in the protective embrace of love.

LOVE THAT LASTS

This week Thursday will be Valentine's Day. Love will be in the air and then after that will go back to our normal routines. Many especially ladies will wish that this could continue for the rest of the year but we all know that life happens. So how can we stay in love?

Before answering that question, its important to note that there are three kinds of love, agape love which is the unconditional love, eros love which is sexual, romantic and feeling love and phileo which is the friendship love. What many of us will be experiencing during this Valentine is eros, that sexual, romantic love that elicits those good feelings of love.  That’s what attracts us to each other and we hope that it can be sustained forever. Phileo love is great for couples because it is important for you as a couple to have common interests. You must be friends, Grace always advises young people that if you want to get married, make sure you marry a friend. Don’t just get hitched to someone you love but more importantly to someone you like.

Phileo and eros love are more responsive in nature and can ebb and flo based upon feelings. Agape love on the other hand is selfless and unconditional. It is what you meant when you said “I do”. It is only by agaping each other that love will last a lifetime. The truth is, if your reason for loving your spouse all have something to do with his/her qualities, what happens when those qualities suddenly or gradually disappear? Your basis for love is over. Love should not be determined by the one being loved but rather by the one choosing to love.

Both friendship and sex have an important place in marriage, but if your marriage totally depends on having a common interest (friendship) or enjoying a healthy sex and a romantic relationship, then the foundation of your relationship is unstable. It is like the house Jesus talked of in the Bible that was built on sand. When the rains, wind and storms came, the house fell while the one built on the solid rock remained standing. Both houses were probably built the same way, looked the same but what was different was their foundations. Your marriage must be built on agape love, that unconditional love that will stand even if conditions change.

“When your enjoyment of each other as best friends and lovers is based on unwavering commitment, you will experience an intimacy that cannot be achieved any other way”

                                                                                        – THE LOVE DARE

LOVE IS NOT JEALOUS

Did you know that jealousy can be a good thing as well as a bad thing? When you see someone else interested in your spouse, you feel jealous isn’t it? There are actually two forms of jealousy: a legitimate jealousy that is based on love, and an illegitimate jealousy based upon envy.

Just this morning I read in the newspapers about this man in Kisumu who killed his wife’s lover when he found them in the act. Now however bad killing someone is, but he must have reacted that way because he loved his wife and wasn’t ready to share her with someone else. A woman might be jealous of a man’s relatives, his career, hobbies because she feels these things are taking precedence over her in the relationship. The Bible describes God as having this kind of righteous jealousy for His people. He is a jealous God, He wants us only for Himself. And in marriage, we should be jealous for each other because we want our spouse only for ourselves.

On the other hand, the other type of jealousy that is based on envy is bad. You are envious of your spouse’s achievements or attributes. You don’t want your spouse to succeed in something because they will be more popular than you, or because you wanted them to go with your idea but when they insisted on theirs and it succeeded, you became jealous. Things are working well for him/her, they have recently been promoted, they are flying high in their career and nothing seems to be working out for you. So you become jealous of your spouse and instead of being their number one fan, you start criticizing and attacking them because you are envious of them. You are jealous, why? Because you are selfish or insecure in who you are. Instead of complimenting and congratulating each other, you start competing with each other as husband and wife.

Do you struggle with being jealous with your spouse? Is your jealousy legitimate or illegitimate? If it is illegitimate, then you need to find out why? Why are you jealous of him or her? What are you going to do not to be jealous of them? Why don’t you embark on being each other’s fan club or as we say here mafans. Determine to become your spouse’s biggest fan and reject any thoughts of jealousy.

LOVE BELIEVES THE BEST

Take a piece of paper and on one side, write all the positive things about your spouse. Then do the same with negative things on the other side. Which side had the most items? What did you find easy to write, the positive things or the negative? If you are courting or newly married most likely you may have more positive things to write home about and probably found it easier to do so. If you have been married for a while, you will find the opposite to be true.

Grace and I always talk about the negative films we used to have in the olden days. After taking a photo you would get a negative which would then be “washed”, developed to get the actual photo. Those negatives were always developed in the dark room in a studio. If ever that negative was exposed to light it would be destroyed and the Photographer would tell you “picha iliungwa”, literally the picture got burned.

So often in marriage, we have a dark room. This dark room is what in the LOVE DARE they call the depreciation room. On the walls of this dark room, or depreciation Room, are written the things that bother and irritate you about your spouse. These things were placed there out of frustration, hurt feelings, and the disappointment of unmet expectations. The room is lined with the weaknesses and failures of your spouse. Spending time on this Dark room is what is killing many marriages or at least makes them passionless.

But there is also another room called the appreciation room. Here the walls are written kind words and phrases describing the good attributes of your mate. In this room lies the memories of all those wonderful moments you have had together as a Couple beginning with your honeymoon and that last holiday you took just the two of you. It is filled with all the good things you spouse has done to you, including that time when you were so tired and he came and took the children away giving you time to relax. That night or day she gave you wonderful sex, that gift they bought you on your birthday. Such things that just elicit some feelings of love.

The choice is yours. Where are you going to spend your time? In which room will you linger for long? Is it the dark room or the appreciation room? Valentine’s Day, if planned and spent well can be one of those things that will create those good memories to fill your appreciation room. On the other hand, the reason many won’t even think of having a valentine’s date is because they are spending a lot of time in the dark room. So in order to destroy those negatives, you need to expose them to the light. This you can do by choosing to resolve that conflict, taking her out for a date, or yes, choosing to leave the dark room and going into the appreciation room. To have lasting love, chose to dwell on the appreciation room, always take the side with the positive things you wrote and meditate on them.

LOVE IS... NOT RUDE

According to the LOVE DARE, rudeness is unnecessarily saying or doing things that are unpleasant for another person to be around. Rude behavior may seem insignificant to the person doing it, but its unpleasant to the person on the receiving end.

It is very easy to be at our best behavior with strangers but when it comes to our spouse, we so often tend to let our guard down and can sometimes be very rude to them. We tend to justify our behavior or totally ignore our spouse's complaints. We insist that's who I am. Bad behaviors like poor table manners, making sarcastic jokes or having a bad mouth can easily ruin your relationship. What does your spouse complain a lot about? What irritates them? Grace hates it when I make sarcastic quips. I have learned to be conscious of this and now I try my best to be more courteous with her and not to make those sarcastic quips.

We sometimes act as if we cannot change these behaviors. But when we can for example, you may be barking or pouting around the house, but if the phone rings , you answer all smiling and kind with a very soft and appealing voice. See, in one minute you are transformed from that rough barking person to this sweet nice person. Why don't we do the same for our spouse? Let love motivate you to make the needed changes in your behavior and you will see how the quality of your marriage relationship improves.

What has your spouse been complaining a lot about? What ONE behavior do you think or feel that if you changed will make your spouse happy and no longer complain? Why don't you make it your goal this year to change that behavior for the sake of your marriage relationship? Remember, rude behavior may seem insignificant to the person doing it, but its unpleasant to the person on the receiving end.

LOVE IS ... THOUGHTFUL

I (Barnie) started the year in January by renewing and strengthening my relationship with my LORD.  This second month of February, being the love month, I have embarked on a journey of renewing and strengthening my most important relationship here on earth by going through "THE LOVE DARE". Remember THE LOVE DARE from the movie FIREPROOF?

The Love Dare is a forty day journey that endeavors to define what love is. Love is more than just some gushy feelings, it is active. Why I like it is that it is action oriented and has daily challenges that make you move from just a good intention to action. Like yesterday I was on the fourth day of this journey, and the topic was "Love is thoughtful" When you first fell in love, being thoughtful came quite naturally. But after a few years in marriage, we get distracted with other things, take our spouse for granted and think only on those things that we think are important. No wonder we men especially can even forget her birthday or our anniversary. We rarely include this person in our thoughts and thus don't do certain things to them that would have kept our love going.

Lack of thoughtfulness also makes us speak harshly to our spouse when we become angry and frustrated. But the thoughtful nature of love teaches you to engage your mind before engaging your mouth. How often have I spoken and said things to Grace that I later regretted. Things that really hurt her. I didn't engage my mind before engaging my mouth. Love thinks before speaking, so next time you are upset with something or even with him/her, think before you speak. Make it your goal this year to always think before you speak especially to your spouse when you are upset.

So my challenge to us is this, "When is the last time you spent a few minutes thinking about how could better understand and demonstrate love to your spouse? What ONE thing are you going to do today to better understand and demonstrate love to your spouse? Think about that and then do it. See how that will affect your relationship and try and make it your habit this year of constantly thinking about how you could better understand and demonstrate your love to your BAE.