Pray the Changes You Want in Your Marriage into Existence

I had planned to give up on the marriage blog, first and foremost because of the time constraint that I was beginning to suffer from, and also because the pageviews for the marriage blog was beginning to dwindle and I just assumed that people are beginning to outgrow what is shared on the blog. But a purpose will always remain a purpose and because of the joy I feel knowing that lives and marriages are been impacted by what is shared on the blog even if it's just a few people still reading it, it's still worth my resolve that it’s not a wise decision to just give it up. I sincerely seek the grace of God to help me continue and remain consistent in this assignment amidst the so many important things needing attention in my life.

Quite a lot of issues have come to mind that requires discussing on the marriage blog regarding issues of marriage. I was speaking to a young friend of mine who is yet to marry and she told me that "Aunty, you need to understand that men of your generation are quite different from the men of our generation," and that the men of their generation are such that they are quite complacent with doing nothing while they allow their wives to carry the bulk of the marital load.

I am in my mid-forties, while she is in her early thirties and I cannot agree or disagree with her point of view, but that reminds me of a speaking engagement I was invited to sometime in 2018. It was supposed to be the married men anniversary of a church and they were having a couple’s session and I was invited to come to speak to the couples from a woman’s perspective (those in attendance at that meeting were not of the young generation, they were mostly in their 40s, 50s, and even 60s). During the question and answer part of the program, I was asked by a wife that what should a wife who was supposed to submit to her husband in everything do if the husband would not pick up the bills in the home and take up his rightful leadership position even in financial matters simply because he knows his wife is working and is capable of paying the bills in the house?

I answered the question at the meeting and would want to share the answer again in today’s blog. A man by God’s calling on his life is the head of the home and the leader in all things including being the leader in carrying the financial responsibility of the home. If a man is unable to fulfill this role of a leader in the home then such a man needs help, and because the wife is his suitable helper, she is the one assigned by God to help him up. But helping your husband in this regard does not mean taking up the responsibility that God has given him as your own and doing for him what he is supposed to be doing as the head of the home.

The help required from the wife primarily is to pray the glory of God down on her husband such that everything he lays his hands upon to do he will begin to prosper in it. That is the time to learn to encourage your husband with words that will make him understand that his situation is only temporary and with God all things are possible. Words have life in them and when you speak the right words into the life of your husband in prayers and encouragement then life comes into his situation and dry bones will come alive for him again.

Now imagine being the wife of the richest man on earth. Precisely whatever income you earn as a wife to a very wealthy man is totally insignificant to your husband because he has more than enough to bother about what you earn. So the secret to your ultimate peace of mind in marriage when it comes to financial matters is that as a wife you pray always and never stop praying that God will make your husband so wealthy that what you earn, big as it may seem to you, becomes totally insignificant to him. Remember the fervent prayer of the righteous avails much.

Far more than your income can solve in this matter, your prayers in truth and with love and sincerity can solve much more. So, get on your knees and begin to call the changes you want to see in your marriage into existence. God is still in the business of answering prayers.

Here is an eBook from me titled God's Rules of Engagement in Marriage. You can get a copy of it from my online book store by clicking here. 

The Me I See in the Mirror

In the recent past, I decided to make some lifestyle changes. Personally, I love to learn, and in my adult life I have developed a love for learning far more than I did when I was much younger. I take as many online free courses that interest me as I can lay my hands on. I developed my own eCommerce website with its full functionalities, where you can buy lace, pay and have them delivered to you by in your home, all by myself without writing codes. This I learned to do just from the free online courses that I take. Currently, I am learning how to code, learning the HTMLs, the CSS and Javascripts, all for free online.

But then I also did some other things to myself, like working on my waistline that has greatly enlarged due to childbirth after four lovely children expanded the waistline making it almost impossible for clothes to sit well on my skin and fit without the stomach bulging annoyingly. I have had a haircut. These are some of the things that have taken me off blogging and resulted in the inconsistency of you hearing from me regularly.

First, I decided to do these for myself and for my own sake. I want to look in the mirror and appreciate what I see to be me. I want to be proud of the woman that stirs at me in the mirror whenever I look at it and God has helped me greatly. But then all those personal developmental steps that I have taken have had its positive impact on my marriage. The woman my husband sees me to be, improves with every step I take to develop myself.

While still being the prayerful, home-keeping, great cook, supportive wife that I have been, I have added to it a presentable looking woman who is daily defying aging, I have become an innovative saleswoman, now I earn income, and cloths are beginning to look good on me. I have even brushed up my make-up skills.

The result of what I do is greatly telling on my marriage and I thank God for it. But I can’t tell you that I do all these by myself, but every time I pray to God to show me what else I can do to spice up my home and He gives me ideas, He gives me a platform and shows me the technique and gives me the strength to do it all. So I am still the one who washes the toilets in my house, cook the meals and clean the kitchen, sweep the house and make beds, do the laundry and mend the torn cloths, help my children with school needs, take care of them, listen to my husband when he needs to talk, and yet I will not forget to exfoliate my body twice a week, get my hair done as often as possible, work on my big tummy everyday and still make out time to have a quality time of worship, spend a few hours on my computer and then sell laces on social media.

Basically, it’s not impossible for you to be all these and more, first, it takes you been intentional about you, make room for no excuses and pray. While not leaving the big things, understand that the little things also matter. It can be very crazy sometimes, that much I can assure you, but there are million and one reasons why you won’t succeed if you pay attention to those excuses. Never give failure a foothold in your life and never go stale in your marriage.

What Do You Look Like 5 Years After Marriage?

So, in my last post, we discussed a bit on the issue of the insecurity feeling in marriage. I said then and I still maintain that in one's capacity you cannot stop a spouse who is bent on cheating from actually cheating but you can trust God to do in your marriage what you cannot do by yourself.

But today we will consider situations whereby a spouse originally didn’t intend on cheating but found himself/herself in such a mess owing to the negligence of his/her partner. In as much as I wouldn’t want to give an excuse for cheating, I will say that there are some things we do that might give our spouses reasons to be unfaithful to us.

Now there are some things that your spouse saw in you that made him/her prefer you as a choice of a life partner far above other possible contenders. I know that prayer plays a big role in choosing a life partner but there are some other additives that caused an attraction between you two in the first instance.

What happens in some marriages is that those indicators that caused the attraction are downplayed or totally eroded in some other marriages such that the husband or wife begins to look for what he/she saw in their spouse that made them say the word “I do” on that wedding day and totally can’t find a clew to those things and they begin to wonder why they agreed to the union in the first instance.

One of those big indicators that get lost in marriage is physical appearance. While some men experience unattractive physical appearance after marriage, a lot of women find themselves looking like a shadow of what they looked like before their marriages. For the women, one of the big reasons for this is childbirth, which is inevitable, but I am also on the learning that I shouldn’t lose myself to childbirth.

God has been gracious to us by giving us a body, it is our responsibility to take care of that body which God has given us to the best of our ability and even beyond. Rather than lose those indicators and catalyst of attraction that drew your spouse to you which resulted in marriage, you need to build on them. Growing old should not mean growing stale. Despite the pressure of marriage, the pressuring of parenting and many other pressures that might be distracting you, you need to take the time out for yourself to pay attention to you.

In addition to a wife being a good home-maker, a good cook, a good mother, a perfect wife, a reliable support, a prayer warrior, she also needs to be a beautiful woman, an attractive lady to her husband, a lady that constantly defies aging signs, an intelligent woman, a creative personality. It is when she is all these and more that she becomes a total woman, an indispensable wife and at no time at all will her husband wonder why he married her. Rather he is ever proud of himself that he made the right choice.

Though most wives don’t really worry over the looks of their husbands, yet some do. And husbands also ought not to lose that one thing that made them attractive to their wives. In the midst of the pressure of providing for the home, men should take the time out to deal with their growing waistlines and potbellies. Looking good also means staying healthy. So just as you are trying to maintain the good looks that contribute to your confidence as a husband, you are also taking precautionary steps in staying healthy and fit.

Never let the fire of your marriage die, there will be challenges along the way but they are always issues that you can overcome with God’s wisdom, with patience, tolerance, and understanding. And also, never let your marriage go stale, don’t get so consumed in the marriage that you forget to take care of you. You are a vital part of the marriage, without you there is no marriage, once you get stale your marriage gets stale also.

Let's Talk Insecurity in Marriage

One thing that gets a lot of wives agitated in marriage is that guts feeling that their husbands may be cheating on them and this is not limited to young couples. Even the older ones get to have that sense of insecurity sometimes.

Now, you might then want to ask if it’s wrong to feel insecure in marriage. The truth is, there is nothing wrong with you feeling insecure in marriage most especially when you can find one or two signs that have necessitated a sense of insecure feeling. But then, the feeling of insecurity can be extremely harmful to your marriage. When you begin to feel insecure, then trust is on the collapse. With trust gone, then unity in marriage makes its way out too. Suspicion then creeps in and brings with it loads of misunderstandings, arguments, quarrels, and even fights.

Before I carry on with this post I need to point to the fact that it’s not just that wives who are burdened with the feeling of insecurity in marriage, it’s a two-way thing and so we will look at this issue of insecurity in marriages from both the husband and wife’s point of view.

So, the main focus of this blog is knowing how to deal with insecurity in marriage. One bitter truth about dealing with this kind of issue is that the resolution to this issue all starts and ends with you. My number one solution to any problem is with God. That is, my ability to present the problem to God listen for instructions from Him and follow His leading on tackling the problem. So to say that you should not expect your spouse to stop whatever it is they are doing that is causing you to feel insecure, but to trust God to teach you what to do to deal with it.

There is something I do in my marriage that has helped me to handle to a great extent the issue of insecurity and that big thing is embedded in prayers. Consistently I pray for my husband that God will make him faithful to me and that whatever temptations he may face that will jeopardize the peace and unity of my marriage, that the Lord will prevent him from falling into such a temptation.

The issue is not that I trust or do not trust my husband not to cheat on me, the issue is that I trust God to hear and answer my prayers. I trust Him enough to know that He who is God is faithful to keep that which I have entrusted in His care. So, because of my confidence in God through Christ, I feel secure in my marriage.

You may feel that this approach is not concrete enough not to rely on, one truth that you will be confronted with as you try other methods outside of God to keep infidelity away from your marriage is that there is absolutely nothing you can do to make a cheating spouse stop cheating. Look as beautiful or handsome as you can, cook the best meals and spend your life out, if a spouse will cheat, he/she will do so. But we know that the hearts of kings and princes are in the hands of God and like the watercourse, He directs them as He pleases. So only God can cause your spouse to remain faithful to you. This is an assignment that only God is capable of handling for you. Don't spend yourself out trying to do what only God can make happen for you. Direct your energy in trusting God to keep and maintain the peace and love of your marriage after you have done all that is within you to do and you have obeyed God's instructions for your marriage. 

Being Yourself Might Just Not Be Good Enough

When I feel stressed and I want to just take a break and rest, I run through my social media handles to see what’s happening in the world around me. Because I am not so much of a social media person, I do a lot of scan reading and only inspiration stuff catches my attention. So, I search for those phrases, sentences, or captions that are motivational in nature and those are the stuff I press the like buttons for the most. One thing I have found to appear quite often in those motivational captions is the phrase “Be Yourself.” While I agree with this to an extent, I believe it doesn’t improve one in many ways.

Now, assuming being myself means me being judgmental, nagging all the time, being consumed in your convictions and not being opened to learning, always sourly, looking down on people and many negative vibes like that, then being myself would just mean being toxic to the environment around you and the people around you.

So, in marriage you need to know when being yourself isn’t working for you and when it is time to improve yourself. There are so many couples in marriage with an entitlement mentality who have crafted in their heads what and what they should be getting from the spouses based on faulty traditional norms and they are so consumed in those traditional shortfall ideologies that they fail to see its killing effect on their marriages.

The interesting thing is that they want a beautiful marital life where everything is rosy and sweet and they get all that they want without being ready to give anything just because the tradition gives them the right to make demands where they have sown nothing.

  A wife who has not been a significant part of her husband’s success story shouldn’t expect that he will be willing to give her all she wants and need simply because she is his wife. I have seen places in the Bible where God has asked the man to love his wife as himself and as Christ loves the church, but I have not seen anywhere in the Bible where it says the wife should depend on her husband for all that she needs and wants. But when a wife has been a strong pillar of support for her husband, encouraging him to be the best he can be and praying for him continually, when success eventually comes, she will not need to make demands before her needs and wants are taken care of by her husband. The grateful part of him will make him go overboard in caring for her because she has sown the right seeds in him that have produced a bountiful harvest for her.

In the same manner, a man who has not been loving and caring towards his wife should not expect that she will be excited to make him the best meals, or do his dirty laundries, or run his many errands for him just because the tradition demands that she cooks his food. It really doesn’t work that way. If you want the best, then you must give your best at all times.

So, I will conclude today’s post by saying, it’s good to be yourself when yourself is the best of you, producing positivity within your environment and for people around you. But when being yourself requires a lot of amendments, then you need to improve on you to get the best from people around you. And this is so important for your marriage. The beautiful marriage you long for can only happen from the beautiful input that you have invested in it.

Consistency Plays A Role In It

One of the important lessons I have learned in the past few months is the lesson on consistency. I have learned a little about it in time past, but not as much as I have learned in the recent past. I realized that to succeed in business you have to be intentional and consistent about your goal in order to get there. In order to lose weight and shed the tummy fat, you need to be consistent in the effort to achieve as little as just a visible difference from where you are coming from and where you are going. I have heard so much about not giving up, but putting it into practice has been the big learning for me than just hearing it.

And sincerely this same pattern applies to your marriage. The main rules of a successful marriage based on the truth of the Bible remains that the husband should love his wife as Christ loves the church and the wife should submit to her husband just as she would submit to the Lord (Ephesians 5:22-31, 1 Peter 3:1-7, Colossians 3:18-19).

The above instruction doesn’t just keep your marriage at peace and secure joy for you within it, it also helps to mend your messy marriage. There is no messy marriage that this instruction direct from the throne of God does not heal and restore. And like I always say in my previous blog messages, don’t wait for your spouse to do the right thing for you to do what is right. Never base your actions on the negativity of your spouse, you might be the right thing that God will use to right all the wrongs in his/her life.

Now, doing the right thing once or twice will not give you the yields of a peaceful and loving marriage that you dream about. But doing the light things consistently at all times indefinitely will eventually produce for you the lasting beauty of a loving and peaceful marriage that you would have worked for.

From my own experience, I realized that putting up an advert once or just twice about your business will not give you the dream sales that you anticipated. And in the same way, doing a diet of just one day or two days or three days will not give you the beautiful body shape that you want. It will take consistent effort over a long period of time against many odds to achieve your set goal.

So, this is where we will begin again from. I know your spouse can be a pain in the neck. You two probably never reason alike and are never on the same page on almost all issues that you have to deliberate or agree on. You are not alone in that situation, a lot of couples have the same struggle as you do. But at some point, you will need to drop your convictions in order to embrace your peace. You will put your emotions on hold in order to obey the instructions of God for your marriage. You will need to be wrong and let God be right concerning how you will carry on in pursuit of your marital success. When you practice this long enough it’s then no longer a difficult thing to do, it becomes a lifestyle. Positive lifestyle yields positive outcomes.

When you see beautiful marriages out there, it's because they have put in much effort to make it so, and it’s not about a one-time effort, it's always a lifetime effort.

A Choosing of a Life Partner

With a grateful heart to the living God, I welcome us all to the new year. I do not take for granted the grace to be alive and be able to share interesting and impactful stuff with you on this blog. I wish you all a happy and prosperous new year. I pray that we will all experience the goodness and grace of God like we have never done before in our lives. In Jesus name our best years lie ahead of us. 

I welcome us all from the holidays as we launch back into God's grace for our marriages. We finished our study on the marital life of Abraham and Sarah last year and we are beginning the new year looking at the marriage of Isaac and Rebekah. The story of how Abraham got a bride for Isaac is found in Genesis 24 and I believe that is a very good place to start our study from. 

The first thing I want us to look at is found in Genesis 24:7, Abraham had walked well with God enough to trust Him to pick a fitting and suitable wife for his son. He had no criteria, he had no preferences, and no adjective or clause of his personal opinion did he state as he sent his chief servant to go in search of a wife for his son other than what God chose and had in mind for him. 

Genesis 24:7 

The Lord God of heaven, who took me from my father's house and from the land of my family, and who spoke to me and swore to me, saying, "To your descendants I give this land,' He will send His angel before you, and you shall take a wife for my son from there."

Abraham's singular concern was that he wanted a wife for his son from among his own people, he understood God enough not to want Isaac to be equally yoked with people who didn't know God. Other than this, he let God decide for his son. He left that task that belonged to God for God to handle by Himself. 

Many parents have landed their children in messy and challenging marriages simply because they tried to do in the lives of their children what God alone should be doing. The assignment of selecting a life partner for our children belongs to God alone. We read in Genesis 2:18-30 how God came about the idea of a suitable helper for Adam. It wasn't Adam's choice to have a wife, it was God's idea. And upon God realizing that Adam needed a suitable helper, He formed Eve from the rib He had taken from Adam and brought her to him to be his wife. 

By the time we walk through the marriage of Isaac and Rebekah, we will notice the loads of benefits that Isaac enjoyed simply by the wonderful choice of a wife that God made for him. The first thing we will find out is that Rebekah was a very beautiful woman. She was a supportive wife and she was a wife that Isaac loved dearly. It was easy for Abraham to rest in death with full assurance that all was well with Isaac his son. God can never give you anything less than the best when you trust Him totally with this vital choice of a spouse either for yourself or for your children and wards. No criteria or preference you have can be better than God's choice for you and/or your children. 

It is time that we understand that whether as a parent to a child of marriageable age or you are one that feels convinced that you are ready for a life partner, that the first thing is to go to God in prayer having faith, confidence, and conviction that God alone that find for you a fitting and suitable spouse. Let Him take the responsibility of choosing for you. He will do an excellent job of that responsibility. He will provide for you a spouse that will give you peace. And when the storms and challenges of life raise its head, God will be there to protect you and fight for you. 

It's interesting to note that even after Adam and Eve sinned and God made pronouncements on them, He still took the time to make tunics of skin and clothed them (Genesis 3:21). He never stopped showing them love and protection. He will do the same always for your marriage.