Posts Tagged ‘wife’

Butter, Beer, and Sex

May 13th, 2010

My husband wrote the title to this blog… well, his original suggestion was actually Butter, Beer and Cock I hope I didn’t just offend or alienate anyone by saying cock, but I thought his suggestion was funny so I had to share.

Today we made our first batch of bread from my sourdough starter. When I tried the first piece I couldn’t help but think, this is good, but it would be so much better with butter. So, out came the butter. After smearing the bread with a generous pat of butter it went from good, to REALLY good. I was happy, very happy. “Butter is amazing” I thought to myself. Then I remembered how I didn’t like butter when Bryan and I first started dating. I never put it on toast or bread and rarely used it in cooking – until I met my husband. Bryan opened my eyes to the wonders of butter. And I’m so glad that he did.

Then I started to think about all the other things that my husband has taught me in past six and a half years of being together. So, here’s a little list of just a few of the things that I’ve learned from my husband. My life is so much better because of him!

  • Butter is Good! (As stated above)
  • Beer is Good! When I met Bryan I didn’t like beer. Bryan decided that he would get me to at least like Guinness if nothing else, so whenever he’d have a Guinness I’d have some for his sake. After a while I started to enjoy those sips and before I knew it I was sharing a beer with him, and not long after we moved to Prague (the beer capitol of the world) I was able to actually enjoy a whole beer on my own. When I got pregnant with Thaddeus I actually missed beer (well, not just any beer – I missed good Czech beer!)
  • Sex is Good! Hehe. I won’t go into details, but my husband was my first kiss, so I’ve learned all about this aspect of life from him.
  • Music is Good! Ok, I always liked music (I was a choreographer and dancer for a while even), but Bryan opened my eyes and taught me how much great music is really out there. He is always introducing me to new bands and artists and filling our home with music.
  • Soy is Bad! I talked about how Bryan taught me this in my post about our Food Philosophy.

Ok, so those are all just silly little things that I can say my husband has influenced in my life. But, the truth is that he has also taught me a lot of really important life lessons. Together we’ve gradually learned how to work through conflict, how to communicate more clearly, and slowly how to set aside our own desires on behalf of the other. Bryan has taught me through his example what it looks like to serve others as he has time and time again selflessly served me. Currently, through his gentle encouragement and steady support, he’s been slowly teaching me to believe in myself, my abilities, and my dreams.

I learn more and more about my husband every day, he is an amazing man with so many gifts and abilities and so much knowledge and insight. But, just as I learn more ABOUT him each day I also get to learn FROM him each day as we experience this life together. That is one of the truly beautiful things about marriage. As we go through life together his likes and dislikes slowly start to become my likes and dislikes, his knowledge and insight slowly starts to become my knowledge and insight. I get to learn from him and grow because of him. Ever so slowly we become one and it’s a beautiful, breath-taking transformation.

What are some things that you’ve learned from your spouse? Or what are some things that you like or dislike now because of your spouse’s influence?

Rejoicing in the journey -
Bethany Stedman

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Complementarianism, Christian Egalitarianism, and some other thoughts…

February 15th, 2008

In keeping with the focus I picked for this week of Lent – family/marriage - I have been thinking a little bit about the different ideas held by Christians on leadership and authority in marriage.

Most of the churches that I have grown up in and the people I have been around have taught and encouraged a Complementarian view of marriage. The Complementarian view is that men and women are “equal in their essential dignity and human personhood, but different and complementary in function with male headship in the home and in the Church.” And on some levels I think this is still the view that I subscribe to… mainly because its so framiliar to me, but also because I know myself and I know my husband. We are clearly very, very different and we clearly need different things and it makes sense to me to acknowledge those differences in desires/needs when talking about our roles in marriage. But, I also struggle with this view and there are times when I have problems with it… clearly there are those who have taken and do take this view and take the concept of Christian hierarchy in marriage and do terrible things in the name of it. But, I’m not really talking about that… sometimes I feel like even in a genuine and kind adherence to this view there are some problems and it can push women and their view points and opinions to the side lines and margins in a way that can be detrimental not just to those women but to those who could benefit from what those women have to add to the conversation. I think in all honesty even though I have theoretically subscribed to this view I don’t think I have ever liked it much. But, I think I started being more ok with this idea when I got married…which is odd, right? I started thinking about why that is and I thought maybe it was just because I married well and my husband is someone who I don’t mind submitting to and following – I trust him. But, then I started thinking about it more and realized that in our marriage I never really have “submitted” and never have really needed to. There has really never been a decision we have made that we haven’t talked through together and come to some sort of agreement together. So, that got me thinking…we both would probably call ourselves Complementarians…but are we really? In actuality… in how we really live out our relationship are with Complementarians…I don’t really think so…

Christian Egalitarianism is the other major view on authority and leadership in marriage and the more I hear and read about it the more it makes sense to me. And the more I realize that in actual practice is is probably closer to how my husband and I treat each other.

Really though I think the best view I’ve ever seen on authority and leadership in marriage comes from watching my parents relationship and listening to some of the things that they have said about marriage…
I vividly remember my dad and I talking about Ephesians 5 once. We were talking about the role of husbands and wives that Paul lays out there and I remember my dad stopping me and telling me to look at it in the context of the whole chapter. He pointed out verse 21 (the last verse under the previous heading and the right before the section on wives and husbands) it says “Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ” – submit to one another! Wives submit to your husbands! Husbands submit to your wives! Each of you submit to one another! My dad then pointed out what if we thought of it not so much in term of men being the head and women submitting but in terms of each of us submitting to the other one. I thought a lot about this and later it dawned on me maybe Paul is just laying out in this section HOW we should submit to one another. Wives how should you submit to your husband’s? By respecting him!  You show respect to him by letting him know that you believe in him, and trust him and think he’s a man – by listening to him and yielding to him as if you were listening and yielding to Christ himself.  And husbands how are you to submit to your wife? By loving her! You love her and submit to her by giving yourself up for her – by putting her needs and desires above your own just like Christ loved us and gave up his very life for us. Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.

Lord, you have created us unique yet equal. In Christ there is truly “neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female for [we] are all one in Christ Jesus”. But, you have called us each to submit. You call us to submit to you and to in turn submit to one another. You call us to serve one another in love. You call us each to be imitators of Christ and to like him make ourselves nothing, “taking the very nature of a servant”. Lord, forgive me for the times when I have been unloving toward my husband, the times when I haven’t submitted to him, the times when I haven’t served him, the times when I haven’t respected him, the times when I haven’t put his needs above my own. Forgive me for what I have done and for what I have left undone in my marriage. And teach me not to fight for control but to in humility take on the very likeness of Christ and serve. In Jesus name. Amen.

Rejoicing in the journey -
Beth Stedman

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Quotes on love and marriage for Valentine’s Day

February 14th, 2008

So, I’ve had a blog in some form or another for something like 6 years now and for most of those Valentine’s Day’s I have written an entry to share a number of quotes about love and marriage. I was going back and forth as to whether or not to do this quote collection this year and finally decided to go for it. I hope you all enjoy these quotes on love and marriage this Valentine’s Day J

“I believe that the most lawless and inordinate loves are less contrary to God’s will than a self-invited and self-protective lovelessness…Christ did not teach and suffer that we might become, even in the natural loves, more careful of our own happiness…we shall draw nearer to God, not by trying to avoid the sufferings inherent in all loves, but by accepting them and offering them to Him; throwing away all defensive armor. If our hearts need to be broken, and if He chooses this as the way in which they should break, so be it” – C.S. Lewis 

“All married couples should learn the art of battle as they should learn the art of making love. Good battle is objective and honest–never vicious or cruel. Good battle is healthy and constructive, and brings to a marriage the principle of equal partnership.” – Ann Landers 

“Every marriage moves either toward enhancing one another’s glory or toward degrading each other.” – Dan Allender and Tremper Longman III

“Love seems the swiftest, but it is the slowest of all growths. No man or woman really knows what perfect love is until they have been married a quarter of a century.” – Mark Twain

“It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.” – Friedrich Nietzsche 

“Happy marriages begin when we marry the ones we love, and they blossom when we love the ones we marry.” – Tom Mullen

“Allow your marriage relationship to stretch your love and to enlarge your capacity for love – to teach you to be a Christian. Use marriage as a practice court, where you learn to accept another person and serve him or her. And please don’t limit this ‘love’ to ‘spiritual’ things like praying, preaching and exhorting. Part of the experience of love is delighting each other in very ‘earthy’ ways. This, too, is a biblical truth.” – Gary Thomas

“A successful marriage requires falling in love many times, always with the same person.” – Mignon McLaughlin

“Marriage is not a ritual or an end. It is a long, intricate, intimate dance together and nothing matters more than your own sense of balance and your choice of partner.” – Amy Bloom

“Success in marriage does not come merely through finding the right mate, but through being the right mate.” – Barnett Brickner 

“A happy marriage is the union of two good forgivers.” – Ruth Bell Graham“

The goal in marriage is not to think alike, but to think together.” – Robert C. Dodds

“Once we enter the marriage relationship, we cannot love God without loving our spouse as well.” – Gary Thomas

Rejoicing in the journey -
Beth Stedman

 

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Some “truths” about marriage that I’m trying to learn and remember…

February 13th, 2008

In keeping with my desire to pursue and look for truth in my marriage this week during Lent I thought I would share some “truth” I’ve learned about marriage over the past few years. I admittedly haven’t been married very long and I have a long way to go in figuring out marriage and what it means to commit to loving someone for the rest of your life. But, I have learned a few small things in my first 2.5 years of marriage and I’d like to share a few of those things with you all today as they have been valuable lessons for me and it’s good for me to take a second to remember them.

When Bryan (my husband) and I were dating (well, I think actually engaged at this point) there was a time when I was feeling really neglected by him. I felt like he wasn’t spending time with me and wasn’t sharing his life and his thoughts with me. I remember calling my mom one night crying and having a long talk with her about it and I remember she shared a story about her relationship with my dad and about what God taught her through a difficult time they had. I remember her challenging me to “encourage the positive”. Basically she told me stop nagging Bryan, stop complaining about what he’s not and instead focus on what he is. Focus on and encourage and praise the good things about him as a unique creation of God. Instead of pointing out the things he is doing wrong (or the things he is not doing right) point out to him and praise him for the things he is doing right, the good things that he does. She told me that if you treat a man like a man then he will act like a man. If you respect them and praise them and encourage the good things they are and the good things they do then they will do the good things more and more and the other things less and less. But, if you nag them and complain about the things they do that you don’t like then they will feel defeated and emancipated and will start to with draw from you. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe put it well, “If you treat a man as he is, he will stay as he is. But if you treat him as if he were what he ought to be and could be, he will become the bigger and better man.” I’ve tried to never forget that lesson and I can’t tell you how many times remembering that pearl of wisdom that my mom passed down to me has helped me to step back and mend brokenness in my marriage.

Love is a choice. Love is not a feeling. Some days I feel love for my husband and other days I don’t. Some periods of time in our relationship I feel close and connected to him and all is right with the world…and other times I don’t.  But, love is not just a feeling, love is an action. It is choosing to act as if I did love Bryan even when I don’t feel love for Bryan. It took me a while to realize that this acting isn’t fakeness and isn’t hypocrisy… it is love. But, it didn’t take me long to realize that the miracle is that in acting like you love someone the feelings often follow close behind. “You can act your way into a new way of feeling quicker than you can feel your way into a new way of acting.”

After many years of watching and talking with couples who have been married much longer than I have I have come to learn that marriages go through seasons. There are good seasons and there are bad seasons and neither lasts. Well, I guess bad seasons can last for a long time sometimes and if you give up trying then they may last forever, but as long as you continue to stick it out and continue to at least try to love each other through whatever season comes then the bad seasons don’t last. The moon is not always full and it’s not always thin either, the tide is not always out and it’s not always up. Marriage is not always good, but it’s not always bad either. And neither season lasts forever. “More marriages might survive if the partners realized that sometimes the better comes after the worse” (Doug Larson). “One advantage of marriage is that, when you fall out of love with him or he falls out of love with you, it keeps you together until you fall in again” (Judith Viorst).

Men and women are different. I’m sure your saying to yourself, no duh, Beth! Of course men and women are different! But, really, I don’t think I realized HOW DIFFERENT men and women really are until I got married. Bryan is NOTHING like my girl friends (and that’s a really good thing) and he is (for all our commonalities) NOTHING like me. Learning to deal with these differences is I’m sure a lifelong process but I guess the first step is to recognize how truly different we are. “What counts in making a happy marriage is not so much how compatible you are, but how you deal with incompatibility” (George Levinger). Recognizing that Bryan is not like me can free me up to allow him to be the unique man that God made him to be and it can free me up to admit that I may not always understand him and that is ok. 

Anne Taylor Fleming said that “A long marriage is two people trying to dance a duet and two solos at the same time.” This struck me and I think that another thing I’ve learned or started to learn about marriage is that there is always going to be a tension between the needs of the individual and the needs of the couple. We are each unique and uniquely different creations of God and we each have our own desires and dreams and gifts and passions – sometimes those things might overlap, but they won’t always. And I’m realizing that part of marriage is learning to allow each other to dance a solo while also together dancing a duet. We are unique individuals but we are also one in marriage through Christ. “And the two will become one flesh.” We need to be united and connected as one being, dancing one dance for our creator. But, I’m starting to realize that we also need to allow each other to follow the unique and individual callings and dreams that God places on our hearts – we need to let each other dance our solos sometimes. And support each other through those solos. This is a newer realization for me and something I’m still wrestling with. What does it look like to be truly two unique individuals and yet also truly “one flesh”…?? I’m not sure yet but it’s another thing I’m learning about marriage.

Lord, continue to teach me and stretch me. Show me what you desire marriage to look like and continue to transform my own marriage into a thing of beauty for your glory.

Rejoicing in the journey -
Beth Stedman

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