When You Fail As A Wife.

I love my husband.
Actually, I would go as far as to say that I absolutely adore him. He is my world. My everything.
Out of all the people on the planet, he is by far my favourite and I am forever thankful God saw me fit enough to be his helper.

But lately, I have not been his helper. In fact, I would say I have pretty much been the opposite. Our lives are somewhat hectic, and I feel I have failed in my duties as a wife.

Please don’t get the wrong end of the stick. I have and will always be 100% faithful to Phil. I honour all the vows we said to each other at our Wedding, and there has been no fall from grace.

But if I was going to be honest, brutally honest, lately I have failed him.
I have not shown him kindness in the way that he deserves. I have not treated him with the respect he deserves and I have not loved him unconditionally in the way he deserves. I have not honoured him for who he is and all that he does.

Now, I can sit here and justify all of this: I am tired, I have a lot on my plate, I am busy  frazzled! I am trying to work, look after him and the kids, keep the house clean, cook and keep up with the never-ending laundry, and then in my spare time write blogs, counsel women and run a ministry for young girls!

But you know what? Not one of those things individually or all of them put together is ever a good enough reason for me to not treat Phil the way he deserves. There are no excuses good enough. And actually, I shouldn’t just treat him the right way when “he deserves” it, I should treat him like that all the time!

And so God has been having a few chats with me lately. Nice chats, but firm chats. Chats about respect. Chats about unconditional love. Chats about who has called me to be and where my priorities lie. Chats about His design for marriage.

And so why am I telling you all of this?
It is certainly not because I am proud of my actions (or lack of them!)
It is not because I want the world to know I have been feeling like a failure.
And it is certainly not because I want you to know

I am telling you this is because God has called me to live with honesty and vulnerability.
Not to air all my dirty laundry, but to encourage people that no one’s lives are picture perfect and to keep things real!

I believe there is nothing that God can’t fix. There is no problem too big or too small for Him. He wants us to come to Him for help. The solution is to not run away or quit. To say that it’s all too hard so I just quit my marriage, well that is never an option for me! But I am also too stubborn to leave things as they are, I want the best marriage possible, and that my friends, takes work!

As I shared with our Church the other week, we need to be intentional with our words and actions. With our kids, with our friends, and especially with our husband/wife. We cannot expect to have great kids if we don’t invest in them. We cannot expect to have a great marriage if we don’t invest in it. And we cant expect God to fix something if we do not take it to Him!

So I am working on being the best wife that I can be. I am working on my heart attitude. God will help me where I need it and He will guide me in the things I need to work on. I am being intentional about unconditional love!

So that’s my (brutal) honesty this week!
And so my hard-hitting questions for you this week are:
How is your marriage?
How is your relationship with your kids?
Are you being intentional?
Or are you just allowing life to get busy in the way?