Cherishing Your Marriage

Yesterday, I sat in the waiting room in the hospital waiting for my wife to come out of surgery and I overheard a lady talking about her marriage. It was quite revealing. She talked about the importance of her marriage for several minutes, but then trashed her husband for coming home late from work in the next sentence. It is amazing how we can know marriage is a gift from God, yet complain in our hearts (or out loud) about the very one that God gave us. God wants us to cherish each other, so as a man I want to challenge my brothers out there.

How do you think you are doing at cherishing your wife? When was the last time you surprised her with something like a gift or that special dessert she loves? When was the last time you had a date night? It seems to me that often the times I grumble in my heart about my wife are the same times I am not seeking to cherish her. I am being selfish and taking her for granted. Here are a few ways I have learned to cultivate a “cherishing” mindset in my 7 years of marriage. I still have much to learn, so please feel free to add to my list. (Most of these ideas are stolen from friends…especially C.J. Mahaney).

1. Study your wife. You need to know what she likes and when she likes it. She might not like the idea of you taking her to a pro basketball game and announcing your love on a jumbo-tron. She may like the nice restaurant or the long hiking trip.

2. Keep studying your wife. My PDA has a reminder to “romance Kristin” every Saturday at 6am. Now I don’t actually wake her up early on Saturdays, but I try to take time each Saturday and figure out how I can bless and romance her. That might mean purchasing some special coffee that she likes or it might mean getting her tickets to a Clemson game (which would truly bless her). It can be big or small, but it is always fun. For example, yesterday, I purchased a Lynn Austin book for her because I know she is enjoying the Chronicles of the Kings series.

3. Pull away. No, I’m not saying take time off from your wife, but take time off from your regular life and take your wife with you. This might mean a “once per year” romantic weekend or it might mean several day trips away from the regular busyness of life.

4. Cultivate communication. Yes, movies and television can be fun in moderation, but your normal time with your spouse should be in speaking to each other. How will we get to know our wife if we never talk to her.

5. Invite correction. What would your wife say if you said, “Sweetie, if you knew that I would fully listen to you and not react, what would you observe as being areas I need to grow or change in our marriage and parenting?”

6. Listen. This should be self explanatory, but guys honestly stink at this. We don’t need to be formulating our counter argument when our wife is speaking or seeking to “teach” our “weaker vessel”…we need to humbly listen.

7. Repent. When God convicts you of sin against your wife, go quickly and repent.

8. Know her soul. Just like a pastor is to give account for those he shepherds, a husband is going to give account for the spiritual life of his wife. You (husband) should know what she is learning and from whom she is learning it. You should know how her devotional times are going and what kinds of books encourage her. She is a daughter of the king and you need to treat her with all of the care you can.

9. Encourage friendships. We all need accountability and those around us to “sharpen” us spiritually. Your wife needs female friends to point her to the cross and point her toward her husband. I don’t know how many times a friend of mine will give me advice that my wife has been giving me for months, but I see my friend’s advice as an amazing revelation (not special revelation) from God. My wife says, “hey love, I’ve been telling you to do that for awhile.” Well, sometimes our wives could use the same advice and care.

10. Love her. Yes, this should be #1, but I think as we cultivate numbers 1-9, we will be showing and cultivating love for our wife. We are to love our wife as Christ loves the church. This means positioning yourself in the best interest of your spouse. Seek to cherish her…you won’t regret it.

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UPDATE:

Here is a #11 that my friend, Jeremy Oddy added when going over this list with some guys. Jeremy also wanted to credit C.J. for these thoughts as well.

11. Share evidence of grace regularly and abundantly. Why? The answer seems obvious, but specifics need to be thought through. Here are just a few reasons why, perhaps you can add more.

First, encouraging words are good for anyone and everyone to hear. They build up. Who else is a better recipient than your wife, the most important human relationship that you have.

Second, your wife is a daughter of the King, a child of the Father. He is at work in her life, which means there is plenty of evidence of grace. Your job is to intentionally identify them and, more importantly, tell her what you see.

Third, when it comes time to correct her, it will be received more easily because she knows you are a gracious husband with words full of grace.

Fourth, your children (when they get older) will be watching you.

Fifth, it helps you not to be too critical, but more gracious to her and grateful for her.

Hope in the Midst of Miscarriage

Tuesday was the day were were supposed to see the heartbeat. We cheerfully walked into the OB and my wife began the uncomfortable ultrasound just like we had with our two previous children. It was the "8 week mark" and so though we knew we would not hear the heartbeat, we knew that we would see it looking like a little butterfly on the screen. As the nurse got quieter, it started hitting me. There was no heartbeat. I saw the little body laying there inside my wife, but the rapid movement of the little heart was not to be found. My wife looked at me with that "what's going on" look and I just shook my head. Tears filled her eyes and all of a sudden we were "those people" who had had a baby die. It was sad, weird, bewildering, and yet there was a firmness in my heart that there was still hope. Not hope simply in a future heartbeat, but in the Lord who controls all heartbeats. I cried hard on the way home and said out loud, "God, I know that you are in control of all things and that you are good. Give me the faith to trust you now and help me to care for my wife." He did. Here is what I wrote a few hours later to our friends and family...

Hello everyone,
Well, it looks like our sovereign Lord may have decided to end Kristin’s pregnancy at 6 weeks and 5 days. We went to the doctor this morning for our 8 week ultrasound and there was no heartbeat. The doctor is saying that there is a possibility that we could be a lot earlier than we expected, but Kristin and I are not really thinking that we were off in our counting. We are thankful for God’s will in all circumstances and we know that He “gives and takes away” and we “bless His name” especially in this trial. We are drawing near to him as he draws near to us(James 4:8). Please pray for us to have unshifting trust in the Lord right now. Kristin and I desire to suffer “well” in this and keep our hope in the Lord. Please also pray that the Lord might give a heartbeat to our little one if He wills...this would be a great miracle to display his glory. We will praise him if he does and we will praise him if he does not. Our hope is in God.

We are thankful for our loving family and our loving church at this time. I’m so glad we have this before crisis hits…God is very kind.
God bless,
mike

I give you this window into my life, not to pat myself on the back...for I don't deserve that. I just want point others to the source of my hope if they are struggling. I am simply a sinner in need of a Savior and my Savior has gotten me through a hard week. I praise God for this and he is our rock...today, tomorrow, and forever. We found out today that there will be no heartbeat and we have officially miscarried, but as another wave a grief has hit, our God continues to be our hope.

Challies on "Women Discerning a Pastoral Call"

Below is an interview that CBMW did with Tim Challies. I thought Tim had some thought provoking answers that were caring, yet true to his biblical convictions.

Tim,
Thank you for joining us on Genderblog to answer a critical discernment question. It is not an uncommon experience reported by female pastors today that they believe they have received an actual call from God to become a pastor. Here are two recent examples from the newspaper:

-- Jacci is not a rebel. She didn't want to break new ground for those "crazy feminists." She only wanted to follow God's leading. After much study and soul-searching, Jacci's thoughts became clear during a college trip to the Holy Land. "It was a call," she stated. "It was quite amazing. I turned to a friend and said - I think God is calling me to be a minister. I was waiting for God to strike me dead. It was a huge shift in my thinking. That was not in the realm of possibility for my life the way I had grown up and had been taught."

-- There was no writing in the sky, no voice from heaven. "I would have loved that," said the Reverend Keri, "but that doesn't happen. At least, it didn't happen to me." Nevertheless a bolt of some sort caused Pastor Keri to suddenly quit her job and go to seminary. She is now the new shepherdess of a 266 member church..

How would you help a woman discern whether or not she is receiving an actual "call from God" to become a church pastor?

(Challies Response)
As you indicate, this is a timely question and one I was faced with even during the process of completing the book when I was contacted by female pastors who were interested in the subject matter. And just recently there was a very popular book on the New York Times list of bestsellers which was the memoir of a woman who, following her husband's death, decided to fulfill his dream and become a pastor. There are many women today who feel they are being called by God into vocational, pastoral ministry.

Time would fail me to really examine the concept of "calling" and how God calls a person to the ministry. In brief, though, I think it is important that we understand what a call truly is. A call to ministry has to be more than an internal restlessness or desire or pull to be a minister. We are accustomed to understanding a call to ministry as being a call from God, that He somehow communicates to a person that it is His will for that person to be a pastor. And certainly God can burden a person for ministry. But I think we do better if we see a call to ministry as being a call from the local church and a call to service.

In The Discipline of Spiritual Discernment I say that the local church is the best and most natural context for the exercise of discernment. The local church serves as the body which will confirm or refute a person's call to ministry. Hence it is the local church which is responsible to search the Scriptures and then to examine a person's life and credentials to see if that person truly is suited for ministry. I am convicted from a plain reading of Scripture that women are not permitted to serve as pastors. Therefore the local church would exercise discernment by telling her that she may not be a pastor. The church would not extend or confirm that call to ministry. Without the local church there is no call to pastoral ministry.

There will often be times that we feel we are to do certain things. And many people believe that discernment itself is really a feeling, that it is something to do more with the heart than with the head. Unless we firmly root discernment in the realm of reason and the realm of skill, it will be easy to permit all kinds of things that do not accord with Scripture. But when we understand that discernment refers to our ability to understand and to obey Scripture, we will see that it is a skill and it is something that requires hard work and sometimes difficult decisions. Our task as men and women of discernment is to search the Scriptures to understand what God says so that we might do what God demands (and avoid doing what God forbids). A faithful reading of the Bible will show that women are not to serve as pastors. There is a whole world of ministry available to them, but the position of spiritual authority and leadership has, since the time of creation, been given only to men.

So my advice to a woman who felt a call to pastor a church would be to encourage her to speak to the leaders of a gospel-centered, church. Within that context she would have the joy of pursuing ministry, but ministry within the context of the local church, within the gifting and passions God has given her, and within the boundaries God has decreed.

True Greatness In Fighting Cancer

I have heard C.J. Mahaney say that seeing people suffer well is one of the greatest miracles he has ever seen. I couldn't agree more. Below is a letter I received today from a friend. Notice both his faith and his mom's faith in our Sovereign Lord. Don't move on to quickly from seeing God's grace at work even in the midst of this cancer.

Friends,

As the vast majority of you know, my mom's had cancer for the past year and a half. Recently, she had made the decision to stop all treatment if her MRI did not reveal significant reduction in tumor size. Her MRI was this past Friday afternoon; we received the results yesterday morning, they are as follows.

In addition to two new tumors that had not previously been there, the central tumor that appeared after her cyber-knife treatment had grown from 2mm in diameter to about 1.25 inches in diameter. While the cyber-knife and chemotherapy have proven to be quite effective on existing tumors and cancer, they do not treat areas that are about to become infected with cancer, thus revealing the cause of the two new tumors. Therefore, we've decided on one last treatment plan that doctors have a good deal of confidence in. This will take place over a ten day period of time. Beginning today, my mother will begin receiving radiation to her entire brain, which brings the hope of destroying any cancer that may be ready to spring up. They believe this will destroy the two smaller tumors. In addition to this, they are going to use the cyber-knife, which is a large concentrated blast of radiation, on the large tumor. If they can not destroy it in one shot, they believe they can reduce it significantly until the next time they try, which would follow about two weeks after. During this time, she will continue taking chemotherapy.

To clarify, I've not written this letter out of self-pity or lack of hope. By contrast, I've written this letter because I have hope in God's faithfulness to his people. Before making my request of you all, I would like to once again remind you all that my mother's cancer has, in many ways, brought glory to our God. Throughout her sickness, she has grown closer and closer to the Lord because of her suffering. Right now she is reading the book of Job and asking many questions about Job's steadfast faith in the Lord. She has not yet reached the end of the book, but it's amazing to hear her question Job's friends and wife when they told him to turn away from the Lord. In fact, she encourages us, Nicole and me, to never allow what has happened to shake our faith in the Lord, but to lean on the Lord and have him as our foundation now and for the rest of our lives. Therefore, whether in her life or her death, I am assured of the fact that God will receive the glory in the next couple months. If it is to be in her life through miraculous healing, God be praised for his mercy to bring it about when nothing else could. If it is to be in her death, God be praised for the abundance of grace He has given her in salvation and in life everlasting.

As I have been trying to communicate, if my mother's last minutes on earth are in the approaching months, I will be saddened, yet I will be excited. My soul will be at peace, for I have assurance of her salvation because of her faith in Christ and God's faithfulness to those whom He has called. That having been said, I come to the purpose of this letter. So long as my requests are submitted to the will of God, I believe the Lord welcomes my intercessory prayers to heal my mother. I've brought this request to the Lord many times over the past year and a half. However, since this will be our last hope of her being healed (medically speaking), I am asking that you all join with me in a special period of continual intercessory prayer over the next ten days, beginning today. Just so that you are aware, I greatly appreciate the prayers that you all have already lifted up to the Lord on her behalf and I know that He has listened to every single one of them, which only further encourages me when I think about this special time of prayer and supplication. Pray with expectancy, eager to see the powerful hand of our God work within my mother's body to heal her. Pray in humble acknowledgement of the sovereign will of God, reminding ourselves that God has ordained the best means to achieve the best things. Finally, and most importantly, pray in the power of the Holy Spirit and in the name of Jesus Christ, through whom we've been given the ability to enter into communion with God.

Love you all,

Angelo

_________________________________________________________________

Here is an amazing update:

Friends,
This will be quite a different email from last time; it will be an email of praise. My mom had her P.E.T. scan today. This locates all the cancer within the body and causes it to light up like a Christmas tree. We received the results 15 minutes ago. The revealed that there was absolutely no cancer in the brain...THE TUMORS ARE GONE! Praise God! She still has cancer in her body, but even that has significantly reduced in size.
Now, mom has been on aggressive chemotherapy and radiation, and while they did the job, we know that the Lord used them as his instruments to bring about healing. God is sovereign, and this past week has just been another testimony of the faithfulness, mercy, and grace of our Father.
Continue praying, as she still has to do another MRI to confirm the P.E.T. scan, but the results are almost conclusive. Also, continue praying in thankfulness to the Lord, for He has, yet again, done another miraculous work.
Love You All,
Angelo