Long Term Marriage

Today I’m thankful to share Kathleen’s thoughts in my corner! The topic she covers is so close to my heart, I was so excited when I received her blog post! I also love the name of her blog “The Joyful Servant“, be sure to swing by her corner and say howdy! 🙂

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I would like to thank Misty for the honor of sharing on her blog today.

I want to share with you about long term marriage, a union that has become somewhat rare, instead of the norm in the past 50-years. With the divorce rates of those in a long term marriage (20 plus years) increasing, something surely needs to be done, because statistically it is showing that for those who divorce that they aren’t any better off and they aren’t happier.

Also, finding a new partner is much harder than the person thought or should I say, were deceived into believing. Why deceived? Because that is what I believe is happening. People are deceived into thinking the ‘grass is greener’…

I think many people today don’t completely understand what marriage truly means. With wedding vows stating things like, “so long as love shall last”, instead of “till death do us part”, something is surely wrong with our thinking.

So many have been blinded by the “powers and principalities” of the air. Honor and morality have no meaning, no standard.

Twenty-eight and a half years ago when I married my husband only five weeks after I met him, I was just a brand new baby Christian who hardly new the first thing about praying, the Bible, marriage, commitment and the word covenant meant absolutely nothing to me. I also had a three year old daughter.

“Wives, understand and support your husbands in ways that show your support for Christ. The husband provides leadership to his wife the way Christ does to his church, not by domineering but by cherishing. So just as the church submits to Christ as he exercises such leadership, wives should likewise submit to their husbands.” Ephesians 5: 23-24 The Message

This was not the first marriage for either Larry or myself and we brought a lot of ‘baggage’ into our marriage. I had three times as much baggage as my husband. Fortunately his parents had demonstrated a good, strong, godly marriage for him and he had standards.

Six weeks after I was married I wanted out. I had married a stranger, with an amazing family but to be honest, all this “normalcy” freaked me out. My new husband and I had a very long, somewhat heated discussion – and we decided one important thing. We were committed and we both wanted to make it work. So, we started dating, every other weekend and we still do to this day.

I also started reading any, “how to have a great marriage” books I could get my hands on. How to be a wife, companion, help-meet. It took several years for the word “submit” to sink in. I didn’t understand what it meant and many women today do not understand what it means. An easy way to understand the word in scripture is substitute the word “support”.

To be honest I didn’t understand a lot of things: How to share, how to give, how to put others first, because I had lived in survival mode for so long, everything in my life had centered around ‘Me’ so putting others first was a concept I hard a hard time wrapping my brain around. But, I did know that I wanted a good life for my daughter. I wanted her to have two parents who loved each other, and an extended ‘normal’ family to sort of counteract the kookiness of mine, if that makes any sense.

It took me a long time to realize that Holy Spirit is the greatest teacher. You can read the Word of God, but it is Holy Spirit that makes the Word come alive inside you. I had to submit my body, mind and spirit to God’s Word. Only then could I submit myself to my marriage and family.

It was about this time that I began to understand what a covenant marriage was. I wasn’t only committed to my marriage, but I had made a life long covenant, a bond between God, my husband and myself. God was the  center, the glue if you will.  Holy Spirit began to guide and teach me how to be a godly wife, the kind of wife my husband needed and I noticed that as I submitted to my husband in love and respect that he responded in ways I never thought possible. The love and respect was returned ten-fold and I felt totally covered and blessed, something I had never experienced before.

I hope that if you are having troubles in your marriage that you will take a deep look into your heart and seek the teachings of Holy Spirit.

Have a wonderful day 🙂

Kathleen Grone blogs at The Joyful Servant. She is the wife of Larry, the mother of four grown children and grandmother to two angels. She has a degree in secondary social science education, has worked in Hospice and Pastoral Care, is an author of children’s books and poetry and is an ordained pastor.