In our 10 years of marriage, I learned a great deal about love & honor. I learned from it the most from my husband, who have shown me real honor. Humbly speaking, I’m still a work in progress. I vowed to love and honor my husband, but it is a continual process for both of us. In this process, I learned to work out each big and every little disagreements we have, learned to forgive and remember to affirm. LOVE cannot be summed up in just 10 years of marriage or more years to come. I’m thankful that I can share the beauty of honor with him everyday.
Moving & living to my home country, the vows that we made for each other 10 years ago and re-affirmed 5 years ago, were tested. Love dares us to do the things our hearts don’t want to do. When we are faced with disagreements, misunderstandings, silent treatments & confusion, love dares us to honor our vows with each other. We faced a marriage-threatening situation. We were off-guarded and realized we can’t handle it on our own. We were both defeated by our own disillusions and only God can fix it.
“For this people’s heart has grown callous; they hardly hear with their ears, and they have closed their eyes. Otherwise they might see with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their hearts, and turn, and I would heal them.” ~ Matthew 13:15
“The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?” ~ Jeremiah 17:19
Don’t follow your heart, don’t even believe what it tells you to do. Instead, let your hearts be guided by the Holy Spirit. Lead your heart according to the Lord’s will.
I know a woman who prayed and waited for her husband’s heart to change, that her husband will love and honor God with his life. She waited faithfully for 10 years. However, after 10 years, she and her husband were blessed with a beautiful healthy baby. In that 10 years of waiting, her faithfulness praying for her husband have touched other people’s lives. Her friends came to know & follow Christ and are now faithfully serving at her church together with their husbands. Yet, this woman’s husband remained unchanged. She’s still waiting for her husband to completely change. Yet the waiting room where she’s in, it is her life and heart that was changed. She found her satisfaction in Christ alone and start expecting big things from God. She found respecting her unbelieving husband a joy and honor to God. Her 10 years of faithfully waiting & praying didn’t just bear the fruit of their love with an adorable baby, but also bear the fruit of her submission to God bringing others to Christ. She’s still waiting–I’m anticipating what God will bring in her life in the next 10 years.
“When your attempts at honor go unreciprocated, you are to give honor just the same. That’s what love dares to do—to say, “Of all the relationships I have, I will value ours the most. Of all the things I’m willing to sacrifice, I will sacrifice the most for you. With all your failures, sins, mistakes & faults—past and present–I still choose to love and honor you.” That’s how you create an atmosphere for love to be rekindled. That’s how you lead your heart to truly love your mate again. And that’s the beauty of honor.
(Quoted from Living the Love Dare)
Our disillusions were washed away with pure conviction to forgive, embrace each other and let go of our pride. Pride is the foremost enemy of marriage. We all have one…and one by one we let it go. A Christ-centered marriage honors God first and your spouse second.
“However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband.” ~ Ephesians 5:33
Thanks for reading!
