Here is one of the rare photos of my husband and myself. I didn’t take this one, nor was the camera on a remote timer. My mother-in-law took this lovely gem. I love this man. I do. We’ve been married 10 years now, have 2 beautiful children and have moved 7 times. Jason used to work in corporate america, that’s where we met actually. When our youngest was born ( a little bit afterwards) we took a Giant leap of faith and Jason started a business fixing computers. His dream has always been to work for himself and be an entrepreneur.
This started a path in our marriage that grew rocky and very hard to maneuver. We have always been committed to each other, and under the surface of our circumstances have loved each other. But I can’t say that without saying that the commitment was hard, and at times felt impossible. Jason put himself head first into making the business a success, working long hours and weeks. At times even if we saw each other physically, we would go weeks without really relating at all. He’d be fully present with the kids when he could, but when it came to us, there was no time left over. At first I fought a lot with him about it, then as time wore on, the battles grew tiring, I slowly retreated into my wounds.
I started buying lies about myself, and over eating and making agreements with myself about how I am never good enough. Meanwhile, Jason is fighting his own wounds, feeling like he has to be successful to prove to me and to the world that he is worthy. Both of us are stuck in cycles of our own baggage, and life together is strained. We don’t want to hurt the other one. I don’t want to rock the boat, I want him to have the space he seemed to be asking for all these years to work on his businesses. I want him around. So I say little. When we fought though, it was like world war 3, all the stops came out and we went at it. This time was a little different though. This time I was done. I needed something more in a marriage than a distant roommate, I’d settle for my best friend back. So, this last break, I think we both were at the precipice of done.
When we remembered that we loved each other at the core. We believed that God could fix this marriage, because we knew we could not. (we failed miserably) We made a decision to ask for help. We turned to our God, had a counselor on the backburner, and opened a book. Sigh… What a relief it is that we have found a way to healing ourselves and our marriage. Not that we are the ones doing this healing, but we are dependent on our God to heal us. We realized that we were looking for each other to fill the holes of our wounds, and this caused a lot of strife admist our hearts. We couldn’t understand why this wasn’t working (marriage that is) and it was because our hopes for a fix was in each other. Our brokenness couldn’t heal the other’s brokenness. I felt like I was always giving and never receiving. And I’m sure Jason felt like that too. The book we are reading puts it like this: We are both leaky buckets looking for a well. The only well that will fill us is God’s.
This is not to say that we are trouble free now. We don’t have all the answers and are still going through a lot of healing together. But this time, we understand why we need God as the third stand to bind us together. We need His strength and His love to heal. Our marriage is only going bring to the forefront our wounds, but if we do this right, we can know that pointing each other in the upward direction can help heal them. So instead of hanging onto a man with broken bones and hurting him more, I can grab the rope to hang onto. And Jason can do the same thing.
This new awareness I’m praying will enable us to be free, to be ourselves again. I want to speak our hearts in love, to want our spouse to feel loved in the deepest of senses and have our attention focused on real love. (which means real work and living in our marriage with real intention).
This post was/is not very easy to write and share with the world. But I want to take the step towards honesty, vulnerability, and truth. This is our lives. We hurt. We cry. We laugh. We dream. We Enjoy. We fight. We scream. We hold onto Life. We love God. And we have faith that even through our emotions that God will be there holding us/healing us.
By the way… The book we are currently going through is Love and War by John and Staci Eldredge. We actually feel that their lives parallel ours significantly. And maybe by reading this post you’ll feel that someone out there is going through something similar to what you are going through too. e-mail me if you would like to discuss this. juliaspencer14 at gmail dot com.
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