Jen and I have been in a relationship for over a year, as of last week. We have been engaged since November 21st last year. We have 199 more days until our wedding.
And I am exhausted. I never knew that a quality relationship with a woman would be so hard.
I am trying to be the man that God wants me to be. I am continually trying to learn how to lead my future wife, but I keep screwing up. I keep being so prideful. I always (unintentionally) think that there is nothing about myself that I need to improve, and of course I'm always finding the faults in her. Why do I keep doing that? Am I not being open minded enough? Am I not seeing things from her perspective? Or God's perspective?
Oh yeah... God's perspective! I forgot about that. Oh crap... So often I forget about God. My purpose on this planet is to spend my life pleasing Jesus. He saved my life!
God created me. I disobey Him. I deserve death. Jesus died in my place. Now, I gave my life up to serve Him. For the rest of my life. Every day. I am His servant.
When I think about people who are servants or slaves, I think about someone with no life. I think about someone whose life is dedicated to pleasing the person in charge. So... am I doing that? No way. I am so selfish! I focus on so many other things: baseball, work, Jen, paying bills, saving money, listening to music, cooking, eating, sleeping, and blah blah blah ... how much of it do I earnestly do with the purpose of pleasing Jesus in the process?
One year later, I am having more fights with Jen, I'm disagreeing with her more, I'm frustrated with our relationship more often, I feel like we aren't communicating well, I just don't feel like it's working.
Here's the problem: I have been depending on myself and on her in order to try and make our relationship happy.
The truth is that relationships are NOT always happy! They are NOT always enjoyable! ESPECIALLY when I'm depending on two sinners to make everything better. When I lean on Jen, she's not always going to hold me up. When Jen leans on me, I'm not always going to hold her up. That's because we aren't perfect. There's nothing we can do about that. We can always keep trying and trying and trying to be perfect and not fail each other, but it's not going to happen! That's why Jesus MUST be the one that we both lean on in order to make the relationship work. If we both lean on someone who IS perfect and someone who will NEVER fail us, then when we both hurt each other, we'll both have Jesus there to support us.
We are complete not when we are living to please ourselves, but when we live to please Jesus. By pleasing Jesus, we are more patient, disciplined, gentle, kind, strong, and lovable. When we have our priorities straight, we are then able to dive into an intimate relationship with another sinner.
I love Jen so much. I want the best for her. I want her to have a fiance that loves her the same way that Jesus loves the church. But I can't give that to her. I'm not good enough for her. I'm not perfect.
I know what I need to do now. When I do my best to please Jesus, then both Jesus and Jen are pleased. That's my #1 priority. Every day.
An illustration made a lot of sense to me, if you think of a relationship as a triangle, with two people and God on the three points. As both people rely on Christ and move closer to his point on the triangle, the distance between each person also shortens. It seems like the closer we are to Christ and the more both people seek to move closer to Him, the closer, deeper and more intimate the relationship between the two people becomes.
ReplyDeleteIt seems to make sense to me. Nothing like a math problem to explain relationships!