We’re still in the first year of the loss of our daughter. She was 25 years old, married for only a few years, raising a son, and serving the Lord as a pastors wife, building a small cake decorating business in her spare time. When it came to baking and decorating the most lovely wedding cakes you’ve ever seen, Rachel truly excelled and could bake the best tasting gluten free cookie I’ve ever eaten. Suddenly, one day just like any other, she was in a car accident and her life here on earth was over. Of course we are still feeling the depth of her loss. There are not many hours of any given day, that I am not still thinking about her or missing her.
I’ve been married for 27 years, we also have two grown sons, one who, hopefully will be married before this year ends. We are blessed with warm, caring, loving extended family and a large, compassionate, church family. I have been very blessed to have great emotional and spiritual support surrounding me. But I’m sure you may wonder as many do, how is my marriage holding up under this great grief? I want to give you a thorough answer, maybe a surprising one, but still an answer that I wish will bring you hope. My marriage is doing exceptionally well despite our great loss this year. I think perhaps, my husband and I are closer than we may ever have been. If you knew our great struggles over these past decades, you would know, that is truly saying something. It may be surprising, but sometimes, grief can tear us apart, but if we let it, with God, it can bring us together. But that hasn’t happened all on its own without a lot of attention and work on our part to make sure we don’t fall apart, or drift away from one another.
Here are some things I think we are doing well, perhaps they will help you too Here’s my advice to you:
1. Find a way to stay connected, and maintain it weekly if possible.
We do ‘Date Night’. We returned to having date night once a week, even if that has meant doing date night at home because of the pandemic. Our daughter was only 6 weeks old when we began our date nights. All these years, we hardly missed a week. Some weeks date night disintegrated into a debate session or even a lengthy fight and some nights weren’t very pleasant in the early years of our marriage, but we never let disagreements, or set backs cause us to quit going out together. It has been part of the glue that keeps us connected. We let that slide a little this year, and found out how quickly we returned to arguing again. We were definitely missing each other. So, we don’t skip date nights unless we absolutely have to.
2. Find a way to connect spiritually. We began doing a marriage devotional together and we pray together weekly. I cannot tell you the number of times we’ve attempted to do this together over the years and never could be consistent, week to week, or month to month. When we were young, my husband said that because of his past hurts, he never felt he could be truly honest about the subjects, questions, or discussions brought up by such devotional books. Often, we’d begin them, but he’d soon lose interest. My past involved a lot of rejection, so often, I’d stop pursuing closeness with my husband whenever he seemed less than interested in me. For years we did our own devotions separately, and only occasionally share our spiritual lives with one another. Thankfully, as we grew spiritually over the years, studied biblical counseling and worked hard on our own personal and marital issues, returning to doing devotions together now is a great source of emotional and spiritual sharing. If you also find devotions difficult to do together, perhaps look at the deeper reason why that is happening, and begin to find a way to address it instead of ignoring or avoiding it. If you can even begin to solve even the smallest problem together, that can lead to learning to work together to become a team, instead of two separate spouses.
3. Make God first priority in your own life, and pray He becomes first priority in your spouses life as well. When I married my husband, I thought we were pretty equally yoked, at least spiritually. Perhaps we were in emotional maturity, but that was not so in spiritual maturity. I knew I was a Christian, but certainly a weak one, but sooner rather than later, I realized, my husband perhaps wasn’t a Christian at all. I suppose I could write a book about it, but that’s for another time. A crisis occurred in our third year of marriage, that almost destroyed both of us, but that crisis also brought an opportunity to make God first priority in our own lives individually. Any change I was hoping for in my spouse, ultimately, still required major changes in my own life as well. That remains to be true today. My husband and I can usually tell when the other person is not spending much time with God. Sin shows up gradually and sometimes abundantly. Because Jesus isn’t just an add on in our lives, he’s the center of our life, we can get back on track, usually pretty easily. We can also encourage one another when one of us isn’t doing very well. Our individual time spent alone with God, keeps our individual focus on godly ways to handle our own problems and each others.
4. Be flexible instead of rigid in all areas of life, especially in your shared life together. ‘Same Team’ principle applies here. (see that article Marriage – ‘Same Team’ if you don’t know what that means) My husband and I were both verystubborn, prideful, and rigid in most areas of our lives more than 30 years ago when we began dating. The first decade we were together, included far more fighting than probably anything else. Thankfully, we both don’t like to lose or quit easily, so we stayed together. But we certainly didn’t make a ‘happily ever after’ environment for one another. We were each focused on ourself, our own needs and desires, and rarely served each other well. We had a lot to learn. We weren’t very kind of loving to one another back then. We frequently treated one another as an enemy ratherthan a “same teammate.” Apply a lot of grace to yourself and your spouse. Work together against the problem and not against each other. Allow God to bend you each to His will rather than your own. He can put you both on the same page so let Him.
5. Apply my “Rule of Five” to your marriage, your spiritual life, and any area of individual struggle you encounter. Of course you’re wondering, What is the Rule of Five? I intend to write a separate article about that which will explain it in more detail, but essentially it is this…Whenever you discover a difficulty in your own life individually or in your married life together, do your best to identify, even label, if necessary, what the underlying problem, issue, or disagreement is about. Once you know what it is, take this subject, problem to God and pray intentionally that God will direct you to Five Key Passages of Scripture that apply to your problem, and to supplement and deepen your understanding, ask God to help you find Five excellent Christian Resources or authors that have written books, articles, sermons, podcasts, etc. about the issue that is causing you trouble. You must make certain that these sources agree with what the bible actually teaches, that what you find to supplement scripture supports and agrees with the spiritual doctrines, laws, and commands of God, and don’t stray into cultural norms rather than godly wisdom. You can and should pray to God for wisdom about what sources would supplement your biblical study. If you don’t know your bible well, reading very good Christian books can lead you to the scriptures found in the bible about a particular issue you are working on. If you are a Christian already you have the holy spirit within you to help counsel you as your study Gods word, pray, and read additional godly resources. If you are not yet a Christian, but still desire to know what God thinks about your situation and you want to invite Him to help you, then your adventure into christian resources may become exactly what you need to discover who God really is, what your life is meant to become, and how your life can truly change if your surrender that life to Jesus Christ.
These Five things have made a tremendous difference in how my husband and I have stayed connected to one another this year as we have been grieving over the loss of our daughter. Our lives will never be the same without her, I believe we will always miss her, but I know God blessed us with 25 years of ‘wonderful’ with her. Now it is time to share our own ‘wonderful’ with others as well. I hope this article helps you find connection to one another in your own marriage.
Begin applying the “Rule of Five’ today, Susan