Love Encourages, Day 27

I am constantly amazed at how God works!! The subject of this Dare is something that my husband and I have recently dealt with—our expectations. He seems to expect me to be more like his mother while I expect him to be more like my father. Not that our parents are bad people—I am thankful for the way they molded us into the people we have become. But we are not carbon copies of them. It really isn’t fair for us to expect the other to be.


Gosh, that made sense in my head, but looks so confusing on paper!

The expectations he places on me make me feel very inadequate. As I told him the other day, “No matter what I do, you will point out the ways it could have been done better. It makes me wonder why I even bother. If I am not good enough, why am I even here?”

I assume that he feels the same way when I start to nag him about spending more time with our family. Oh, it’s not like he goes out all that time. He works 8 to 10 hours a day, 5 to 6 days a week (a real blessing from God, giving his profession and the economy in our hometown). Tuesday night, he is Tiger Scout Den Leader for our 6 year old and he leads a Bible study at the church on Wednesdays. Other than that, he is normally at home. I get frustrated, though, when it seems that I am constantly with the kids (a frustration I assume most work-at-home and stay-at-home parents feel). He has turned one of our extra rooms into his “Man Cave” and spends a lot of evenings in there, not coming out until the kids have gone to bed. Even on nights when I plan to spend the evening working in my office, he goes into his cave. The boys are so afraid of bothering him that they come to me with all of their troubles. I don’t want to be a single parent when we are married and living in the same house!

Yet I don’t think that nagging him or cutting him off, which I know I tend to do, is really the right way to handle the situation. I can’t really say that I know what is the right way. In the Gospel, Jesus tells His disciples to “remove the plank from your own eye before you can be concerned with the speck in your brothers eye” (paraphrasing, but if you check out Matthew 7:4-5, you will see that I am pretty close). I guess that means that I need to look at the problems in my own life, the ways where I don’t measure up as a wife.

And I am not talking about where I don’t measure up to the expectations my husband has for me. In all honesty, I am not sure I can ever be everything he wishes for me to be. But I need to see where I fall short of GOD’S expectations. If I can please Him, pleasing my husband should follow naturally.