Kindness & Patience: 2 Elements in Our Marriage Formula
This week in the Dispatch:
We will look at some really random interesting facts in Quick Hits!
“Grit” can truly make a difference!
Awesome Marriage Podcast is still on a winter break
Is there a marriage formula that works?
Some challenges and a next step to get your marriage moving!
This Week’s Quick Hits:
Here are some interesting facts that may surprise you:
The world’s oldest toy is a stick. You can use it to play fetch with your dog, swing it as a bat, or use your imagination to turn it into a lightsaber. Its adaptability is among the reasons why the National Toy Hall of Fame inducted the stick into its collection as possibly the oldest toy ever.
Albert Einstein’s eyeballs are in New York City. They were given to Henry Abrams and preserved in a safety deposit box. Abrams was Einstein’s eye doctor. He received the eyeballs from Thomas Harvey, the man who performed the autopsy on Einstein and illegally took the scientist’s brain for himself.
Pregnancy tests date back to 1350 BCE. According to the Office of History in the National Institutes of Health, an ancient papyrus document shows that Egyptian women urinated on wheat and barley seeds to determine if they were pregnant. If wheat grew, it predicted a female baby. If barley grew, it predicted a male baby. The woman was not pregnant if nothing grew. Experimenting with this seed theory in 1963 proved it was accurate 70 percent of the time.
Book:
Grit by Angela Duckworth
Grit is another great book to read starting a new year. Have you ever wondered why some people succeed and others fail? In this book Angela Duckworth explains why talent is hardly a guarantor of success. Rather, other factors can be even more crucial such as identifying our passions and following through on our commitments. Success is driven by a blend of passion and long-term perseverance or grit. I love this book as it is both personal and insightful.
YouVersion Plan:
Traffic Signs and Your Marriage - Part 1
In this five-day plan, I apply traffic signs that we see every day to growing your marriage relationship.
Podcasts:
The Awesome Marriage Podcast is still on a short winter break. Look for our first episode of 2021 on Tuesday, January 19th!
Insights
The Marriage Formula
Did you ever wish there was a magic formula that would solve all your marriage problems? Something that would give you the love of a lifetime, or in our case an Awesome Marriage. There are stacks and stacks of marriage books. You can read them online, listen to them, or do it the old fashioned way and actually pick up a book! The internet is full of ideas to help pursue a great marriage. The different definitions of what a great marriage is are mind blowing. Then add in social media and I get a headache just from the huge amount of information available. If you do not find a formula you like today, you can just wait until next month. There will be new books, new articles, and new posts. The problem with all of the above is that they don’t always work. If they do, it is a short-lived fix. It’s not that there isn’t good advice out there, it’s just that for some reason most of it does not stick.
What if I told you I had a marriage formula that works? One that I could completely guarantee. It is not short lived. It will work today, tomorrow, the day after and so on. The really good news is that it is totally and completely free! No hidden charges. No bait and switch. Just a marriage formula that will literally change your marriage forever. Interested? Over the next few weeks I am going to roll out this formula. If you follow it, you will definitely see some big changes in your marriage.
To begin with, a formula is a recipe or plan designed to address a problem. Our problem is marriage. Our formula starts with kindness. Webster says that kindness is “the quality of being friendly, generous, and considerate.” In my marriage being friendly to Nancy should be a given, but sometimes I am a little crispy and kindness falls to the wayside. As far as generosity, Nancy and I agree that in everything, God is the owner and we are the managers. With that perspective it is pretty easy to be generous but without that perspective, things can go downhill quickly.
Being considerate is probably the hardest of the three for me because I often want my way. I have to be intentional to put Nancy’s needs at the top of my list, but when I do, things are really good between us. When I don’t, our marriage suffers. So it makes sense that kindness is part of our formula and it's something that is important for me to work on every day.
Our next ingredient is patience. Patience is a mystery to me. Sometimes in my marriage I am really patient and other times I show very little patience at all. I honestly think the root of my impatience is selfishness. I get impatient when things don’t go my way. If I want to be somewhere at a particular time and I have to wait on Nancy, I get impatient. If I want something and have to wait for it, I get impatient. I get selfish. Yet to have an Awesome Marriage, I cannot be selfish.
Jesus said one of the essential rules of life is to love your neighbor as yourself, and for me Nancy is at the top of the list of those to love as myself. When she is late, I need to be patient. When I do not get what I want, I need to be patient. The key for me is knowing that I cannot be a patient person on my own. I’ve tried but I need help. The good news is that God is there 24/7/365 to help me, change me, and make me more like Jesus. So there we have it. Kindness and patience, the first two elements in our marriage formula.
Challenge:
What does kindness look like in your marriage? Are the qualities of being friendly, generous and considerate easy or hard to live out day after day?
When are you good at being patient with your spouse? When is it difficult?
Next Step:
Together come up with two things that you would like to have in your marriage that live out both kindness and patience. Now talk about how you will implement these in your marriage. What is the next step for each of you?
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