Oh man, I am loving today’s guest post! Coming to you from Bijee from Reflections of a Good Woman this article is packed with encouragement and insight for our marriages. Pour yourself a fresh cup of coffee and dive in. It’s gonna be good.
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A PERFECT MARRIAGE is when two imperfect people come together and commit to making their version of a perfect life.
Marriage in all of its beauty, glory, and awesomeness is unfortunately gonna forever have flaws; your marriage, my marriage, and every other marriage that graces this land.
To any person that is married and beyond the fog laden and angel graced honeymoon stage, I am sure this is no news to you.
For those of you who are not married, this might be a newsflash.
Let me give you another.
You are not perfect and neither is (will) your spouse be.
But here is the shocker of it all … wait for it:
YOU CAN STILL HAVE A PERFECT MARRIAGE.
I thank God every day for my marriage; for my husband; for my family.
As a young girl I never thought I would be married. I use to always jokingly say, “It’s gonna take a special kind of man to deal with me.”
God amused me, and sent him. He had actually been right up under my nose all the while.
He is special indeed and he deals with me very well; with all my quirks, imperfections, and flaws, he loves me through them; my attitude, my self-doubt, my struggles in parenting, my sometimes lack of keeping up my home, my overall shortcomings, which might I point out one more time, that we all have them.
He reminds me of how beautiful I am, how when I smile rather than frown it lights up the room, how I use to find joy in keeping our home and asks how he can help me get that back, and that it’s ok to just have some down time, where I am not the Hostess with the Mostess.
My husband is far from perfect to most, but to me he is perfect in all his imperfections. Those things that I am pretty much exclusively privy to, they make him normal and it gives me a place in his life. It allows me the opportunity to have something to offer him, to give him completion, to really be his Help Mate.
You see we both do this protection thing, over our flaws. Not to seem perfect but to cover each other. He actually strengthens my flaws and I’d like to think I do the same for him. We work as a team, we don’t allow others to exploit them, or have a chance at them, we don’t use them as ammunition in a heated fellowship, and most importantly we try to grow each other through them.
To know me before my husband is to know a totally different version of me. I often times like to sit and just reflect on how much I have grown, how much we have grown and changed.
I thank God for the chance to be loved in this way, to be covered and grown and just held high.
I like to also hear the testimonies of others and how they have overcome in their marriage.
I’ve found that those that have longevity have not traveled a road of fewer bumps, woke up to roses every day, or had perfect children, jobs and homes.
Those that have made it and still smile, smile because they have fought for it, at times cried through it, got down on their knees and prayed to God about it and got up and recommitted to continue on, to glorify the Lord.
They have taken the hard challenge of self-reflection and reviewing their own actions to determine what they can change within themselves, do better and how they can better SERVE the one they stood before God and the world and committed themselves to, and met it with courage, grace and a whole lot of JESUS.
So in your marriage, when it’s in those hard times, ask yourself what YOU can do differently, what can YOU make better, and do it without worrying about the other person, let God work on your spouses heart. Ask yourself are you covering your spouse and truly adding value to their life and your union with them. Remember that the only variable you have control over is you, and so only focus on changing that.
In the good times, give GOD the glory and praise for it, learn something from it and enjoy every single bit of it.
When I was with my daughters father, I told him the same thing I told all guys I would date, “It’s gonna take a special kind of man to deal with me.”
Of course every guy wants to think they are special right, so he laughed and said I bet and kind of poked his chest out. Sometime later, in frustration with me, he said “Dang, you said It’s gonna take a special kind of man but good luck with that, cause yea.”
It’s no secret that that relationship did not work out, but I laugh at that now, because when I said that to my now husband, then friend, he never said anything, he never stuck out his chest, he never claimed to be that guy.
Perhaps he didn’t know that he was, perhaps he did, but he never had to make the statement. He just striped and let me see him naked. LOL, not in the physical sense, but rather in the “this is me” sense; he just showed me, and he allowed me to see his flaws and who he really was, and that made me love him that much more.
I say that to say, that the perfect person does not exist, the perfect marriage won’t either. But there is a perfectly flawed person whom you will have a perfect marriage just for you with, and that my friends is real PERFECTION in marriage!
Be blessed.
Moment of Reflection:
Are you covering your spouse’s flaws? Are you fighting for your marriage? Or are you spending time focusing on their imperfections and looking at them to change?
About Bijee
Bijee (a.k.a “B”) is a young woman trying to be the person that she can be. Her greatest blessing is her friends and family, which consists of her husband and two children. She doesnít take lightly to being a good wife, mother, daughter, and friend. The ultimate goal is to be a role model to her children and a good woman to her longtime best friend and husband. She strives to show her daughter what a good woman looks like and to model what her son should be looking for when the time comes. This attitude and approach is outlined and guided by Titus 2 and Proverbs 31.
