Midlife Musings

First the woohoo: when I weighed yesterday, the scale said 150. I finally budged off 154! I was so excited, I tell you! Oh, wait, I am telling you. One-Fifty means I am halfway to my goal. One-Fifty means I’m back at what has been my normal weight for most of my adult life. I’m not willing to stay here, but yesterday, One-Fifty felt mighty fine.

Now for the uh-oh. I didn’t put that porn there. My blog is being intermittently hacked. I’m not quite sure what to do about it, except delete it when I find it. The hackers are using invisible font, so it only shows up in the feed. That means, I’ll take it as a personal favor if you go ahead and click through to leave me a comment if you see it in the feed.

That about wraps it up. I’ve been too busy doing the next thing these past days to be thinking really profound thoughts. Well, that’s true and not true. I just haven’t figured out when/how/if/where I am going to blog about it all. Some really wonderful things have been happening in my marriage, re-adjusting of roles, some goal directed priority shifting, some attitudes repaired. It’s kinda nice being here just now, and the sex has been amazing, too. Just sayin’

Sometimes, women can get real hard headed. We can attempt to wrest control from a man because we feel like he’s incompetent. Now, if you happen to be married to a laid back type guy when you do that, he’s not liable to say much. But it won’t be long until everyone in the house is miserable, and you are in a bigger pickle than you were in when you thought hopping in the driver’s seat was a good plan, and the sex is routine and boring, if there is any at all, and you are bickering over nothing all the time. It truly sucks. And then, since you have taken on way more trouble than God designed you to handle, you are at maximum stress load. You know what that causes, right? More bickering, less sex, bigger pickle. That causes more stress. And pretty soon, you are wondering why you are even married. You’ve stepped so far out of the God designed plan for marriage that if you don’t duck right back under that umbrella and f-a-s-t, you are going to end up divorced. You’re all out of love and all out of sorts and you are tearing down your house with your own hands because of your refusal to embrace … because you are foolish, just like Proverbs says.

Sometimes, though, if you are truly blessed, someone may perceive what’s going on. Mostly, she will probably perceive it because God clearly reveals it to her. And she will begin to say things in conversation that make you think. And she will begin to pray. And she may send you a book to read, and she will pray some more. And then when things are just about ready to crack from the stress, she will come flat out and say YOU need to pray. YOU need to pray for God to remind you why you married that man. YOU need to pray to love him like you used to. YOU need to pray that God will help you love and respect and honor that man who is your husband.

And so you will pray all that, even though you may roll your eyes while you are doing it. And then maybe your laid back husband will finally say something that pricks your hard, cold heart, when he maybe or maybe didn’t mean it quite the way you take it. And you will chew on that thing for several days, and you will have great trepidation, but you will decide to get your butt out of the driver’s seat, and let him get back in. You might have to coax him back into that position. You might have been driving so long that you have to remind him that he’s holding the wheel now. You’ll probably even have to snap your lips shut sometimes to keep from speaking out when you should be quiet. You might even have to live with waiting on a decision instead of getting an instant answer. (You might take that opportunity to realize your husband makes good decisions because he stops to think before he speaks.)

You might even have to have some hard conversations about authority and submission. You might have to explain that submission is a gift that you freely give. It’s impossible to make someone submit. You can beat someone into subservience, this is true. But you cannot force anyone to partner with you in submission. It’s a gift, a choice the submitter makes. If you’ve been hard headed and willful for a long time, you might have a husband who has forgotten how soft and loving you can be, just as you have also forgotten. I can tell you though, that when you look up at him with eyes full of trust and love, something will happen in him. It may not be overnight, but that good man you married will rise to the occasion. He will cherish you again, and he will treat you like a queen again. You will become heirs together of the grace of life once more. And the sex, it will be amazing

I finally realized the other day that when God told Eve that her desire would be to her husband, that was not such a bad thing. It was her protection and blessing, see. That thing God said to Eve, He was giving her the gift of submission, I think, so that she could accept Adam’s rule with grace and love, so that her respect and gentleness would help him to be a benevolent authority to her.

Hmm, I guess I decided here and today would be the right place to blog about all that after all.