My husband is a very social person. He can chat with strangers over any subject matter for hours and never bat an eye. He can work a room at a party or banquet and enjoy meeting new people, catching up with old acquaintances, and find something in common with just about anyone. But he has very few very close friends.
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I read in a marriage book one time to be careful with whom you share your marital problems, because it’s very easy to update friends on the problems, but we tend to forget to update on the progress. If you’re like me, you can sit there and think of friends who seem to constantly trash talk their husbands, but who rarely praise them for anything good they’ve done.
Pin ItThere was a time in our marriage when there was little trust between me and Gregg. I’d say one thing and he wouldn’t believe it. He’d say another thing and I wouldn’t believe it. It was a very dark time in our lives, and even typing about it and thinking about itelicits a bit of an emotional reaction in my heart.
Pin ItGregg and I rarely fight. I’m very passive, and he and I pretty much agree on most things, so there isn’t a lot left to fight about. We’ve had our moments, and our marriage had a really rough year at one point, but for the most part, there has been little fighting.
Pin ItThe week after Gregg and I were married, his unit – a Special Forces unit out of Birmingham, Alabama – went to do a joint something something within the United States. He was gone for about 2 months. When they returned, almost immediately, they shipped off to Afghanistan.
Pin ItDuring an airborne operation, my husband, Gregg, discovered that he was allergic to fire ants. He parachuted out of a plane and landed on a fire ant bed. He was bitten several times, resulting in his body producing massive amounts of histamines that started to send him into anaphylaxis. After taking a dose of Benadryl, we both still thought maybe he should go to the emergency room, just in case.
Pin ItIn the course of our discussing it, we discussed the fact that God has placed the husband as the head of the family. Gregg said, “I am responsible for my choices. If I make a bad decision, God is going to say to me, ‘Why did you make this bad decision?’ If I seek your counsel and take your advice, God is not going to say to you, ‘Why did you give bad advice?’ God is going to say to me, ‘Why did you make this bad decision?'”
The first thing that attracted me to Gregg was his mind. Before we met in person, we had known each other online for two years as part of a writers’ group. This group was supposed to be about writing, but writers like to read what they write, so it was a prolific bunch. We discussed everything from writing to politics to religion. After 9-11, it really exploded with talking and writing, and it wasn’t unusual to get 400-500 emails a day. Gregg and I are very similarrily minded when it comes to religion and politics, so we “bonded” intellectually long before we met. However, that bonding never went beyond the discussions to anything personal simply because I was married. The first time we ever had a private conversation, I was already separated from my husband.
Pin ItMen are visual creatures. And we live in an extremely visual world. From swimsuit models pedaling beer to shiny sports car commercials, we are bombarded visually on a constant basis. You can barely even read a website without your peripheral vision being attacked with ads that flash, scroll, bleep, bloop. I was on a website recently trying to read a long line of text and an ad in the sidebar was so annoying that I had to open another window and put it in front of the one I was reading to block the ad.
≈WEEK ONE: THE POWER≈
As I read this introduction to the book, I was overwhelmed. For those of you who have not read my testimony, when our youngest son, Johnathan, was an infant, Gregg and I went through a terrible time in our marriage. Gregg was suffering from a terrible depression that was manifesting itself in destructive ways. Since we only saw each other on weekends, I had no idea about how much he was suffering. I was just going through my happy life never believing for a moment that my marriage might be in trouble, that my husband might be in agonizing pain, that satan was wielding his destructive ways and working on both of us.
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