RESPECT

Okay, so I am back to my marriage study notes. Tuesday night we talked about respecting our husbands. This marriage study is showing me how truly different men and women and are more specifically how different me and my husband are. It is no wonder that we are all messed up at time. There are a few points that were made that I think are worth sharing.

Here is one example of how I say we are completely different: "A wife needs love like she needs air to breath." "A man needs respect like he needs air to breath." When we first started talking about these two statements I kind of thought it was silly and that really wasn't true. But then it all kind of made sense to me. Think about when you are in an argument with your husband. At some point in the argument what do YOU end up saying to him? Something to the effect of "Well, you don't act like you love me." Right? You need love right? I do! I don't know if I have ever heard my husband say "You don't respect me" but when I think back to some of our arguments, that is essentially the bottom line.

There was a diagram in our workbook that is a circle with words written all around it, so show how behaviors can feed off each other. There is a healthy circle and an unhealthy circle. I am sure you can figure out which one is which:

Without love she reacts without respect.
Without respect he reacts without love.

Her respect motivates his love.
His love motivates her respect.

Is there really much to comment on that? It's a fantastic reminder of how we feed off each other and it is really easy to get trap in a circle. Hopefully we get trapped in the healthy circle and not the unhealthy one!

Melody (the woman who wrote this study) gave a great every day example of how to respect your husband. So, your husband is changing the baby's diaper and when he is done you see your kid walking down the hallway with the diaper halfway falling off. A disrespectful response would be something like, "Honey, don't you know how to put on a diaper. Do I have to do everything around here to get it done right.? A respect answer would be, "Jonnie (little kid), we need to march right back in here to daddy so he can fix your diaper. Those things can be so tricky some time."

I know that is silly, but it makes complete sense. Yesterday morning Jayme came down the stairs with mismatched pajamas and I thought to myself, "Alan, your killing me." But I had to change that thought to be grateful that he put the kids to bed last night so I could stay at church to lead a small youth group.

My challenge for you this weekend is to speak all words of respect to your husband. I will have a hard time with this I know, but I think it'll be rewarding for me and hopefully you too!