Happy Valentine's Day From Our Home to Yours 🌹

Edition #36

Welcome to "Write Your Life Forward"!

Are you here for the first time? Come on in, my Friend! We are a community of friends who aspire to see change, get unstuck, and write our lives forward. We do that by helping you study your life's story in the light of God's love story! Happy Valentine's Day and welcome to our cyber corner!

How to Have the Kind of Valentine That Your Heart Truly Longs For

Back then, I didn’t think I’d ever for one moment be.

Vowed to myself that I’d never, ever: slam those doors, raise my voice, stomp my feet, and walk. away. angry.

Never for one split second ever imagined that I’d ever be SO FUMED.

Or that this beast would show its ugly rear in the compound of my home, in the fold of my skin.

Did they say that broken babies make bent ladies?

I never expected that there’d be nights of driving out into the dark, of circling round and round that beat-up Toyota, of night sobbing just to clear your one muddled-up mind, your one messed-up heart.

In those early years of our marriage? I left him with our babies.

Not once, but twice.

I left him, worried to death, in the darkest of all my darks.

My brother and I — we’d both hidden behind closed doors and trembled through some fights when we were young.

We had clung tight and cried silently as Daddy’s voice hollered through the hall and the plates came crashing down in pairs.

Their fights would grow wild and our voices would grow weak.

And you can be 5, witness all those dysfunctions, and believe that the cause of all those rifts? --- “it must be me”

You can grow up being all that you are, and having all that you have, and never knowing how to process anger healthily, never learning how to fight fair intimately, never grasping how you can talk calmly and disagree kindly and actually grow in and through those fights.

It’s true —anger kills romance when you drag it into the marriage bed.

Doesn’t it always start with something small?

Your spouse says something torpid, and you retort back with something tenebrous.

Then it simmers

Before you know it, something's cookin'.

You lose the key and he loses his cool.

And then -- an eruption.

The wonder of love can get murky through the scrapes of life.

And we can lose the wonder of love when we really want to be in control because fear often masks itself as anger when you feel like you’re out of control.

But this is true:

the way to live life in control is to give the key of control to the One who really can control.

Love endures long…

A great marriage takes a great amount of work, a great depth of nurture and a great level of maturity. There’s no roundabout way about it.

What did my sister say again about the danger of emotional driving?

I tried texting another sister. She’s overseas, but she’ll understand.

He tried ringing. And I brushed it off.

He was in my face, but would he ever understand?

And one thought that rummaged through and through: “We’re not really meant for each other.”

That he’d never get me, that I’d never like him.

And yes, you can grow 12 and receive the hope of a new life, and the start of a brand new beginning, and not deeply realise that the grace that saves you is also the grace that sanctifies you.

And His love that redeems you is exactly the language of health for what repairs you.

You never know the lies that lay dormant deep within you, and the causes of all your confusion, and the avoidance of all your difficult emotions until you’ve got your fist in the air, promising that life will never again have you trembling in fear, that relationships will never again make you powerless, victimised, unprotected.

Till a moment of truth teaches you otherwise and you begin to understand and grasp another kind of love -- God's kind of love --- and it teaches you:

Love is a decision, not an emotion.

Love is a covenant, not a convenience.

Love is a commitment, not a compulsion.

Love is for holiness, not mere happiness.

Real marriages are built not just on hot beds of lust, but on the raw and rough edges of love.

Love keeps no ledger of wrong, it forgets all past; it hopes for all new.

So after driving around for what seemed like an eternity of aimlessness, I felt silly and headed back home.

I found a little note.

It was an opened screen from a heart I had broken in twos.

He wrote:

“I wonder what sort of day she’s really had….and how tiring it can all be for her. The constant questions, “Mummy, where’s my green pencil?”. The weaning, washing, wiping and how the cycle perpetuates…

And then there’s me.

A fairly selfish, analytical, super-conservative, verbose, generally unemphatic husband who seems to have opinions on everything.

Oh and I forgot to mention a bit self-righteous and down-right grumpy at times (when the milk runs out). She must wonder what it’s all about!

Oh Lord, I pray for my dear wife. I know that I need to be a better husband and father… I know that taking spiritual leadership isn’t just about demanding time.

A real man, must really care and must really care enough to seek you for the answers.

I need your love to fill me so that My love can overflow into her…

Help me, Lord, I pray. I am just a very normal, average, and at times below average guy with a desire to… well, be better…”

A smile escaped my face.

Did he say he was verbose? Self-opinionated? analytical?

His raw honesty softened the hardened ground inside me.

Could it be that real love is about getting real down on your knees, and standing real strong on trying times, until the truth about love transforms you to stop looking for the right fit, but to start being the right fit?

Men that fall on their knees in prayers are always men that rise up to lead on in life.

And marriage – this mysterious union of two becoming one, of welding different stones cut out of different quandaries ---it blossoms through deep connection, not just great communication.

Connection is what we long for — not just mere chit chats.

Deep love is about deep connection, deeply connecting even when you feel like disconnecting.

When that bedroom door flung open and he found me with tears at the end of my drippy nose, he straight dropped on his knees like he was proposing, like he was proposing a connection; a reconciliation.

“Where have you been? I’m so so worried about you. And I’m so sorry about judging you.”