breath, jo breath!!!!
my sense of being a round peg trying to find somewhere to fit in a board full of extremely square holes has increased in the last few days.
even while i'm conscientiously taking all my herbs lol.
i know i seem to live hopelessly in the shades of grey, but honestly! what is the deal with all these false two option choices society keeps offering?
firstly there is the 'potter versus god' thing. for goodness sake. (i'll take both thanks)
then the supernanny inspired ' you have to choose between being punitive or permissive' thing. (ummm neither thanks)
the how do i love my husband (as in how do i function on a daily basis) when he's being a jerk thing. (i don't think i'm a door mat or a harradin. so what do i do?)
it doesn't help that i am having some true crises (crisises??) of faith and have no one to ask about them as all the people i know are locked onto whatever 'side' they perceive of many of the issues. i want to hear from people who actually look at the information and consider things with a view to finding truth and not just defending their position.
aaaaggghhhh.....
steam over... for now.
even while i'm conscientiously taking all my herbs lol.
i know i seem to live hopelessly in the shades of grey, but honestly! what is the deal with all these false two option choices society keeps offering?
firstly there is the 'potter versus god' thing. for goodness sake. (i'll take both thanks)
then the supernanny inspired ' you have to choose between being punitive or permissive' thing. (ummm neither thanks)
the how do i love my husband (as in how do i function on a daily basis) when he's being a jerk thing. (i don't think i'm a door mat or a harradin. so what do i do?)
it doesn't help that i am having some true crises (crisises??) of faith and have no one to ask about them as all the people i know are locked onto whatever 'side' they perceive of many of the issues. i want to hear from people who actually look at the information and consider things with a view to finding truth and not just defending their position.
aaaaggghhhh.....
steam over... for now.
posted by jkr2 | 9:50 am
15 Comments:
Me, Jo, pick me!
Oh I could've written that entry myself. The people around me are the same... you either believe *this* or you believe *that*. One is right and one is wrong. There's no medium ground or blending of ideas or exploring other options. Drives me up the wall!
Email me if you like and we can rant about our narrrow-minded friends and our crises (isesises...!) of faith together!
xo Sumara.
hey sumara. thanks for that.
do i have your email? i have deleted most of my bubbaj babe stuff i'm afraid.....
Jo, I feel similarily to you sometimes too! Why can't the world just chill out a second hey?
not so alone afterall huh........
hugs
I'll email you Jo. :-)
Even when we were dating, I realized that I could really be mad/angry at my husband -- but I still loved him. And it really confused me. And to this day (two years in) there are times when I don't know what to do. Because completely leaving him alone I've tried, isn't the right thing. But nagging isn't either. So there' a middle ground and the only way I can navigate it is total dependence on Christ -- and that is both scary and not easy. Because how am I sure it is Christ and not my own head telling me these things? I am absolutely positive I've made mistakes. Luckily my husband knows I love him and forgivs me even so.
As for the rest. Some things are definitely right, others are definitely wrong. (And I happen to prefer the blacks and whites) But there aren't near as many definites as I might wish there were! There's an awful lot more of (I think) God telling me things he doesn't want me doing -- and then me, not realizing this was God speaking to me, not God speaking to the world, going out into the world and trying to tell everyone else they have to live by the same rules I do.
hi mbr.
nice to hear from you.
the marriage one is still the trickiest for me.
we've been together a LOOOONG time (coming up to 20 years if you count from when we met and started going out together) and it has NEVER been easy.
but it has been rewarding. (sometimes hehehe)
we've tried separating (did that for about 5 months at one stage) and it was part of a useful process at the time, but not something to try lightly.
the black and white part that i come up against is that i made promises to him and myself, and made vows to god. so that's the way it is.
within that though, it's every shade of grey.
one of my deepest darkes thoughts is that i know who i think my dh *should* have married. it was the reason the whole harry and ginny thing sent me for a spin. she is even a red head lol.
now what sends me into the abyss about that isn't that i start to contemplate leaving and setting them up (well, i don't do that anymore ;)....) but how do i accomodate that into the reality that we're together for life? do i try and be more like her? do i try and prove to him that i'm enough?
the only thing i can do, and maintain my mental health at the same time, is be as authentic as i can while growing as much as possible in my soul. and use that to be attentive (as in taking notice of him and his journey) and loving as is in me. sometimes that's not a whole lot. but whatever is there he can have you know?
good thing this is all in the comments, so it won't likely be read by anyone at this late stage.
nice to get that out though.....
My pastor likes to say that once you are married, then it is the church's job to support you in the marriage you are in. There is no such thing as "one true love" (And no one else will work) -- but we can have successful marriages with whoever we are with, because God has blessed the union. Before you marry is the time to worry about who you should have married, afterwards it is about making this marriage work.
After all, throughout much of history, marriages were arranged. The feelings of the people involved had little to nothing to do with the match being made -- yet they worked out anyway.
mbr - just wrote you a long reply and it wouldn't post. rats!
will try again later.
cheers,
jo
Tis okay. I've been having blogger problems too.
Feel free to contact me offline if you'd rather. my heart breaks for you, having been married to a fellow for 20 years that you love, yet feel would be better matched to someone other than you. I know I love being reassured my husband does not regret having married me, and if I thought there was someone else... I just can't imagine where you are.
I'm at sarah at eskimo dot com.
kinda glad i lost that post now, mbr. lol. it was a bit of a rant.
i've come across many people with a very flippant attitude to what it's like living the reality of a difficult marriage. the comments you referred to by your pastor put me in mind of someone like that. and i kinda lashed out at that.
however your next comment disarmed that completely. :)
he's a good man, my husband. he really is. so it's difficult to articulate the kind of long slow pain it *can* be.
thing is it's not always. sometimes you just do life and that's fine. sometimes you have fun. sometimes it's good.
but there are really long stretches of time (months, on one occasion it was a couple of years) without a single unsolicited positive word, look or touch.
he doesn't hurt me or drink, or cheat or anything. but sometimes it's dead. and sometimes that can be cruel without meaning to be.
it's not necessary to go into this really, but i wanted to give you some transparency in response to your compassionate message.
on the upside, we laugh a bit and i don't walk around in the depths of despair over it. life's cool.
cheers,
jo
Hi! I've just discovered you as a cloth nappy user. Loved this entry. Life is complicated. And unless you've been in a marriage which is hard, but doesn't look bad to others, but isn't really terrible, but you think you might go crazy... you can't really understand others very well. Hang in there. Pray. God will answer. I felt mental at our 10 years anniversary, but things turned around once he discovered some things about himself that affected the way he related. I think it was only by the grace of Christ that it came to light, but it has changed our relationship, and now, at our 11th anniversary, I can honestly say I'm glad to have been through the hard stuff and come out the other end. In Isaiah, there's a verse my nanna quotes all the time - troubles give you an 'instructed tongue' to encourage others. Be encouraged!
And as for black and white beliefs, don't worry too much, but read how Jesus related to people in the gospels. He's the ultimate in grace and truth. That's what's needed.
hi cecily. nice to meet you.
i had a quick look at your blog. you look very interesting :)
those nappies look good. how do the inserts go? i was a bubba j babe. we sold hemp and bamboo and organic cotton fitted nappies, but also some pockets with hemp inserts.
my youngest is only in a nappy overnight now. who would have thought i'd miss nappies! love the cloth.
your favourite books were a lot of mine too. i've gone a little further on from the boundaries books now and am into gracebased parenting, but still find those ones really useful - there's a great one about having difficult conversations. really owning your own stuff.
so , do your words about living in a difficult marriage come from personal experience?
jo
Thanks!
I think the nappies work well - I guess I have to because I designed them, but I'm always pleased with them whenever I change them! (Let's see - at 6 changes a day, that's a lot of good feelings :)) I've have some good feedback, but also some negative. One comment that comes is that they fit better on babies with chubby legs. Probably true. Both my boys have been beefcakes. But the absorbent stuff I use is really good - soaks it *all* up.
Where can I read about grace-based parenting? I love the boundaries stuff, but have also read recently about positive reinforcement. My immediate thought is from 1 John, where truth and love go hand in hand. Grace is worthless unless there is truth to define what the grace is all about?
Yes, the marriage comments are from personal experience. I'm an over-functioner (co-dependent, super-responsible, supremely attuned to others feelings) married to an under-functioner. It made me physically unwell and depressed for some years - but I didn't understand what was wrong with our relating patterns. By the grace of God, he realised last year that he has passive-aggressive coping strategies and has struggled wtih prayer and counselling to identify it (truth), be supported in it (love) by me and others and then use God's courage and power to change. The first few months of our 'new' relationshp were really hard, but praise God, it has become really great now. We do have a different relationship now, and it's a lot free-er and more honest (and therefore, more loving!)
Now you have my lifestory!
life stories are cool!
i found grace based parenting at
www.gentlechristianmothers.com
one of the posters there is crystal lutton (?spelling) who wrote 'biblical parenting' (again i think - it's a while since i looked at it). if you go to the gentle discipline boards you'll find out more.
it was all about, for me, thinking of how god parents me and seeing the disparity between how that and how i was taught to be a 'christian mother'.
that's a whole new journey i could tell stories about.
anyway, 'thanks for sharing'. any more stuff always interestingly received!
jo
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