Marriage During Tough Times

Have you ever lost an expensive pair of earrings and spent hours searching for them? I’m guessing you didn’t give up until you found them, right? Well, think about this: How much more important is your marriage? Earrings are things —things that can be replaced. But your marriage? Your husband? Well, that’s another story.

We’re all going through tough times right now, but when it comes to your marriage, you should be willing to do whatever it takes to produce God’s kind of marriage relationship. You should commit to following His rules and guidelines, to living out His will for you and your spouse. God has placed you in your marriage and expects you to do your part. That’s His will for you . And, to be sure, God has His guidelines for your husband too. But He only asks you to focus on and take care of your role.

So we wonder: How do wives do this? How can I, as a wife, do this?

I know a L-O-T about hard times and life changes. Jim and I married in college and completed our educations without financial support from our parents. It’s not that they didn’t want to help out—they simply didn’t have the money to help us.

When I met Jim on campus, we both had part-time jobs that we kept until graduation. And since then, we have known only a very few years when we didn’t both work in some way to take care of our daughters and living expenses. I worked away from home until we had children. Then I worked at home doing transcription, bookkeeping, and other office-type work.

Believe me, we saw our lives turned upside down almost every other year as Jim was transferred every 18 months for his job. He was even activated into military service during Operation Desert Storm and the Bosnian crisis.

Tough Times

But I learned the most about supporting my husband’s job during ten very lean years. That decade began when Jim resigned from his job as a pharmaceutical salesman to enter seminary to prepare for the ministry. As you can imagine, those were some tough years. And our daughters remember those years too. One day my Katherine, a newlywed at that time, called and asked, “Mom, do you have any of those recipes you used to fix when we were in hard times?”

I think a lot about those challenging years. Well, one morning I was wondering how I made it through those trying times.

Making It Through

Actually, it was a trying decade! So I looked through my prayer notebook, located those years, and read through my prayer lists. And there I discovered my prayer requests for my Jim, who had four—yes, four—part-time jobs so I could stay at home with our two preschoolers.

Instead of being bitter and dwelling on the plenty we had enjoyed in the past, we adjusted. Jim took on extra work, and I did everything I could do to keep spending to a minimum.

And...I prayed. I prayed like crazy. I felt like the man who shared the following experience, which I believe is the way God wants us to live:

“In a single day I have prayed as many as a hundred times, and in the night almost as often.”

Friend, you can make it through any tough times you and your husband are in through God’s strength. Start now to pray for it!

RESPOND:

Dear Lord, I am coming to You with the needs of our marriage. I ask that You shower my husband and I with Your grace and favor as I pray for, support and love my husband! Grant us wisdom and strength during these tough times. Amen.

RENEWING RESOURCES:

REFLECT:

In what ways do you support your husband during tough times?

REMEMBER:

The goal is to work together as a team, today and every day throughout life and its seasons.