twelve years

Yep, this one will be sappy.  Twelve years ago...it seems like such a long time ago, and then again it seems like only yesterday.  July 31, 1999 had to be the hottest day ever to get married!! 

When I look at my former high school students now who are married or getting married, they seem so young to me, but I was the same age or younger.  I was nineteen and Landon was twenty-two.   It didn't feel too young to me at the time, and I have never thought back and said I was too young to get married.  If I had it to do all over, I would do the same thing.

I couldn't have asked for anyone better for me...one who makes me always feel loved and protected,  supportive, makes me laugh, and makes me want to be a better person.  He is truly the love of my life, and these have been amazing twelve years.  I look forward to many more together.

When Logan was born, I received a wonderful book that I really believe changed the way I would parent.  It is called Power of a Praying Parent by Stormie Omartian.  I loved the book so much I immediately bought another one of her books called Power of a Praying Wife.  At the end of each chapter she has prayers typed out for everyone to pray over the particular subject in the chapter.  These aren't my words, but they could have been straight from my heart.  I literally cried when I read these words as a prayer the first time.  I wanted to share because it really changed how I looked at my husband in many ways that weren't his place to fulfil, they were God's.  I continue to pray this prayer that it will bless and strengthen our marriage so nothing would ever tear us apart.  May it be a blessing to someone else who reads this powerful prayer. 

Help me to be a good wife.  I fully realize that I don't have what it takes to be one without Your help.  take my selfishness, impatience, and irritability and turn them to kindness, long-suffering, and the willingness to hear all things.  Take my old emotional habits, mindsets, automatic reactions, rude assumptions, and self-protective stance, and make me patient, kind, good, faithful, gentle, and self-controlled.  Take the hardness of my heart and break down the walls with Your battering ram of revelation.  Give me a new heart and work in me Your love, peace, patience, and joy.  I am not able to rise above who I am at this moment.  Only You can transform me.

Show me where there is sin in my heart, especially with regard to my husband.  I confess many times I've been unloving, critical, angry, resentful, disrespectful, and unforgiving toward him.  Help me to put aside any hurt, anger, or disappointment I feel and forgive him the way You do--totally and completely, no looking back.  Make me a tool of reconciliation and peace, in this marriage.  Enable us to communicate well and rescue us from the threshold of separation where the realities of divorce begin.

Make me my husband's helpmate, companion, champion, friend, and support.  Help me to create a peaceful, restful, safe place for him to come home to.  Teach me how to take care of myself and stay attractive to him.  Grow me into a creative and confident woman who is rich in mind, soul, and spirit.  Make me the kind of woman he can be proud to say is his wife. 

I lay all my expectations at Your cross.  I release my husband from the burden of fulfilling me in areas where I should look to You.  Help me to accept him the way he is and not try to change him.  I realize that some ways he may never change, but at the same time, I release him to change in ways I never thought he could.  I leave any changing that needs to be done in Your hands, fully accepting that neither of us is perfect and never will be.  Only You, Lord, are perfect and I look to You to perfect us. 

Teach me how to pray for my husband and make my prayers a true language of love.  Where love has died, create a new love between us.  Show me what unconditional love really is and how to communicate it in a way he can clearly perceive.  Bring unity between us so that we can be in agreement about everything.  May the God of patience and comfort grant us to be like-minded toward one another, according to Christ Jesus.  Make us a team, not pursuing separate, competitive, or independent lives, but working together, overlooking each other's faults and weaknesses for the greater good of the marriage.  Help us to pursue the things which make for peace and the things by which one may edify another.  May we be "perfectly joined together in the same mind and in the same judgement" (1 Corinthians 1:10).

I pray that our commitment to You and to one another will grow stronger and more passionate every day.  Enable him to be the head of the home as You have made him to be, and show me how to support and respect him as he rises to that place of leadership.  Help me to understand his dreams and see things from his perspective.  Reveal to me what he wants and needs and show me potential problems before they arise.  Breath You life into this marriage. 

Make me a new person, Lord.  Give me a fresh perspective, a positive outlook, and a renewed relationship with the man You've given me.  help me to see him with new eyes, new appreciation, new love, new compassion, and new acceptance.  Give my husband a new wife, and let it be me.

Happy Anniversary Landon!!