April 17, 2010

I woke up at 4:30 this morning in dire need of a bathroom break and chocolate milk. Totally normal, right? Upon not being able to return to sleep/stop drinking chocolate milk, my mind somehow started psychoanalyzing my husband. Also totally normal, right? The way I was able to understand him at 5 AM made me love and respect him more than ever before. Warning: The following are assumptions based off my perception of Zach. I haven't actually run any of this by him before publishing on the internet. Don't all great love stories start with unauthorized publications about the other? Or was that just 27 Dresses?
I was thinking about how different we are in how we manage stress. I am a warm bath and chocolate relaxation kind of girl, he is a tear out tree stumps and manly things kind of guy. I often wonder what in the world can be relaxing about manual labor and reorganizing the garage for the tenth time in a week. I realized this morning that some of the greatest stress Zach faces are in regard to school and work. In both circumstances (as with most things in life), he often has to answer to a higher authority. Sometimes the judgment of these higher authorities is not in agreement with Zach's judgment, something he finds frustrating and powerless over. When he comes home, he's put into a setting in which he is given authority. Sometimes that situation is something as seemingly trivial as the length of our grass or the arrangement of the garage. To Zach, though, he has control over making some element of our home life perfect for our family to enjoy. Ultimately, his yard work and cleanliness equal out to his desire to make things perfect for us. For me. How can I not be flattered by that? How can I not respect that?
This may seem pretty irrelevant to movements in faith, and maybe it is. I'm just excited to develop a further appreciation of the way God designed my husband to provide for me. We don't have to speak the same language to understand what the other conveys.

PS Did read the Bible yesterday. Read about the mission work of Paul and Barnabas in Acts. I didn't feel a great revelation from what I read, and that's okay. If I am submitting to what God has asked of me, I am still doing His will. How can He or I be ashamed of that?