I Choose You: Understanding

We did it! We reached the end of our mini-series! (I will do a wrap-up tomorrow, but today is the last letter in the acrostic.)

I choose you ends with a U, and in our acrostic, that stands for understanding.

Want to know a secret?

There is no such thing as a perfect marriage.

Not even the marriage you hold in highest esteem as the marriage you want to emulate right now or someday. Not even our marriage - I figure I should be very clear about that since you've been looking at so many parts of it over the last few days! 

You want to know why no perfect marriage exists?

You aren't perfect.

Your spouse isn't perfect.

Life certainly isn't perfect, is it?

In the course of your daily life, you're going to make mistakes. You are going to say and do things without thinking and immediately wish for a do-over. You are even going to say and do things intentionally and regret them later. 

When (not if, but when) those moments come, you can choose to be bitter about it, or you can choose to understand that you are two imperfect people living in an imperfect marriage in an imperfect world. You can choose to offer understanding, forgiveness, and love.

Here's the truth of it: I have disappointed Ryan in our almost five-and-a-half years of marriage. I'm not proud of it, but it's true. And yes, there have even been moments when he has disappointed me. But I understand that at the core of his heart, my husband loves me with everything he is, and he wants to serve me well and love me completely. That is his heart's desire, and I never question that. And he knows and believes the same to be true about me toward him.

That's how we get through the challenging moments. It's true that most of the time, things are smooth in our household. We don't fight (in the true sense of the word fight) and we don't even argue or disagree very often. I know that's not the case in every home, but that's the norm around here. But there are difficult moments for all the reasons I've stated above. And when those moments hit, we choose to fall back on what we know to be true: we love each other, we're in this marriage for life, and there is nothing at all about either of us that actually wants to hurt or disappoint the other. 

Because of that, we say choose to understand your imperfections. Choose to understand the truth of who you both are at the core. Choose to offer the benefit of the doubt. Choose to repent (to each other and to God) when you fall short of your best behavior, and choose to offer forgiveness. 

** We hope that you have found something helpful in this mini-series we've done over the last couple of weeks. We don't claim to be marriage experts. We just claim to have stumbled upon some practices that have helped us enjoy our life and marriage, and we want to share our thoughts with you. **

If you missed any of the earlier posts, you can catch them all here!

I Choose You: Introduction

I Choose You: Intentional

I Choose You: Chronicles

I Choose You: Help

I Choose You: Optimism

I Choose You: Openness

I Choose You: Sacred

I Choose You: Exciting

I Choose You: Yoked

I Choose You: Only

I Choose You: Understanding

I Choose You - Works For You

       

The Shafferland Shuffle

Spring has sprung! We are excited to finally enjoy some warmer temps. And we are excited for a couple of fun (Busy! But fun!) weeks coming up! Here's what we were up to this week!

* Last Sunday, we went to a birthday party for my best friend's Lynnette's grandma. She turned ninety! While we were there, we got to hang out with my friend Faith and catch up with her, so that was fun! We came home and got busy cooking dinner, because after the party ended, Mark and Lynnette and their two dogs came over to hang out with us and spend the night! We actually had nice weather and got to take a walk through the neighborhood! It was a fun day of friendship.

* Ryan decided to take his birthday off work this year, so his co-workers celebrated him on Monday instead. Treats for days! We were in the middle of lunch when he got the notification that gas was going up, so we jumped in the car that very minute (I didn't even have shoes on and wasn't about to let go of my coffee) and hurried to beat the gas hike. Monday was also the day my biggest plan for Ryan's birthday fell apart completely, as did I. He felt so bad that he surprised me with beautiful flowers, which I'm still enjoying!

* Ryan turned 39 on Tuesday!! Even though the day was not at ALL what we planned, it still turned out to be a fun day, and we enjoyed getting to spend time together. We went to Indianapolis, ate at Giordano's pizza, and had fun walking around, enjoying a coffee date, and of course - opening presents! I'll give you the full recap soon! :)

* Apparently a day of celebration means the next day you have to be a responsible adult, because on Wednesday I had to go back to the podiatrist. I was the youngest person in there by about 40 years. LOL! (And I actually fell asleep in the treatment room waiting on him!) I did a 5K of hills on the treadmill that night, and look what we found in our yard! BLOSSOMS!!!!!!!

* Thursday was such a beautiful day, though I confess I wasn't sure about being stuck behind this precariously packed tractor going ten miles an hour! Ryan got a post-birthday cupcake that night, and we both thought it was pretty appropriate that it featured Goofy! And he was most excited that his new mower-blade-sharpening tools arrived. He holed up in the garage sharpening and watching the NFL draft pick. He said it was a great night!

* We had to borrow Ryan's mom's air fryer to cook some spring rolls Ryan had gotten for his birthday, and he was so excited to try out that new toy. Pretty much guessing we'll be putting that on our wish list! :) Phoebe spent a few hours with us that day, and that evening, we got together with one of our small group couples. We went to dinner and had a great time!

* Yesterday we had Phoebe again, so she and I spent most of the day at home working on projects and going for walks! Ryan worked and had just enough time after work to mow the yard before he needed to go help set up for his sister's baby shower. Busy day in Shafferland!)

The Saturday Six

One.

Someone asked me in the comments this week how my capsule wardrobe is going. I haven't talked about it for a long time! It's still going strong. I've increased it slightly mostly because of speaking engagements. I find that with the work I do, I have two polar opposite needs in wardrobe. When I'm home, I need really casual wear, but when I'm speaking, I need to look nice. So I've tried to serve both needs without going overboard! Last year, as part of my seasonal capsule, I bought my first pair of white jeans, and I love them! Well, almost! I wish they had a more tapered leg. I'm on the hunt for that. But I love the option of white pants! And this week, Audrey at Putting me Together did a whole post on white jeans! Here it is, if you need some inspiration!

Two.

Isn't this the cutest thing you've ever seen in your whole life? A personal library check-out kit! Swoon, swoon, swoon! My inner paper nerd is so happy. 

Three.

Ryan and I visited a coffee shop on his birthday (more on that adventure coming soon!) and they had some really cool Instagram gallery walls. I've heard of them before and always imagined them to look a bit cluttered. But I loved the way this looked. And although this is slightly different in style, here's a post about how to create such a wall, including where to buy frames, print pictures, and measure for even display!

Four.

This Mother's Day gift story...ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. My heart!! This son has just made all future gifts he will ever give his mother pale in comparison to this one. 

Five.

One of my jobs at the school where I volunteer is to put out preschool lunches. (The kids bring their own lunches from home, but I pull everything out of the boxes, put straws in the juice boxes, open the packaging, etc. I've noticed that the little protein boxes/snack packs are pretty popular. (Perfect size for a preschooler!) They're just as good for grown-ups, but they're pricey at the store. Here's a link to an idea for how to make a handful of them for yourself, so you can just grab and go!

Six.

Source

I've been in serious creative overload lately. TONS of writing (for personal projects and for speaking), TONS of scrapbooking, TONS of ideas sailing through my head at about 150 miles an hour. Often, such creativity leaves me happy but sapped at the end of the day. But lately, I seem to be in creative abundance mode. Rather than needing a nap, I'm hungry to refuel my creativity.

Fiction to the rescue!

As you know, in the last couple of years I discovered Irene Hannon, and I've fallen completely in love with her writing. All of it. The romance and suspense alike. And the bonus of finding an author many years after she started writing is having a serious backlog of books to read while awaiting new releases!

A while ago, my friend Shari bequeathed to me just such an Irene Hannon book. It was called The Best Gift and was a quick and delightful read about a young lady who inherited a bookstore from her late aunt. When I blogged about the book, I lamented that there were two more books in this series, and I didn't have them. Shari told me not to worry; she had unearthed the second book and it would soon come my way. And it has!

The idea of this series is that Aunt Jo had three nieces, and she left a unique inheritance to each of them. Each offering also came with a stipulation. She left a job for each of them to do for six months. If they did not finish the six month request, they forfeited the monetary inheritance. The Best Gift chronicled one of the sisters and her adventures in breathing new life into the floundering bookstore. The story I just read, Gift From the Heart, followed the second sister, Clare, in her assignment.

A widow who still silently grieves the loss of her husband and son, Clare is living a paycheck-to-paycheck life. No one knows about her tight finances, including her late aunt. But her assignment from her aunt's will is to move from Kansas City to North Carolina for six months, where she is to assume the task of working as a nanny for Dr. Adam Wright's eleven-year-old daughter, Nicole.

For free.

Clare has never heard of Dr. Adam Wright and isn't sure he will take kindly to a complete stranger calling him to propose caring for his child, but she needs to fulfill the stipulations of the will.

Although he's wary at first, Dr. Wright researches her story, finds her legitimate, and agrees to accepting her help. After all, he's completely lost in understanding tweenage girls. A woman's input might be welcome!

Nicole has a pretty serious chip on her shoulder where her dad is concerned, but something about Clare intrigues her, and the girl is willing to give a new nanny a chance. And something about Hope Creek, North Carolina seems to ease the grief in Clare's heart.

This story was a quick read for me (finished it in one night flat) but I loved it! It filled my creativity tank in all the best ways. If you're looking for a lighthearted, hope-filled read, Gift from the Heart is for you. Thanks, Shari, for sending it my way!

I Choose You: Only

We are almost done! Can you believe it? Also - can you believe that in a ten letter phrase, there are three o's? We've made it to the last one today, and in our acrostic, this O stands for only.

Years ago, when I was very new in my job, I worked with a guy who left quite an impression on me, and not in the way anyone should want to leave an impression. He was older than I (though I'm a terrible judge of age and I'm fairly certain now that he wasn't nearly as old as I thought he was), and he tended to treat women with a bit of disdain. It didn't particularly bother me that he didn't treat me well, but it made me furious to hear how he talked about his wife.

Looking back on some of the things he said, I realize he was probably all talk. (I'm pretty sure he overcompensated for his own lack of self-esteem by being a big talker.) But whether or not that's true, he certainly gave the impression that he wasn't warm and fuzzy to his wife. In fact, he flat out told me one day that he didn't often tell her he loved her. He'd told her that the day he married her, he said, so she should know it.

WHAT?!

Again - perhaps it was all talk, but what a terrible thing to say to an impressionable young lady hoping for great things in love and marriage!

Suffice it to say, we do not run Shafferland that way.

In fact, we tell each other we love each other about 1500 times a day. It's one of the many ways we are purposeful in saying you are the only one for me.

We've been married almost 65 months now, you know, and people still tell us all the time that it seems like we're stuck in the honeymoon phase. Best. News. Ever. If they're still telling us that after 25 years of marriage, I'll be thrilled!

A few weeks ago, when we were at church one Sunday, a gentleman we didn't know came up to us and introduced himself. He explained he'd been the photographer at the wedding of a couple from our small group, and as soon as he said that, we realized why he looked familiar! He told us he wanted to pay us a compliment, and of course, we were listening! :)

He asked how long we'd been married, and when we told him, he said, "Well, I watched you two at the wedding, and I could tell by the way you looked at each other, you truly love each other. I don't often see that kind of look from people who have been married a while, and I just wanted to tell you you're doing a good job!"

Day. Made.

(Here are two pictures he took of us at that wedding.)

We figure if someone who photographs weddings took notice of our love for each other, we must be accomplishing at least one of our goals! And it brought joy to us, because we really want our marriage to be an example to others of how great marriage can be!

Because both of us brought heart-hurts into our marriage, we make a point to often say to the other, "You at the only one I want...for always." This has been a huge source of healing for me, particularly, because in all earlier seasons of my life, I'd been a pretty jealous person in my relationships. I didn't like it when other women showed attention to the guys I dated, because that made me worry. (Sometimes that worry was warranted!) Through a combination of God's grace and Ryan's intentional words, that's not a worry I've ever had in our relationship. Not for even half a second.

Say. The. Words.

They are important. They're even important past the wedding day. They're especially important past the wedding day. It is easy to assume your spouse knows you choose them and they're the only one for you, but say it anyway. This is a love-gift of words that can go a long way in keeping love alive and well long after the wedding at!



If you've missed the other posts in this series and want to catch them, here's the list!

I Choose You: Introduction
I Choose You: Intentional
I Choose You: Chronicles
I Choose You: Help
I Choose You: Optimism
I Choose You: Openness
I Choose You: Sacred
I Choose You: Exciting
I Choose You: Yoked
I Choose You: Only
I Choose You: Understanding
I Choose You - Works For You

I Choose You: Yoked

We made it to the last word! YAY!!! (Yay isn't the last word...it's actually you!)

The Y in You stands for yoked.

In the Bible, specifically in Matthew 11:29, Jesus says, "Take my yoke upon you and learn from me." Yokes aren't a big thing in our world like they were back in those days, so maybe you don't even really know what a yoke is or what this verse means! Well back in the day, when oxen did farm work, a team would be yoked together by an apparatus worn across their necks/upper backs. It was intended to keep them in sync and help evenly distribute the weight of the work as they labored on the land.

The yoke analogy is used again in the Bible in 2 Corinthians 6:14, where Paul warns against being "yoked together" with unbelievers. So we thought we'd explore the word yoked in our acrostic!

When you get married, you are yoked together with the person you marry. You're yoked together in all of life. It's not a bad thing! It's not like being shackled together. It's embracing the chance to take on the work of life together and learning how to approach each facet of life in sync, sharing together the tasks in front of you.

We've heard a lot of people say that marriage is hard. We heard that before we got married, and we still hear it all the time. And we know that is probably very true in many instances. We want to say that for us (and speaking only for ourselves, and not as representation of the human race) that has not been the case.

Now hear me:

Life has been hard at time. Oh my goodness. Life has been really hard sometimes. Some of the circumstances we've walked through have nearly flattened us, and we know that we haven't experienced even a hint of what some of the rest of you have. But my point is that we've learned to differentiate between life being hard and marriage being hard. In the process, we've figured out a way to wear this yoke of marriage so it's not cumbersome. We've learned to work together as a team to handle the difficulties of life without straining our marriage to a breaking point.

(The other day I saw a quote on Pinterest that said something like this: "Did you have a bad day, or did you have a bad five minutes that you milked all day?" It reminded me of this hard life/hard marriage analogy. Sometimes maybe you really do have a bad day! Goodness knows I have them! But sometimes you really only have a bad moment that you wallow in for the rest of the day. And sometimes marriage IS hard for people. I do know that. But sometimes people don't really have a hard marriage as much as they're having a hard season of life that they're mistaking for a hard marriage.)

Before Ryan and I were married, Lynne (my boss if you don't know that) used to tell me that my days wouldn't seem so hard after I got married and could go home to Ryan without saying goodbye at night. She promised me there was something extraordinary about getting to fall asleep in his arms and then waking up to him a few hours later that would take away a bit of the sting of whatever hard thing life had thrown at me.

For me - for us - this has been true. Teaming up to tackle the hard - and even just frustrating - parts of life has made them far more interesting and bearable than doing it alone.

* Remember when the sale of Ryan's house fell through a year after we thought it was a sure thing? That was a hard season. But we worked together to start over on cleaning and repairing the house so we could put it back on the market.

* Remember when we found a new buyer and the time between the day he signed the offer and the day he was permitted to close totaled 141 days? That was a scary season. But we joined up in prayer and faith that God had a plan, and eventually we signed off on that house forever!

* Remember when we were driving to our wedding and had been in the car for 21 hours and THEN found a three hour traffic jam? We were just ten minutes from our destination, exhausted, hungry, and feeling sick. Not life threatening, but maddening! Even so, it was much easier to pass the time together.

* Remember when we made the decision for me to quit my radio job and go to a single income household? That was so frightening! It's hard to walk away from your dream job and it's hard to know if a live-on-faith life will work out! But we joined hands and jumped!

* Remember when we bought our new house and needed our old house to sell immediately? The house that had been on the market for five years? Scary stuff! But we felt led to move forward and trusted God wouldn't let us fail!

* Remember when Ryan was sick and we could not get the doctors to test for the one thing (gallbladder) we were positive was faulty? So many days and so many costly, unnecessary tests later, someone finally listened and we moved forward with surgery to make him well.

In all those situations - and many more! - we weren't always the best versions of our individual selves. Worry, fear, and uncertainty threatened us! But we committed to working as a team and supporting each other through the hard of life. We chose each other and chose to show love by choosing to show up to carry our half of the yoke.

We also want to pause to mention the importance of being yoked together in the Lord. Years ago, I believed that the verse that said not to be yoked together with unbelievers meant as long as I found a man who said he was a Christian, it was a perfect match. I've since learned that it's important to be yoked together with someone who pursues the Lord like you do. I sometimes went out with guys who were Christians, yes, but they weren't pursuing a growing faith in Christ. Ryan and I follow hard at similar paces, and that helps us be yoked equally; one of us isn't dragging the other.

We know sometimes it can be awkward to begin working together as a team in your faith, if you're not used to doing it. It can be strange to pray together out loud, share your thoughts in Bible study together, or have conversations about God.

But you know what? I'm sure the first time oxen wore a yoke, it was awkward, uncomfortable, and perhaps a bit unnatural for them too! But they persevered and learned to find their rhythm, and we believe you can too!

Ryan and I have found some of the sweetest moments of our whole relationship in praying together, studying Scripture together, and in talking about what we've learned in our devotions. This year we're reading the Bible through together. Every day we read the passages on our own and then come together to talk about what we've learned. We love all the things we're learning from our study and discussion!

I know I've thrown a lot at you here, but I just want to encourage you to learn to wear your yoke well. (The yoke of life and the yoke of faith.) If you are married and it hasn't gone well, purpose to make today a fresh start together. Work through the awkwardness and learn to find your yoked rhythm. And learn to find the true difference between a hard season and a hard marriage.

If you're not married yet, I really encourage you to look for someone who will show up to carry the yoke! It can make all the difference in the joy of your marriage!

The bottom line is this: choose to show love to each other by choosing to show up to carry your part of the yoke and work in rhythm!



If you missed the previous days in this series or want to keep reading more, here you go!

I Choose You: Introduction
I Choose You: Intentional
I Choose You: Chronicles
I Choose You: Help
I Choose You: Optimism
I Choose You: Openness
I Choose You: Sacred
I Choose You: Exciting
I Choose You: Yoked
I Choose You: Only
I Choose You: Understanding
I Choose You - Works For You

I Choose You: Exciting

We are wrapping up the word CHOOSE today in our I CHOOSE YOU marriage series! (If you've missed the other posts the last few days, you can catch them in the links at the bottom.)

This will be a fun one to talk about! In our acrostic, E stands for exciting!

On the very first day of this series, we talked about how we work hard to be intentional in our relationship, but we do want to make a point to say there's a difference between being intentional and being exciting.

From the very beginning of our marriage, we declared it a priority to have a weekly date night. Even though we don't have kids and are "always together," we wanted to be purposeful about those date nights! But after a while, we began to notice that they started to look remarkably the same.

Lowe's:

Coffee:

Grocery store:

Don't misunderstand: we appreciate and cherish the time we spend together, no matter what we're doing, but it's fun and exciting to do new things. So as some of you might remember, at the end of 2016, I sat down and made a list of date ideas - one for each letter of the alphabet - for us to try in 2017. That was such a fun experiment! (If you missed that and want to read about them, the whole list is here.)

Though we have done fun dates beyond this list, this particular exercise did bring some excitement into our dating life!

Like when Ryan surprised me with tickets to a Gaither Vocal Band concert:

Or when we tried an escape room!

Or when we toured the sunflower oil farm:

Or when we had the ritzy dinner at the rooftop restaurant:

Or when we took a Christmas tour of the Biltmore!

Fun dates! Some we'll probably never do again - not because we didn't like them, but because we don't have it in our regular budget. Others may be new favorites we'll do many times over! But the point was, each one added excitement to our life!

Our county tours add the same kind of excitement to our lives!

Like when we followed the whole Garfield trail:

Or hiked in Mounds State Park:

Or toured the South Bend Chocolate Company:

Or conquered the Three Dune Challenge:

So many fun dates we've planned with the intent of making life together fun.

We know that the things we find exciting might not thrill others. That's okay! But we do encourage you to find your own excitement and make it happen. Choose to show love by choosing to make room for something exciting. Be purposeful about being exciting!

And don't think that exciting has to mean pricey. Some of our adventures have required us to plan and save a little bit, but several have been free or pretty close to it! Make memories you can look back upon with fondness! :)

(If you're single, it's not too early to start planning! I had a whole list of ideas on reserve when I met Ryan!)


To read the rest of the posts in this series, you can catch them here:

I Choose You: Introduction
I Choose You: Intentional
I Choose You: Chronicles
I Choose You: Help
I Choose You: Optimism
I Choose You: Openness
I Choose You: Sacred
I Choose You: Exciting

I Choose You: Yoked

I Choose You: Only

I Choose You: Understanding
I Choose You - Works For You

I Choose You: Sacred

Before I launch into the post this morning. I must pause to wish my handsome and wonderful husband a happy birthday! I thought about pausing the whole I CHOOSE YOU series to devote a post to his birthday, but I wanted to wrap this one up this week, so I'll do a short version happy birthday now, and a longer version happy birthday later. Ryan, I love you and am so excited to celebrate you today! You are my joy!

Secondly, it is Tuesday, of course, which means it's PODCAST TUESDAY!!!!!!

Listen here!

And now, to our regularly scheduled programming! 

We've been looking at the phrase I CHOOSE YOU and how Ryan and I choose to apply that to our marriage, and today we are ready for letter S, which in our world means sacred.

That is sacred and not scared. Big difference. ;)

This is a big one for us. Huge! I'm looking forward to telling you what it means to us and why it's so pivotal.

You've heard it said, I'm sure - and maybe you've even said it yourself! - Is nothing sacred anymore? Sadly, it seems most things aren't, but your marriage doesn't have to be among them. Ryan and I believe a big part of fostering a healthy marriage involves choosing each other by choosing to keep your relationship sacred.

Now, when you see those words, the first thing that probably comes to your mind is keeping your relationship sacred by choosing to put a hedge of protection around it that keeps out the temptation of an affair. We do mean that (obviously!) but we also mean something more. We think it's important to keep sacred some of the details of your relationship together. 

If you've been reading here for a while, you know that we had a pretty short pre-marriage relationship. We'd known of each other for most of our lives, and we had been friends for a few years, but our dating season was really short, and so was our engagement! (You can read more of our story here if you don't know it and want to see the details!) 

Let me tell you this! When you pull a stunt like we did, a whole lot of people have a whole lot of opinions about how you should and should not be managing your relationship and decisions. And they're very open with them! 

I take things like that pretty personally, so the shower of unsolicited advice made me sweat. And worse, it made me question myself. Here's the bottom line: we were confident in our decisions. We had sought the Lord in a time of set-apart prayer before we ever began our relationship, and we continued our deep prayer-seeking throughout those early stages. We also sought counsel from friends and family before moving forward. We didn't rush in blindly and without consideration. But whether or not people knew that, they still had opinions they shared freely. (It was even a bit much for Ryan, and he can normally handle that sort of thing pretty well.)

We decided we would just keep a big chunk of our relationship sacred. We weren't trying to be dishonest or secretive from others, but these moments were so precious to us that we just wanted them to be ours alone. I chronicled them in our journals and scrapbooks, but we were protective of those moments in bigger audiences. 

I didn't blog everything. I didn't put everything on Facebook. And since I was working in radio back then, I also kept some of it from the airwaves. Those things belonged to us, and we unapologetically protected them. 

Honestly, I think one of the reasons we were able to so quickly form the deep bond we have was because of this choice we made to keep so much sacred and precious to us!

There's a delicate balance between being transparent about your relationship in ways that encourage others and protecting it as sacred. You know, if you read here often, that we are pretty open about our lives. We want to encourage other couples, and if showing how we live will do that, we're happy to show how we live. But we also want to protect our hearts, so we don't tell every single thing - good or bad. Some things are ours for safekeeping. And that's okay too!

Choose to honor one another, not by having secrets from each other, but by being willing to keep parts of your life in a secret place. This is true if you're married or single. Our social media world seems to demand that we tell all things at all times, and it's just not necessary. Your heart matters, and it's okay to know your sharing boundaries. It's actually imperative that you know your sharing boundaries.

The world is filled with loud opinions. Sometimes the hardest ones come from family and close friends. It's okay to even protect some things from them! (I know, no one wants to hear that. But it's true!) This is your marriage: not the world's marriage. Nor is it your family's marriage or your friends' marriage. Choose your marriage and choose each other by keeping your relationship sacred.

Ryan, thank you for helping me keep our relationship sacred. I love you! Happy birthday again! 

If you've missed some of the posts in this series - or you want to keep reading, you can catch them here:

I Choose You: Introduction
I Choose You: Intentional
I Choose You: Chronicles
I Choose You: Help
I Choose You: Optimism
I Choose You: Openness
I Choose You: Sacred

I Choose You: Exciting
I Choose You: Yoked
I Choose You: Only
I Choose You: Understanding
I Choose You - Works For You

I Choose You: Openness

I should tell you at the beginning of today's post that we are not exempt from taking our own advice. My day on Friday sort of tanked, and by the end, I'd cried twice. (Ironic, isn't it, when my post for that day was about optimism?) Ryan was so kind and offered me every bit of optimism he had, and the day definitely ended on a much better note. I told him I should have figured that writing about it would have been a sign for field practice!

We're marching right along here in our blog series on marriage ideas, and we're basing it all on the phrase I CHOOSE YOU. (The previous post links are at the end if you've missed any.) Today's word, based on the second O in choose is OPENNESS.

Here in Shafferland, we are in the middle of birthday season. Ryan's birthday is tomorrow, actually, and mine is coming up in twenty-one days. (Eeek!) We're both attempting to pull off ordering gifts without the other knowing, which means we've resorted to enlisting the help of the same poor friend, who has been stuck purchasing our gifts for us. She texts us about the progress, and we've banned each other from reading any messages from her or pilfering through phone photos or texts in general now, for fear the other will stumble upon news of a birthday surprise. 

We're also not allowed to open any packages not specifically addressed to us. Birthday secrets are such fun!

We run into this same thing again around the first of December, when we bring in the anniversary and Christmas presents. And you know what? We hate it. I mean we love surprising each other, but secrecy is not really fun for us. We're not used to don't look! rules, because we have chosen to live our days openly about the happenings of our lives. 

For us, it's not about the information we're sharing (or allowing the other to have free access to) as much as it's about the trust we place on each other to be open without fear of being judged or looked down upon. 

This is one of my favorite things about belonging to Ryan - and it's been one of my favorite things since the very beginning. I can tell him anything, and I know it's okay. Even if it's really really stupid. Even if it's really unlikely to ever happen. Even if it's really embarrassing. And he has the same freedom to tell me anything. 

Ryan actually loves it when I'm open with him about my daily life, dreams, struggles, fears, excitement about something new, or even what I'm wrestling with in prayer. He loves knowing that often he's the only one who gets to hear some of those things, because I protect them (okay, I protect myself) from sharing with anyone else. When he knows he gets to hear the classified stuff, he feels loved. And at the bottom line, isn't that what we all want? To feel chosen and loved? 

When we share this series as an out-loud talk at an event, openness is Ryan's topic to share, and he has some really important advice for the guys, so we'll share it here with you as well. Ryan tells the men in the crowd that he knows being open can be a bit of a struggle. (And let's be honest: while it may come more easily to women as a whole, there are some girls who don't like it all that much either!)

Ryan this to the men: We tend to keep things bottled up, not speaking about the very things our wives long to hear from us. I know feelings might not be our favorite topic, but they're needed to grow together with your wife and to help her feel cherished and loved. You need to let your guard down to the one you love, because you're supposed to be one with her! If there's anyone you can depend on and trust, I would hope it would be your wife! You chose to spend your life with her, and one thing that will make that life together beautiful is being open and honest in all you do. 

Like many people, Ryan and I came together into our marriage bringing with us the hurts of previous relationships. Because of those hurts and our desire to not repeat them, we approached our relationship and then marriage with openness, honesty, and prayer, not hiding anything!

Because we chose to do that, we were able to begin our relationship with a solid foundation that has only grown from there. This priority has strengthened our relationship and marriage. Our openness allows us to hold each other accountable as well as feel safe within the walls of our home. (As long as we don't send a birthday text to the wrong person!)

We encourage you to show honor to your marriage by choosing to be open, even when it's hard or embarrassing. Show honor to your marriage by being trustworthy and kind when you are being vulnerable with each other. 

We also encourage those of you who are single to make this a priority from the start when you do enter a relationship. It's much easier to establish it at the beginning than to try to change it later. Even if you've never lived another relationship this way, we urge you to try it! 

If you have missed the other posts in this series, you can catch up here!

I Choose You: Introduction
I Choose You: Intentional
I Choose You: Chronicles
I Choose You: Help
I Choose You: Optimism
I Choose You: Openness
I Choose You: Sacred
I Choose You: Exciting
I Choose You: Yoked
I Choose You: Only
I Choose You: Understanding
I Choose You - Works For You