Do you care most what God thinks of you, or what your husband thinks of you?

Every Friday I like to run a short inspirational 400 word piece about marriage–with one little thought you can chew on over the weekend. Today I want to talk about reputations.

Sheila’s Marriage Moment: When You Care Too Much About What Your Husband Thinks of You

On Monday morning I took a deep breath, picked up the phone, and geared myself up to talk to the IRS about an ongoing issue. Before I called, I prayed and asked God, “Please, let me not embellish to make myself look good. Let me just be honest.” God’s been convicting me lately that I have a habit of trying to show myself in the best possible light.

I wonder: does this tendency affect our marriages?

I recently heard Canadian hockey legend Paul Henderson say this: “Don’t give a second thought about your reputation, but be ruthless about developing your character.”

So brilliant. What’s important is not what others think of us, but what God thinks of us.

How do we live this out in our marriages?

When we want our husbands to think the best of us, we can stretch the truth. We can make excuses for ourselves. We can concentrate more on winning an argument than on growing intimacy.

When we want our husbands to think of us in a certain way, we can act like a martyr–like we’re the one who is always put upon, and he’s the one who is always wrong. We can rely on pride in our identity as the “longsuffering wife” rather than on humility before God.

Or then there’s the flipside: when we want our husbands to think well of us we may follow them into sin. We may not say “no” to things we know are wrong.

We may become enablers rather than the strong helpers that God made us to be. We may become so scared to rock the boat that we say nothing as our husbands degrade us. We may say nothing as they fall deeper into addictions or into laziness.

But what happens if we are ruthless about developing our character? We’ll become humble before God, which will make us honest before our husbands. We’ll be able to accept blame for things we’ve done, without taking blame for things that he has done. We’ll be able to see clearly to deal with longstanding conflicts. We’ll be able to find the win-win in marriage, rather than only trying to make him lose so that we look good.

Loving our husbands does not mean valuing our reputation in front of them. It means always, always valuing first what God thinks of us. That’s the only way to properly love anyone.

What’s #1 at To Love, Honor and Vacuum?

We almost have all spots filled with #1’s this week!  But I had to shake things up with something new to add to the mix.  This week, a theme we haven’t looked for a while has popped up and it’s an important one: submission vs abuse.  Also check out some ideas on how to spice things up!

#1 NEW Post on the Blog: Top 10 Way To Not Be A Miserable Mama
#1 on the Blog Overall: How To Initiate Sex
#1 from Facebook: Submission Doesn’t Mean Lying Down And Taking It
#5 from Pinterest: Top 10 Ways To Be More Adventurous In Bed

I Need 92 people to get to 50,000 on Facebook

As of right now, I need less than 100 people to bring my Facebook fan base to 100,000. If we’re not connected there yet, could you go like that page? I post great older posts, new stuff I’ve found around the web, questions for posts I’m writing that help give me ideas, and more! I’d love to see  you there.

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Why I’ve Been Feeling Convicted

Sometimes someone says a little pithy thing and it just sticks with you. And then it starts to really make a difference.

I hope that sometimes I say those things for you. That truly is my prayer.

But I just love that saying that I heard from Paul Henderson at that marriage conference: Don’t give a second thought about your reputation, but be ruthless about developing your character.

God really spoke to me through that. How many times have I been in knots about commenters saying mean things or about people disagreeing with me? And yet, ultimately, all that matters is that I’m faithful before God. That will make me humble enough to ask, “does anything they say warrant me reconsidering?”, but it will also make me confident enough to disregard it, to shake the dust off of my feet, if I know it’s wrong.

But it’s also made a difference in really little things. I was doing some of my end of the year accounting this week, and I’d be transferring numbers from one place to another. And if I forgot whether it was $509.42 or $509.24, I’d double check. Normally I’d just go with what I thought I remembered, but I didn’t want to write $0.42 if the expense was actually only  $0.24. Such a silly little thing, but I couldn’t let it go just because of that one sentence that Paul Henderson spoke!

So I don’t know if I should be grateful or not :), but I think I am. I do want to be more consistent and more confident with my worth in God, and I pray that this will stick with me.

My Happiest Instagram Moment…

…this week wasn’t actually from my Instagram. It was from my daughter Katie’s.

I just like the status update from this. Nice to know my girls still spontaneously get together, even when they don’t live at home anymore! Although I’m appalled that Katie didn’t order the crunchy chocolate chip. Who goes to Laura Secord and doesn’t order crunchy chocolate chip? When I would take them when they were little girls they both always got crunchy chocolate chip, but now that Katie’s out on her own and spending her own money she has left the fold and ventured further afield. At least Rebecca got her order right. #geneticsbaby

I texted her, “Wanna go on an ice cream date? I’ll buy.” and she was like, “YES”, so we did. #sisterthings #laurasecord

A photo posted by Katie Gregoire (@katielizg) on Mar 16, 2016 at 1:58pm PDT

Have a great weekend, everyone!