Happy Monday Ladies! Today starts a new week. I pray your week will be full of blessings, peace, and companionship with both God and your husbands. I thought I would get a head start posting this week since we will be hitting the road around middle of the day today.
This devotional has hit the nail on the head for me every single day! God is really using this book as a tool to show me areas I need to improve and areas to grow in. And I am slowly seeing things change for the positive. We still have bad arguments and still have our struggles, but I am really starting to see God working in our marriage.
The subject of confident worthiness... I love the scripture passages she chose for today's focus verses.
I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Psalm 139: 14
I have a hard time with my insecurities. I think some of my wounds are deep seeded in my childhood and my relationship with my father. I came from a broken home, my parents were divorced with I was very young. My father is of the Muslim religion. I spent my childhood going back and forth on court mandated visits to see my father near Tulsa, OK. My mom would always tell me "Your father loves you in his own way." After about the age of 10 I never saw him again. We emailed several times when I was in undergraduate at APSU but nothing since. He has no idea I am a doctor, married, etc. So from this broken relationship with my father it was not until I was already grown up that I realized the damage it caused. I have a hard time viewing men in general in any light other than a negative one. I am insecure in that I always have the mindset that Justin will eventually leave me or not love me or get tired of me. I am always seeking Justin's approval, encouragement, etc. My fear and insecurity gets in the way of me letting God be my everything.
For today's challenge I am looking forward to discussing this topic with Justin on our drive up to the mountains. I think it might be a bit too cold for a walk outside, but we can admire God's beautiful masterpiece from the car and discuss worthiness.
I found this posting from another wife:
Black, fat, bald-headed, and ugly were words used to describe me growing up. I carried them around with me for many years, and I believed them. I tried to find my value and worth through a lot of different things, and everything failed. It was not until I got saved that I realized that I did not have to claim those words that were spoken over me! It was a tactic of the enemy to keep me from God, and blessedly I am onto his lies. Of course I am not perfect, and I do doubt my worthiness, but I can now look in the mirror and see my beauty shinning through. God's love for me and understanding my true value and worth through Him did that!!
I also wanted to share some song lyrics. I have this song on my itunes and I listen to it often while in the shower. It seems fitting for today's topic.
ReplyDeleteYou Are More by Tenth Avenue North
There's a girl in the corner
With tear stains on her eyes
From the places she's wandered
And the shame she can't hide
She says, "How did I get here?
I'm not who I once was.
And I'm crippled by the fear
That I've fallen too far to love"
But don't you know who you are,
What's been done for you?
Yeah don't you know who you are?
You are more than the choices that you've made,
You are more than the sum of your past mistakes,
You are more than the problems you create,
You've been remade.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cgi-G-dHYkY
I too struggle with many insecurities. I always feel that my best is never good enough. I know that my marriage is strained due to my many insecurities. It is hard for me to accept that Ryan really does love me for who I am and not what I have done.
ReplyDeleteTomorrow marks 11 years that my husband and I have been a couple or "dating." It is unreal to look back and see all of the struggles that we overcame together. It is hard to believe that after all of that time, he still loves me just as much as he ever did. I have to let go of my insecurities in my marriage. I plan to pray about this all week to ask God to help me overcome this struggle and help me to see that I am a worthy wife.
Trina, that song is perfect and I literally sang it out loud as I read the lyrics. Perfect. :-) And thank you for sharing your story about your childhood. I will say an extra prayer for you as I know this is a difficult topic for you.
ReplyDeleteDay 8's topic on worthiness had me reflecting a bit on my own worth in the last year or so. I have struggled with self-worth and have mentioned it to Torey quite a bit in the last year. As I kind of mentioned, we had a crazy 2012 with graduating, having a baby, graduating again, moving, buying a house, and my husband starting a new job all within a four month span. It was CRAZY. In 2012 I felt worthy because I had brought a new life into our family. So, 2013 on the other hand, was a different story. I began seeing patients in December of 2012 and was blessed with the ability to bring my son to the office I was at. It wasn't until summer of 2013 that I realized that my practice was not taking off as I had hoped and my husband and I were really starting to struggle making ends meet. Now that it is 2014, we are still catching up and still struggling. For a while I was searching for a new job, but had absolutely NO luck in that. It caused me to do a lot of soul searching because I now felt unworthy and more or less an inconvenience to our family. It was not a good feeling. So, I searched for worthiness in my husband and honestly, I didn't always get the warm welcome feeling from him either. It was and still is a "fire" we are walking through. I welcomed 2014 with open arms and I'm hoping that through this devotional I will find the guidance I so desperately need to further build my relationship with God. I need Him and my marriage needs Him to get through this financial "fire" we live in right now.
To read that God is the only one who can truly fulfill my life completely, meet my every desire, and exceed my every expectation gave me a feeling of hope. I now fully understand that in order to live out God's love story I need to fully submit my life to Him and most of all TRUST in Him. I'll be praying about this that I will learn ways to fully rely on Him so that I can unconditionally love my husband each day.