Fiddler On The Roof

Have you ever seen The Fiddler on the Roof? There is a scene in the movie that has really been making me think a lot lately. 

Pondering the announcement by their daughter that she is in love, the husband and wife get into a discussion about their arranged marriage.  The husband begins to ask "Do you love me?" The wife asks "After 25 years, why talk about love right now?"  She goes into a list of all she has done with and for him and then questions herself "Do I love you?"

I think my favorite part is where she says "Do I love you?  I'm your wife!" and he responds with "Yes, but do you love me?"  After determining that they do in fact love one another, they end the scene with "It doesn't change a thing, but even so, after 25 years it's nice to know."

I have found myself pondering this scene for many reasons lately.  The first is the idea of arranged marriages and "learning" to love your spouse.  As a child I never understood how arranged marriages could work.  How could they ever be happy?  Didn't one need to fall in love and get all goosebumpy for a marriage to work?  As an adult with 6 kids, I'm liking arranged marriages more and more. 

But it's not so much the idea of someone else choosing your spouse for you that has recently been intriguing me.  It is the idea of choosing to love the one to whom you are married.  Perhaps you are thinking, "shouldn't you already love the one to whom you are married?"  Perhaps.  However, with the rate of divorce as it is, perhaps we need to redefine this idea of loving your spouse. 

I know that there are married people who either don't love their spouse or, like the wife in this movie, question whether or not they do love their spouse.  If that is you, take heart.  There is hope.  If you don't love your spouse, or don't know if you do, here is a simple plan to help you.  Ready?  Okay.  Love your spouse. 

See?  Easy, peasy, lemon squeezy.

What?  Not good enough?  Okay, how about this.  You have likely heard "love is a verb not a feeling" blah, blah, blah.  Well the good news is it can be both.

You know those crazy people that actually like exercise?  Why do they like it?  Because at some time, they forced themselves to get up and do it.  They forced the mechanics, made themselves run, walk, zumba, whatever.  And on the days they were tired, they got up and exercised anyway.  Soon, they discovered that they actually felt better after they exercised. They began to see that on days when they didn't exercise they felt yucky.  At some point the mechanical act of forcing the behaviour of exercising rolled into an actual emotional and attitudinal change toward exercise. 

Love is like that.  Force yourself act in loving ways.  Each day think of one thing that would be nice for your spouse and do that one thing. It doesn't have to be earth shattering.  You may be surprised to find what small things it actually will take to show your spouse that you love him or her.

Early in our marriage, if I didn't have to work, I stayed in bed while my husband got up for work.  He went to work and ate instant oatmeal at his desk.  He ate PB & J at his desk for lunch, and if he was really lucky got to take me out for dinner.  At some time I decided it would be nice to fix him breakfast.  Now I get up (something I hate) and make breakfast for my husband.  I pack his lunch, make his coffee and (usually, barring nasty weather) walk him to his car.  If he's really lucky, he still gets to take me out for dinner.  This little thing has changed our marriage.  It shows love to him while allowing us a little alone time.

I don't tell you this to brag.  On the contrary,  I'm a miserable failure in dozens of other ways, but the fact that I make him a priority sort of hides some of my faults.  He doesn't go out of his way to find things I'm doing wrong.  The mechanical discipline of getting up to show love to my husband by making breakfast and lunch has become an emotional connection for us.

I don't know about you, but I don't want to ask my spouse in 25 years "Do you love me?"  I definitely don't want him to ever have to ask me "Do you love me?"

Looking Back, the View after 15 Years.

I spent yesterday at a pow wow with my family.  If you've never attended a pow wow, you should take the opportunity to do so sometime.  It's an interesting event to view. 

My husband and I met somewhere around 20 years ago in the pow wow world.  I was 16 and he was 15 when we fell head over heals deeply in love.  Or so I thought.  Who knows the heart of a teenager.  They are crazy.  But I do know that it is to this world of pow wows and friends that I owe my opportunity to meet the man who was to become my husband.  Okay, honestly it was to the great and awesome God who orchestrated the whole thing.  It amazes me that while I did not yet know Him, He was situating me for a future life so full of His blessings that I would be unable to deny Him, not that I want to.

I can pinpoint the exact moment I fell in love with my husband.  I remember exactly where we were and the circumstances surrounding it.  We were, surprise surprise, at a pow wow in Oklahoma.  It was a dance that years later we would attend together as a freshly engaged couple.  I remember that moment, sitting on that picnic table when I realized that I was in love with this kid. 

We were such kids.  Of course we wouldn't have believed that if you had told us that.  We knew so much.  We knew what we were going to be doing for the rest of our lives.  We couldn't imagine a life where one didn't pow wow 6+ times a year.  We loved our week long trips to Oklahoma, or our long weekend trips to Oklahoma.  We even spent our honeymoon at a pow wow.  Okay, not a pow wow, THE POW WOW.  The biggest and best pow wow in this area, the National Pow Wow.  This dance is held only once every 3 years.  It is this same dance that we attended yesterday, 15 years and 6 kids after our honeymoon.

God is so awesome.  I got to see a few old friends who I don't see much any more.  I got to share something I used to love with my kids.  I got to enjoy the music and dancing I often times miss.

Despite the fun I had, I got a much bigger message.  About 8 years ago, my husband and I walked away from this life.  The reasons are complicated.  We didn't know at the time how complete our removal from this world was going to be.  Where we once imagined ourselves raising our kids, we suddenly were no longer.  I don't think either of us intended to remove ourselves so fully from this lifestyle.  But it was several years before we returned with our kids to visit a life that had become so deeply ingrained in us.

Now, looking back, I can totally see God's hand and wisdom.  We cannot believe some of the things that we thought were so important.  We see danger and harm in things we once felt were so benign, even helpful.  Now we see the bigger picture with our children and understand that the things that are such vital values and beliefs to us would be practically impossible for us to teach well in this environment.  Not that others cannot.  I know many good people in the pow wow circuit who love their children and teach them well.  I am not criticizing them.  However, I know that my husband and I would not have been able to do so. 

God led us, without our knowledge or understanding, to walk away from that which would have been detrimental to our marriage and our children and led us toward a life far more fulfilling than we could ever have imagined. 

I still miss my old life sometimes.  I miss the fellowship, the late nights, the music, the dancing, the flashy clothes.  We now feel more able than before to take our children out to experience this occasionally without getting pulled into all that goes with it.

But yesterday I was given a gift.  God gave me the opportunity to fall more in love with Him, seeing much of what He has done without my understanding.  God also gave me the opportunity to fall more in love with my husband, the man God gave me to share this life with. 

I can truly say, as I watched my husband of 15 years dance around the arena carrying our 6th child in his arms, that I love him more now than I did during that National Pow Wow 1996, just days after marrying the man of my dreams.

More on Love and Relationships

After a 6 month break and major crazy life chaos, I am returning to my challenge to help myself - and hopefully you - learn to love like the bible commands in I Corinthians 13.  I urge you to reread my January post On Love and Relationships.  I had to reread it myself.  

In the first post, I challenged us to pray for God to show us ways to show patience to our loved ones.  I must admit, that though I daily feel like I am failing, as I look back I see overall progress.  I feel as though I am I offering my children more grace when they frustrate me, hurrying them less and in general losing my temper less.  If you have been working on patience in relation to the I Corinthians model of love, please comment below on your successes.  Encourage one another, you may well find it encourages you.

After "Love is patient", we find that "Love is kind."  What does that mean? I honestly can't say I know.  Today's challenge is to seek God in how He wants us to show kindness to the person you have challenged yourself to show more love toward. (If you feel lost, you really want to read or reread the previous article.  Go to the Archive button in the left column and click January.)

According to an online dictionary, the following are synonyms for kindness: benignity, benevolence, humanity, generosity, charity, sympathy, compassion, tenderness,  good turn.  A person who is kind is described as being of a good or benevolent nature or disposition.  Reading the synonyms still didn't help me a lot, so I looked up the antonyms.  The opposite of kindness is malevolence or cruelty.  Malevolence is defined as hatred.  So the opposite of kindness is essentially hatred. 

 

Wow.  Now THAT spoke to me.  So I began to wonder, is there a middle ground, a neutral?  Something between kindness and hatred?  The best I can find as a word that is neutral, somewhere between kindness and hatred is indifferent.  

I'm not sure being indifferent toward your loved one isn't equally as bad as hating them.  Honestly, who among us want to think our parents, our spouse or even our best friend is simply indifferent about us?  Would you care if your parent didn't hate you, but was simply indifferent toward you?  As if your very existence means nothing, good or bad, to them?

That may sound really harsh, but it seems to me you have 3 choices as to how you behave toward this person you have chosen to love better:  with kindness, with hatred, or with indifference.  Looking at it that way, I pray please Lord help me show kindness to my children each day.  Help me to never cause them to feel as though I either hate them or that I am indifferent about their existence.  Help me, today, to be the mom they need and You have created me to be.

On Guarding Your Heart

I grew up on country music. There is a certain quality to country music that has always spoken directly to my heart. As with anything, there is good and bad to listening to country music. It certainly didn't have the type of "profanity" and amoral content you might hear in some other styles (though I grant there is some). Yet I found, years later, one important way that it affected my heart, a way in which I was not expecting, nor was I ready for. Young girls especially, take heed, it isn't just music. You can be setting yourself up for problems without ever knowing it.

Here is my story. I am married to an amazing man. Now, after 15 years (nearly) of marriage and nearly 20 years together, I am loved and adored beyond my dreams. But this has not always been so. When my husband and I first married, we were happy. Of course, we didn't know any better, but we were happy. We bickered and argued, but who doesn't? We were in love. Of course, I knew what love was, I listened to all the great songs on love, country music. Country singers are the experts on love, or so it seems. I heard all the songs singing about how he couldn't live without her, she was the most beautiful creature in the world, he would walk to the ends of the Earth for her. And there begins my problem.

After 3 or 4 years of marriage, I didn't feel like I was being loved like this. Don't misunderstand. I married a faithful, kind, honest man who would never mistreat me or behave in any way that was less than ethical. Yet I was certain he was not as deeply in love with me as all these songs implied he should be. I wanted him to be gaga for me, but I didn't realize I had a part to play in this. I needed to behave in a lovable way.

I am not saying I was the worst wife in the world and he was miserable. Far from it. I was a mediocre wife, he was a mediocre husband, we had a mediocre kind of marriage (from my viewpoint). Once I became convicted that the only way I could make any changes in my marriage was to change my behavior, I saw real improvement quickly.

I began to try to treat my husband like he was the king (ok, that was my goal, I may have fallen short some). I wanted him to feel special and adored, the way I wanted to feel but didn't. I don't know how long it took, but 10 years later if feels like it was overnight that he began to reciprocate and began to see me differently.

Here I am, a decade later, more in love than the day we married. I truly know what it is like to be adored like the women in the country songs that I rarely listen to anymore. But I regret the years that I spent longing for what my heart misunderstood due to the influence of the music I listened to. I let my heart be affected to the point where, had God not intervened, my marriage would have been eaten away until we were no longer two mediocre spouses in a mediocre marriage, but two selfish people unable to make even a mediocre marriage work.

I am grateful God stepped in, showed me how to make my marriage what I longed for. I am grateful that God stepped in before I did lasting damage to my marriage and to the amazing man He gave me. Now as I am endeavoring to raise godly children, I think more about the influences in their lives, not just bad language or bad messages, but the heart of the matter.

I encourage all you young girls, or even married women who have issues in their marriages that are making them unhappy, search your heart for expectations that may not be from God. Ask Him to teach you to make your spouse (current or future) happy, not to show your spouse how to make you happy. Don't let "romantic" notions in your heart set you up for unrealistic expectations. Instead, let God's design for marriage, a relationship filled with servanthood and love, lead you to the best God has for you.

On Love and Relationships

"If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing." - 1 Corinthians 13:1-3

God gave me a plan for encouraging myself and others to use the 1 Corinthians 13 model of love to strengthen one particular relationship (or in my case 5 - my relationship with my kids). I was amused by the idea as it struck me during my drive to church. I was thinking "how might I" as I sat and listened to my pastor's inspiring message. That is when I knew it was God's idea. When I realized the pastor was preaching very much on what I was planning, I knew God was behind this. God wants you to read this, and God wants me to write this. I believe God wants all of us to do this.

I've developed my own version of the "Love Dare". It really isn't intended to be taken from that movie, but the term fit so well that I decided to borrow it. I want to encourage, even dare you to walk with me over the next days and weeks. Try each of the things with an open mind and an open heart. Listen to what God is whispering to you. See if these things help, if even in some small way. I can't imagine any way in which they can hurt.

First, I want you to identify a person (persons) with whom you feel your relationship needs strengthened. I've chosen my children. It is important to identify a specific relationship to work on. In the end, I believe all your relationships will benefit, but you must focus on one. I decided to consider my children one relationship since what I am really doing is working on how I relate to them more than their individual personalities.

Let's look at what the bible says about love. It is one of the most famous passages in the bible. "Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails."

Boy, that's a lot. It is too much to try at once. We are going to take this one item at a time. Today: Love is patient. There is an old saying in the christian world "Never pray for patience." What we are going to pray for today is that God will, in his infinite grace, show us what patience is, what it looks like in this particular relationship. For example, my prayer for today is "God, please grant me the grace to see and understand how I am to be patient with my children today." It may be your spouse, your coworker, your sister or your best friend. Ask God to show you today how you can demonstrate patience in that relationship. If you mess up once, don't feel like you blew it. Take the next opportunity to do it right. Keep praying.

A note, if you know your spouse has read this and is working on their relationship toward you, pray for God's guidance on how to receive. Even if you feel things are perfect, it is possible your spouse feels that he or she is not fully demonstrating the love God calls him/her to show.