Embrace Your Differences - No More Perfect Marriages

“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.” (1 Corinthians 13:4-7, NIV)

One Tuesday morning, Mark asked me a question and it took a few minutes to register that he was talking to me. When I finally looked up to answer, he was smiling at me. “I wondered how long it would take you to get from the back of that Amazon warehouse in your mind to the front where I am.”

I’m an internal processor. There’s a lot going on inside my head and I often don’t even think about sharing it. Mark is an external processor. Anything that goes on inside his head, he says.

He often says that as an external processor, he talks about it, talks about it, and takes a breath and talks about it some more.

I on the other hand, think about it, think about it, think about it…and then I tell him what WE decided! He then gently reminds me that he wasn’t invited to those conversations in my head!

When we’re dating, our differences are cute and they draw us to each other. When we get married and have to live together all the time our differences can drive each other crazy!

Mark used to take my internal processing as rejection. He assumed (wrongly) that if I wasn’t talking about something, that meant I wasn’t thinking about something. Because it took me longer to respond, he told himself it meant I didn’t care or that I was ignoring him. None of that was true, though. As an internal processor, my mind was simply elsewhere, and it sometimes took me a while to tune into what was going on around me.

When Mark started seeing my mind as a big Amazon warehouse and he started imagining me in the back of the warehouse needing to make my way to the front when he said something to me, he moved from being furious to being curious. Thus the smile on his face while he waited for me to respond to him that Tuesday morning.

Love is patient and kind when your spouse talks all the time and it drives you crazy. Love is patient and kind when your partner is in their head a lot and you wonder what’s going on in there.

Love doesn’t insist that your spouse does things your way but moves from frustration to fascination at learning how God designed you. As our love has matured, it’s helped us care for each other’s hearts so much better than we did in our early years.

Move your heart from frustration to fascination with love today and just watch how God will start changing you from the inside out!

Prayer:

Father, help me to love better. Give me patience and understanding so that I may truly care for my spouse’s heart. Replace my critical thoughts with kind ones. Help me to not make my spouse’s differences about me, but to find them fascinating instead. In Jesus’ name. Amen.