This is a bigger concept than I think I can verbalize, but if you look at my whole life and there is only one major problem in it, why is that? I am a "good" girl. I'm not used to being in trouble, I grew up that way and made the best decisions I could have along the way, which is especially incredible considering the environment I grew up in. I studied hard in school even though I wasn't the smartest student and got through college in four years. Even though I don't "use" that degree, I will never regret the time I invested in obtaining it-it has made me a better person. I'm reliable, thoughtful, faithful, careful, smart, loving, make a conscious effort to do the right thing, put others first, and err on the side of kindness almost to the point of being a push-over. I am extremely hard-working and rarely take the easy way out. I don't waste time or money on entertainment and have to force myself to have some fun now and then. I am an excellent mother and embrace all of the duties of that role that I have been blessed with three times over. I am very careful with money and know how long it takes to make it, and spend or not spend with that principle in mind. I have kept away from alcohol and drugs my entire adult life, not only because I am a Christian, but because I have seen the devastating effects it can have on a life so many times over. I've only had a handful of jobs because I hate quitting anything and stay so long at each one. Each employer I have had has said I was a model employee and the only reason I have quit any of them was (1) leaving to be a stay-at-home mom after five years at Art Van and (2) leaving my job at Target after eight years because I could no longer juggle my full-time job at Hartman Insurance with it and be the primary caregiver for my kids when my husband took a job on the road for a few months to deal with the sudden death of our oldest son. Dealing with that tragedy has been the biggest challenge of my life, but I continue to get up every day and brave the day and my permanently-altered life for my two remaining children who are oh, so worth it.
I am thankful for these qualities I have and for the success they have brought me in life, but they mean nothing without the salvation I have through the shed blood of my dear and precious Savior. Even though it seems like I was on the "right track" before I was saved, none of those were going to get me into heaven. Praise God for sending His One and Only Son to die for my sins so I could stand sinless before Him and live eternally with Him in heaven once my earthly life is through.
I feel like I'm being punished by my Pastor. I have never been fired from a job or asked to leave anything until now with this Sunday School/Junior Church thing. It makes me think of the story in the Bible when the adulteress is about to be stoned for her sin, and Jesus asks for the person without sin to throw the first stone. I am positive that every other teacher or leader in the church has some form of sin in their life. Maybe Pastor just doesn't know about it. We are not human without sin. That is why we need a Savior.
What is this sin that I am being punished for? It's not like an addiction that I have no control over like substance abuse or viewing inappropriate material on the internet or anything like that. My track record has shown that when I am given a rule to follow, moral or spiritual, I do my best to follow it. I know that following any kind of rule is important, especially ones that God commands, so why when I've been told countless times to follow this one rule of obeying or honoring my husband, can I not do it? I know and actually live the consequences of disobedience to this on a daily basis. I, like most women when they get married, had visions of riding off into the sunset with their soulmate and living happily ever after. I know that is not real life, but at least some happiness should come from marriage, right?
Something else I know is that I'm not supposed to pick and choose what I obey where my husband is concerned. Even if he's making what I think is a bad decision, as long as it's not going against God, I'm supposed to go along with it. The idea behind that is if it was a bad decision, that will come to light and maybe he'll learn from that for next time or something. So, it's clear I know what the command is. That is not the problem.
So what is the problem? Do I not trust him? Has he made bad decisions in the past that he has not learned from that have hurt our family? What is his character like? I was going to refer to my list to compare, but overall I would have to say it is mostly the opposite.
The first thing that comes to mind is his many, many jobs. I think the longest he's stayed at any one job in the past 20 some years is close to three years. And what were his reasons for quitting? Didn't like the boss, industry not doing well, procedures and rules changed, didn't get along with a co-worker, Company X is a better place to work, etc. The promise and belief that "this time it will be different." All of the jobs have been commission-based jobs which always require a "ramp-up" period, so once a new one was started, there were a few months of either a draw or very little income. Tack this on to the tail end of a previous job that "petered" out because business dropped and that is very scary, especially when he was the only income earner when I stayed home for 10 years. I fielded so many collection calls for unpaid bills, had to ask multiple family members for "loans"(I quoted that word because we haven't paid most of those back) and ultimately had to leave the home to rejoin the workforce. I can't believe he put us in that position so many times when he would come home and just tell me he quit somewhere for whatever reason. How can you do that to your own family?
Ok, you may say, it's not his fault he's had bad luck with jobs. He didn't go to college, what other options did he have? That's one thing, but when he can't bring home a steady income or even an income some months, this does not seem to affect his spending habits at all. You would think that if money was unstable you would try to save money or at least not spend as much. For some reason, this has never been a deterrent at all. He still eats out whenever possible and buys the new basketball shoes or latest thing, even when I have told him that we don't have the money for something or we need to save it for this or that bill. How do you do that when you have a family to take care of? I simply don't understand that. And one of the biggest financial mistakes he got us into was building the new house. I knew we didn't have the money for that. And then, surprise, surprise, we couldn't sell our old house. We still moved anyway and rented out our house under what our mortgage payment was and ended up with a monthly housing payment of $4000 for the two. We only made that payment twice-once with tax return money and the second with a bad loan. We still owe the builder tens of thousands of dollars for that mistake. They aren't bugging us about it and I'm glad we still have our old house because we had to move back into it, but still.
Next topic-laziness. He will waste hours on end in front of the tv, at the movies, and now he is pretty much addicted to his phone. Napping occurs frequently. His interest in home maintenance is minimal. He doesn't shovel, mow the lawn, take out the trash-he does nothing. He won't pay for repairs or we don't have the money so as a result we haven't had a working hose for years, the garbage disposal has been out for a few months, it took 7 years to get new gutters after he ripped the old ones off, etc. The only thing he has done to the house over the years is take down walls at random, leaving gaping holes in ceilings and giant messes for me to clean up, with no plans for the repair of the resulting damage, which have taken years to finally get repaired while the house looked like even more of a dump in the meantime.
His mom-she has been and continues to be number one in his life. She is his main concern, she is always right, he defends her to the end even in an exchange that occurred the week of Hayden's accident regarding a reasonable request I had. That about sums it up regarding her. I am constantly getting talked to for how "rude" I am to her.
Unreliability-basically what Bill says and what he does are two very different things. This has caused many problems naturally because he will agree to something and simply not do it. If he says he can bring the kids somewhere for example, I have to make sure I am still available in case those plans change. A recent example of this was this summer when I was trying to figure out how to get Carter to Skyline every day for water polo practice. Originally Bill said he could take care of it, but I still felt compelled to make back-up arrangements at work in case he called and couldn't do it. This involved trading lunchtimes with a co-worker so I could leave at 12 instead of 1 and get him there by 1. I confirmed this with Bill several times and he assured me that he would treat it as an appointment and commit to getting him there every day.
Well, for the first week, I did two of the four days for various reasons and then Bill no longer did it. He said he couldn't because of customer appointments. I reminded him that he said he would treat this as an appointment and schedule things around it. He said he couldn't do that because he has to be available when his clients are available. I pointed out what he said to me originally but he didn't really have an answer for that-almost as if he didn't remember or realize he said that. How can you successfully work with someone like that? You need to be able to rely on someone when they say they are going to do something, and I simply cannot with Bill.
This applies also with money. I will ask him not to get something or tell him we are low for the week and he will agree initially, but then comes home with the very purchase he agreed not to make with some big explanation about why he had to get it or no explanation at all sometimes. I can never understand why he would knowingly jeopardize our finances like that. I have a recent example of this too. His starting-out salary has ended and he does not have enough deals that have closed to produce a decent paycheck. To make ends meet this pay period, we had to get a title loan/personal loan. Because of that we were able to pay the mortgage, etc. For some reason, he decided to spend $160 on some probiotics products that he is starting to try from a friend. I asked him why he did that when we had to borrow money recently to pay our bills. He said, "We're paying it back," so he obviously didn't understand my concern. He just always thinks more is coming. Money doesn't come that easily, and it's even hard to borrow it. I don't know why he doesn't understand that.
I know that specific things we fight about don't seem to hold much weight in our past counseling sessions but I think your decisions and actions are manifestations of your character. I know I have been told the generic Biblical principles to follow as far as submission goes, etc. but that is very hard to do when you don't trust the person you're supposed to be obeying. I know this is probably an extreme example, but think about how we are supposed to be under the authority of policemen, judges, etc. But what do you do when these people are bad or crooked? In those instances, the rules change. I know that the only exception to the submission rule is if your husband is asking you to do something against God, but what if the wife feels that his decision-making is not going to benefit the family or could even make things worse and there is a proven track record of that? I also know that the husband is supposed to take his wife's feelings or thoughts into account when decisions need to be made and this never happens. It's my life, my money and my family too, so I don't know why my thoughts and opinions are consistently pushed aside.
For some reason, I have a hard time trying to explain "what my problem with Bill is." I hope that this is a start. This began as a blog entry for me to get some thoughts straight and then as I went on, it seemed like it might be beneficial to explain where I am coming from when I contemplate my marriage problems. I may or not share it with Pastor. I will let you know. Love you sweet boy!
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