Found People Find People

What would you do if you could do anything in the world?

This is a very open ended question. I could mean this evening, or this weekend, or with your free time or with your career. Sadly, I’m afraid that my answer to this question would be unremarkable. My sister asked me today if I could have any job in the world what would it be. I would write. Not that my books would be life-altering classics. But I would enjoy that more than anything else.  But it made me wonder, what would I do if I could do anything in the world? And as I just said my first reactions were unremarkable.

I found that several of the things that first came to my mind were quite selfish. Some of the ones that even sounded selfless were not. And since they were severely limited by my own benefit they were decidedly un-ambitious. Because if I were honest with myself I would have to admit that there is a big difference between my answers to the questions “what would you like to get if you could get anything” and “what would you do if you could do anything”. Doing is much harder than getting.

So why don’t we work hard to accomplish or achieve the things we would like most to get? Laziness. Selfishness. Pride. Just to name a few. So what do we do about it? I’m trying to figure that out myself. I have a feeling it will require a change of heart. Actively working to care more about others than we do about ourselves. Caring less about what other people think and more about what they need.

And they need to be found. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the following phrase this in the past week: Found people Find people. I want that to be my automatic answer to the question “what would you do if you could do anything in the world”? I want a change of heart that would cause my answer to be that I would invest my time, effort, heart, and soul into finding people. Because I was found. And found people find people.

My Husband Is A Warrior.

I love my husband. Seriously, I do. I’ve known Clay since we were 16 and I have had the privilege to watch him grow from a boy into a man. Not only physically; but mentally, emotionally and spiritually as well.  It didn’t happen overnight, but something has definitely changed in his life as he has learned to put God first and love Him more than self. Today I watched him make himself completely vulnerable and risk embarrassment and judgment because God’s glory is more important to him than his own.

My Mr  gets a great deal of joy from playing video games. He once told me with a completely straight face: “Babe, you don’t understand.  I have to kill a certain number of things a day, because I’m a warrior.” Yep. He was serious.

Not too long ago, as we talked about struggles he has faced and continues to win out over as he chooses on a daily basis to be a man of God who holds onto truth, and integrity even when it is hard, he said to me “I have to kill a certain number of things a day, because I’m a warrior. And some of those things are pride and selfishness”.

We have faced  A LOT of difficult times in our years together. Times that we’ve been scared or angry, times that we have been hurt by others and times that we have hurt each other. Let’s be honest, in marriage you are so closely and intimately united that you are completely vulnerable and you have the ability to devastate each other.  

I’ve faced some of his struggles head on with him, just like he’s faced mine. We’ve faced moments where we have had to preach the gospel to ourselves, reminding ourselves of how Christ has loved and forgiven us when we didn’t deserve it, in order to continue loving each other sacrificially and unselfishly. 

However, our God is a loving Father, and he never wastes a hurt. He is using all of this to shape us, to teach me that He is the only one who is truly Faithful in all things and that I cannot look to my husband to be my functional Savior, I must look to my Savior to supply my needs and then love and respect my husband regardless of what I feel he should do better. I am learning to look at myself through the eyes of my Heavenly Father rather than through the lens of what I fear I’m lacking as a wife, friend, woman, and helper in our relationship.

 I love seeing the way that these struggles have encouraged and challenged my husband to embrace transparency and fight sin and selfishness head on. I’ve seen it stir in him a passion to lead other men and challenge them to be men of God rather than boys who give in to selfish pursuits. And through it all I am challenged to be the kind of woman that helps my husband to be God’s kind of man.