I also need to love the Lord and put Him first, which she might not always understand.
I admit to getting this. Maybe a little too easily. People's demands pull at you trying to get you off your ministry course.
Given that my parents opposed my ministry course and the ministry God called me to, dragged in counselors to try to shove me off of it by misinterpreting the Scriptures, and sent me to college where my calling was picked apart into a bunch of tiny pieces, I've had a bellyful of being misunderstood. I've also had a bellyful of not understanding what in the blue streak God was doing, so this is old news. God first, people second.
I will state it now and for the record and endure the tomatoes: I feel that God is calling me to a ministry or ministries in the online space. I have the web design and the writing. I write posts on forums, understand how they work, and have actually conducted ministry out here. It has required enduring a lot of suffering. The problem is, most people who claim to have a calling for ministry online (especially on social media) seem to do it wrong, just Bible-bashing their way along. I respect the context of spaces and actually learned the medium instead of being a jerk.
The suffering that my calling has wrought is less the nasty comments from others online, but the doubt and confusion it has wrought offline. It's basically turned into a productivity and economic black hole as God has guided me through this wild maze of different skills I have to learn which never seems to end. It's also not a ministry that I can ask for monetary support from people to help me with, which makes my life even more confusing. Is this ministry a "nights and weekends" thing? Should I get a job? Which one? *is baffled*
I joined this space not so much to minister to people as to get knowledge support for myself. I have been working on a kids' forum and the kids are growing up. I know that I will need to learn more theology and more Scripture and more stuff about marriage as time goes on. Otherwise I won't be doing them any favors.
My apologies for the digression, but it's the context of the last point.
Not everyone will lead bible studies or prayer or pray with you either. That doesn’t diminish his relationship with God, her or spiritual authority. I wish someone would say that. Add in work and familial responsibilities, church, volunteering and time with friends you’re pretty stretched.
I agree. I grew up in a family with two engineers and a computer programmer. Right now I'm ministering to a young scientific computer programmer a little bit, and you can't hound for discipline. They have a relationship to God's creation and they don't see the people aspects as clearly. I do encourage him to see them, but I know that for him it will be difficult. It's not how he sees the world - it's like asking me to understand advanced calculus and how that relates to the design of the universe. He sees it easily, I do not. But I know I have to expand my thoughts and meet him on his own playing field, even if that is uncomfortable for me.
The thing is, frequently with people like that, you don't see the evidence. No hugs, no prayers for you, no frequent Bible reading. But if you put them under trial, their faith comes out eventually. They know what to do and where to look for guidance. You see them gush over God's creation on camping trips and spend hours talking about physics and how it relates to the Scriptures. It's there. But it's not classical.
But many books makes similar suggestions for laymen too. It can lead to unrealistic expectations and what I term pseudo pastors. I’ve witnessed it firsthand as well.
To this, I must say idk. My parents made it a regular practice of reading a passage from the Our Daily Bread devotional every night and made the 4 of us take turns praying out loud. My brother and I repeated the same prayer every night because we didn't want our parents to know what we were praying. The devotional kinda worked, but my dad was just such a bad spiritual teacher that we ended up correcting him on his mistakes instead of really learning anything.
When my parents left, me and my brother immediately dropped the practice.
My mother did a much better job of spiritually teaching us when my father wasn't around with the Bible stories and the scriptural memorization using the Awana program. If I were to get married I would follow her model instead. I don't think I would ever force my kids to pray or read devotionals in front of me. That wasn't why I accepted the Gospel. (All the devotional reading did was make me actually good at public speaking. No audience will ever be as bad as reading devotionals for abusers.)
I certainly wouldn't be a strict husband except for where spiritual matters are concerned. Regular Bible studies together, praying together, raising our children in the Lord together, and ensuring our marriage is where it needs to be.
When your ideals conflict with His you don't create a new theology or contort the word to your benefit. You meet it head on. It may make you uncomfortable or scared but sometimes the truth does.
I value sufferance and I'm not afraid of scourging. I understand what lies beyond it. I think Gibran explained it well.
I value a Scriptural focus in marriage simply because it's placing Christ and the Church on display, and also because it's a safety net. If he follows the Scriptures, he will not hurt me, and if I follow them, I will not damage him and an abuser I will not become. Indeed, you don't twist the Scripture to fit your circumstances or your inner self, you change your inner self and the circumstances so you follow the Scriptures. You're proactive.
Beliefs create emotions. When you find an emotion that is making it hard to obey a Scripture passage, you dig out the wrong belief behind the emotion and you change it. Suffering makes it hard to obey - your emotions are in the wrong place. You take them out and you climb the mountain. You share in Christ's sufferings, knowing that as you follow the truth in a dying world they will come and you will be victorious.
But as long as this post already is, I do have a story to tell. When I was younger, I started the practice of reading a chapter of the Bible every single day. As an abuse victim, I was constantly facing spiritual warfare, and near the end of the fight where I confronted my abuser to end the abuse, I was pretty much facing it 24/7. Scripture and prayer and writing it out from morning until night, forgiveness, gentle answers, on and on, forcing myself to emotionally heal on the fly. I ended the abuse and emerged straight into dealing with a situation at my community college where a professor was being mistreated and he passed that on to his students, including me, and there was an anti-Christian element to it. So I wrote poems to fight off his abusers and defend the faith, getting myself out of community college and back into university. Meanwhile, I was working the earlier-mentioned children's forum and working on my own abuse recovery at the same time.
Around the year 2020 I started to realize my daily Bible readings weren't doing anything anymore. I wasn't getting anything out of them. Sure I would read it, but I felt like what I had read, I had read it all before and I already knew what was there, which was because I probably had read it before and I did know what was there.
I started skipping days. And then I realized that I had spiritually wiped myself out. I needed a rest - emotionally, spiritually. God wasn't going to slaughter me if I didn't read my Bible every morning. So I quit.
Okay, not really. I started copying the Bible by hand as a prelude to memorizing the whole thing.
But I go about that project much more slowly than my former soldier-like Bible-reading program. Why? Because I'm not under the same pressure that I once faced. I'm not in the middle of a battle. The war rages on, but I have been largely resting and healing before charging back into the fray. The Scripture I have memorized hasn't vanished from my skull, and I find myself using it regularly anyway.
From this experience, I have learned that spiritual discipline is about caring for people, and spiritual needs evolve because the person changes. For someone with a gift for memorizing Scripture, I needed to change to better use that gift and accommodate that path. I also needed to learn to trust God not to hurt me as my father did, and that I didn't have to appease God by spiritual discipline to stop Him from hurting me.
But yeah, I burn out under extreme ministry pressure, and I think my own ministry calling is enough of a strain to bear. At one point I dearly wanted a husband who could understand my ministry and help me with it lol, but that's not how it works - it's the other way around! I wish Saucy well on finding a woman who can actually help him with his calling and has enough patience to support him in his ministry work. But do keep in mind that any of us ladies may burn out lol, so it may pay to let her go on a women's retreat every blue moon or so. Just some thoughts.