The Impact of a Life Partner: Lessons from 34 Years Together

Today happens to be my anniversary and my wife and I have been married for 34 years. To some that is a very long time. To others who have been married longer than we have, we are on the road to another point in our lives.

God brings people into your life for many reasons. Some come into your life as a friend, others are just acquaintances. Then there are others like my wife who has stood by me and encouraged me through college and my career as a Medical Technologist. Even though that career was shorter than I had hoped it would be, God had another plan which took me in a different direction which brought me to a computer repair shop and I served for a time as a pastor at a small church. A life partner, whether it is your spouse or God, can encourage you and inspire you in many ways. Your life will change when your life partner comes into your life and it will never be the same after that.

Some say that the change could be good or bad, but I believe that anyone who is your partner in life, whether it is God or your spouse, the change will usually be good. I say usually because we sometimes choose to follow the wrong partner or find the wrong one by not listening to God and His guidance in our lives. So, in essence, I am saying that you should seek to know God as your life partner first and foremost, then you will have His help in finding a spouse (if He has planned that for you).

We live in such a mixed up and crazy world today until it is hard to think about finding a life partner because it seems that the world may not last long enough for us to want one around. With all that is happening in the news around the world, if we had gotten married less than five years ago, children would not have been an option for one. i’m not sure anyone could honestly say that they are confident about having a child and watching them grow up in today’s world. Some people have children for other reasons and the possibility of that child having a future is not a part of their thinking.

God forms the child in the womb and He had a purpose for many of us before we were even thought of. Give your heart to Jesus and trust Him as your Savior before you move into another relationship that could be life-altering. He will give you the knowledge and wisdom to make the choices that will be beneficial to both of you, especially if you allow Him to find the right person for you.

Winding mountain road with sun rays shining through dark clouds — Sun rays illuminate a winding mountain road beneath dramatic clouds

No Weapon Formed Ajst You Will Prosper

No weapon that is formed against you shall prosper; and every tongue that shall rise against you in judgment you shall condemn. This is the heritage of the servants of Yahweh, and their righteousness which is of me, says Yahweh. (Isaiah 54:17 )

https://youtu.be/ZMD_6Jsotr0

The Tapestry of Life

When God said, “Let there be Light!”, He wasn’t kidding. The work which He started way back when His Creation was just starting. It began with that thread of light in the darkness and it continues on today in all of the colors of the biggest rainbow that anyone could possibly imagine.

The colors have changed and run together to make different colors over the years. Sometimes the changes were caused by floods or war or slavery or just our own greed and stupidity. Because when we try to weave the colors together on our own with our ideas of how they should be, usually we end up with knots and broken threads and hurt feelings. We say things which shouldn’t have been said or we cause hurts in ways that we don’t know about with those words.

We are the cause of our own separation from God. We are the ones which move away from Him when we should be getting closer to Him. Your life and mine are important to God and He wants each of us to be a part of His Kingdom, but when we decide to do things our way or say things which hurt others, even if we didn’t mean what we said at the time, it places a barrier between us and between us and God.

But God still loves us and if we haven’t been pushing Him away for too long, He will take us back. He will forgive and forget and He does it completely. He doesn’t bring it up again to hurt us or to make us feel guilty.

The tapestry of Life on the Earth has had many colors in it and it has had a lot of blood spilled over greed and anger and problems which we brought on ourselves. There are many threads in this tapestry and each of us has a part in it, but the finished work won’t be visible until God is finished with us and we see the completed product. He wants you to see it and be a part of it, but if you choose to go your own way and walk on your own path without Him, He will let you do that too.

This tapestry is part of our life and a part of our journey on this journey. God has placed people and circumstances in our lives which leads to more strands in the tapestry of life here and for each person on Earth. How will it turn out? Only God Himself knows that answer, we just need to make sure that we are along for the ride.

God’s Hand

God’s Hand has moved since the very beginning of His Word and recorded history. It was His hand which flung the stars into the heavens and it was His hands which placed the Moon and all of the planets in their orbits along with the Sun itself. It was by the hands of God that the first man was created and formed from the clay and dirt in Eden and by God’s breath, the man became a living soul. It was God’s hands which took a rib from Adam’s side to form a helper for him, perfectly suited for her task.

In the Word of God, His hands have moved nations and kings, people and circumstances, so that His will for our salvation and for the world’s salvation would come about the way that He knew that it should. Does He move in our lives today in small ways and in big ways to bring about that which He knows we should do for His glory and for our good?

I believe that He does exactly that! We may not perceive it before we feel the need to come to a saving knowledge of Jesus, but many times each of us could’ve been killed and we weren’t. I believe that it was at those times when His hand or maybe an angel that He sent intervened in our circumstances and kept us on the path toward His usefulness for us.

God used the circumstances of Joseph to save the nation of Egypt and his family too which grew into the nation of Israel while in captivity. If all of the things which happened to Joseph had not happened the way they did, things would’ve been much different. But God orchestrated all of the things, good and bad as we read of them, in order to place him in the position of authority to save his family from starvation. God still does these…adjustments today in our lives each day. Whether we see them or not. A car veers off before we are in a wreck, or an old tire doesn’t blow out on us even when we are driving too fast. All of these “little miracles” which we don’t see or even know about are happening all around us. We may find out about them when we get to heaven.

Why do I write about this today? Because of all the small miracles which do happen and we don’t know about them, God is using them to bring His will to bear in our lives and in the world around us. Would we call them miracles if we knew about them? Probably not because many of them are just small adjustments in our commute to work or in how we swallow our food one night or some other things which, to us would be insignificant but they affect our lives in ways which we cannot know.

Yes, God’s hand is still moving in our universe today and in our immediate lives too. Not just in Christian lives but in every person’s life on Earth. Some are moved in a way which we might see one day as an act of evil and even though God didn’t cause the evil which they did, He allowed it to happen because something else good would come from it. There are many things in our daily lives which we see and don’t perceive as His hand in our lives and we might not recognize them as such but those small decisions which we think were ours, were actually God’s way of moving us in the direction that He wanted us to go.

I pray that your life will be full of some small decisions or adjustments in your routine of work and life so that God can and will use your life to bring others to a saving knowledge of Jesus.