What a concept right? If I spend time with God, it will help my marriage? Yep. Here’s how:

Seek His presence for you. Wives today flip more hats and transform into more roles than ever before. Along with those roles comes pressure, stress, fatigue, loneliness (yes, even in marriage), heartache and the often the self-imposed image of being perfect. Taking time to be still and to enter into the presence of your heavenly Father allows you the opportunity to just be you - no pressure to be anyone other than the “you” that He made. In His presence we lay down our masks, our struggles, our worries and climb into the arms of comfort in God. In the stillness of His presence is where our strength is made new, our joy is restored and our peace is guaranteed. In order for us to pour ourselves out and be the helper for our husband, we must first sit in the presence of God and empty ourselves out so that we can be filled with more of Him.

Seek His presence for your husband. Many times throughout history we have seen the pictures of husbands leaving to go off to war with the wife waving as he leaves. Believe it or not, every time your husband walks out the door, he is walking into a war zone. Yes, there is the pressure from the job, the anxiety to get to the job, or the stress involved in determining which bill to pay that we all mentally walk through. But your husband has the unique struggle of remaining pure in thought and action in a society that has endorsed the concept of using sex to sell everything from toothpaste to cars. Believe me when I tell you that the enemy knows the weaknesses of your husband and the enemy knows that if he destroys your husband, the marriage and the family will go right behind him. Seek God concerning your husband throughout the day. Pray earnestly for your husband’s safety, for his prosperity in the workplace, for favor and influence and, yes, for protection from the devices of the enemy. Listen closely to the voice of God and He will guide you in how to pray for your husband both on the job and in his ministry. Some men will never tell you what they are struggling with because of pride or the fear of rejection. But in God’s presence, He will give you insight and understanding that only comes from a loving Father.

Seek His presence for your marriage. God created and ordained marriage, and therefore He blesses the covenant of marriage. In the presence of God, all the concerns of your marriage become His concerns. He will lead you in ways you may never understand, but He will show you how to build your marriage and how to not use your hands to tear it down.

Winter is finally over. The temperatures have soared upwards and all of us that love this time of year head outside to dress the yard by planting flowers and yes, this will be the year that we plant and maintain that garden that we promise ourselves every year. After that long winter that we just had, we feel the need to make the most of the warm weather. But how about our marriages? If we are real honest about it, some of us have just come through a winter season in our marriage. Or maybe not winter, but we all could use some spring cleaning and summer planting in our marriage. Let’s borrow some tips from the garden to make our marriage the best that God has for us.

1. Prepare the soil with prayer. I know we all can agree that good marriages don’t just happen. When you combine two individuals with the stress of today and add in children, careers, elderly parents, the list goes on and on. We have to bathe our spouse and our marriage in prayer. Ask God to guide them and protect them, to give them wisdom and favor. Your husband is the priest of the home that needs to have clear direction from God. By giving your marriage to God daily, we honor God for His love and honor our husbands by releasing him to God to accomplish all things through God.

2. Plant the seeds. One of the things that men actually need more than anything is the support of their wife. Now, we may not always agree, but they do need to feel our support, whether it is with the children, the home -- whatever, they need to know that we have their backs. Plant those affirming words in your husband, at least daily, and let him know how proud you are of him, how you thank God for him and how you support his decisions. These strong seeds will bring a bumper crop.

3. Tend the crop. After you have bathed the soil of your marriage in prayer and planting seeds of support and affirmation, you have to become gardener of your marriage. Fertilize the crops with a glance and smile from across the room at your spouse. Bring him a tall glass of ice tea while he mows the lawn. Men like to be surprised with acts of kindness - it makes them feel appreciated. Oh, and like any gardener will tell you, you have to be careful to watch for weeds that can choke the seedling. Seeds of unforgiveness, pride, selfishness and just plain bad attitude will kill out an entire crop if not dealt with.

4. Harvest the crop. This is the easy part. When you have taken these steps to garden love in your marriage, enjoy the bumper crop! One more thing. Multiply your harvest by sharing what you have learned with other women. The joy will be overflowing.

Somewhere between “Leave It To Beaver” and “Roseanne,” the whole concept of giving our husbands respect kind of went straight out the window, down the block and in the sewer. What happened to wives that respected their husbands? Okay, let’s not get this twisted - I’m not talking about being anyone’s doormat or robot. Ephesians 5:32-33 says that each husband should love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband. Isn’t it funny that right there in God’s word He doesn’t ask us to love our husband, but instead He tells us to respect him? Oh, your husband still needs to see and feel your love, but I found this concept pretty interesting. Here we have God having to tell us to respect our husbands.

One morning a few days ago, I gave my husband a kiss as we parted going different directions to our respective places of employment. As soon as he was out of ear shot, my very good friend Kathleen asked “Okay, what’s the matter with you two?” I proceeded to take the next few minutes listing all the things that Ken had done in the last 48 hours that just ticked me off. Kathleen was patient and listened. She stood there and looked me squarely in the eyes and asked, “But what if he doesn’t come home? What if something tragic happens during the day and one of you doesn’t make it home? Is all the anger really worth it?” I stood there speechless. Wow. Suddenly all those little things that had irritated me seemed so small and inconsequential now when I looked at the whole picture instead of focusing on the right now.

Last time we dealt with putting away our anger, clothing our responses to our husband in love, and got right to the dangerous word of submission. Why is that word so hard? Is it because when we think of submissive wives we think of women in robot form bowing to their husbands? News flash. That description doesn’t appear anywhere in scripture!!! The ancient Greek word “submit” is essentially a word borrowed from the military. It literally means “to be under in rank.” It speaks of the way that a branch of government is organized among levels of rank. We know that as a person, a Private can be smarter, more talented, and a better person than a General. But he is still under rank to the General. He isn’t submitted to the General so much as a person as he is to the General as a General. In the same way, the wife doesn’t submit to her husband because he deserves it. She submits because he is her husband and she respects the office he holds in the family unit. Therefore, submission means you are part of a team and the husband is “captain” of the team. God has gifted us individually and has fitted us with our husbands so that our gifts compliment each other’s, not compete. You may be the one gifted to handle the finances, but he, your husband, is still the captain. What does all this have to do with communication? Well, if you have ever observed any military movies, the captain is always spoken to with respect for the office he holds. It doesn’t always make him right, but usually the responses he receives are “clothed” to convey the thought and not the anger. One thing I know about most men is that the minute you start screaming at them the ol’ ears shut down. This is the spot that the enemy waits for because no one is communicating.

In communicating with our spouses, we learned last time in Colossians 3 that we are to daily put down anger, rage, malice, slander and filthy language and to clothe ourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. To clothe means to cover something up: to obscure or conceal something as if wrapping something around it. Now I know you are wondering how do we clothe issues with our husband, right? Here’s an example. Your spouse is angry with you or something happened at his job and you are the recipient of the anger. You have the choice of reacting to what you are receiving and possibly extending “life” to it, or concealing it or “smothering it” with compassion and killing it. See, one thing I have learned in gardening is that cucumber vines will grow and take over everything in the garden if they are allowed to because that is their nature. After they have established the vine, then they produce fruit. So it is with negative thoughts. They will go in any area of our lives that we allow them to unless we smother them and as it says in verse 5 and put them to death. If we don’t deal with negative thoughts either about ourselves or our spouses, that vine will start to produce fruit and the harvest will be bountiful: anger, rage, malice, slander and filthy language. Once this vine is left unattended, it will take over your thought pattern and lead to destruction of not only your marriage, but your very life.

Communication, as we all have heard, is the foundation of any relationship, especially marriage. To communicate means to convey feeling or thought: to transmit or reveal a feeling or thought by speech, writing, or gesture so that it is clearly understood. The issue with communicating effectively is that in order to be able to express our thoughts clearly we have to first be aware of our thoughts. What does that mean? In order for us to convey our thoughts or feelings, we need to make sure that our thoughts and feelings line up with what God has to say about the situation. So many times instead of taking our thoughts or feelings to our husbands and confronting them, maybe we should tell God how we are feeling about this situation first so that He can move on our behalf. No, that doesn’t necessarily mean that He is going to go along with our game plan to confront our husbands. Sometimes it may mean that He will correct our way of thinking first so that the confrontation can either be avoided or will be reduced to a conversation that leads to understanding and maybe resolution.

Wow! The newspapers and nightly news tell the story. The enemy is coming after marriages, and unfortunately winning at an alarming rate, including those that are of the body of Christ. What hope do we have in our marriage working when so many people are walking away from their marriages? It’s really simple- relationship. Our hope is in the Lord.

Wow! The statistics are real. The divorce rate is through the roof, even in Christian marriages. What happened to the day of your wedding when you were so in love, the sky was blue and the birds were chirping a beautiful song? Life happened. Mortgages, children, jobs, mean words, hurt feelings, broken promises, and the birds flew away – Life! Time passes and those hurt feelings are not dealt with. You want to talk about your hurts but somewhere inside is a tiny voice that tells you that you will only open yourself up to more hurt. What do you do?