Patience & Grace
How would you describe the ideal marriage? Many years ago, prior to my first marriage, I journaled about what I wanted my life to look like in 10 years, including my ideal marriage. Then I entered my first marriage, and it looked nothing like I expected. For a while, I grappled with it. How much of my list was naive hope that could never be reality? Was any of my list unfair expectations? Was it so bad for real life to be different from what I had hoped? When the marriage ended, I spent substantial time working on myself as well as thinking of how I could avoid that heartache again. I went back to my old journal, and reviewed my list. I looked at it more objectively, and decided that most of the items were realistic and still applied for what I wanted. Sadly, now I knew my future would look different in new ways because it would not be with my children’s father. I knew I had to start from the ground up with any new relationship, building properly so it would be healthy and long-lasting. I knew I had to keep what I valued in mind from the beginning of any new relationship. From counseling, reading books, and self-reflection, I determined some of the things I needed in my new foundation. Then, as my husband and I started intentionally forging our new relationship, we had many long discussions of what we each wanted individually and what we saw as important for a marriage. We started our relationship with open and clear communication. Although we may not always practice it perfectly, we know communication is the #1 foundational skill for marriage (Key Foundation #1). Some other important foundations to work on building are patience, grace, respect, commitment, and endurance.
Canda
Each of these areas are important for their own reasons. Many of them overlap, but they also have their own distinctive features. However, they are all powerful in similar ways. Why should we work on building patience, grace, respect, commitment, and endurance? All of these are a way of expressing love. They also generate peace within ourselves, our marriages, our families, and our homes. They help us build trust between ourselves and those we interact with when properly shown. Lastly, these are opportunities for us to grow in our maturity when we strive to incorporate them well in our lives and to improve in demonstrating them.
Let’s start with Patience & Grace.
Patience:
Patience is an important skill in life. Patience while checking out at the grocery store, patience in traffic, and patience with your family. Patience has to do with staying calm when any sort of trouble crops up. In a marriage, patience can manifest in so many ways: waiting calmly when your spouse is running behind, allowing your spouse time to implement changes in their life, assuming your spouse’s best intentions with what they say or do. Being impatient with your spouse can make them feel as if you do not care about them or what they are experiencing. We all need to understand that we, ourselves, are flawed; and we cannot hold our spouses to an expectation of perfection either.
In practice, showing patience to your spouse starts with communication of your expectations, and then giving time. Patience also is expressed in your tone of voice and your body language. For example, in many relationships, punctuality means different things to each person. To one person, being on time means being early. To another, being on time means just making it there. If you and your spouse have different ideas of what it means, it will end up generating conflict. If you know that you and your spouse have struggled with this, it needs to start with communication and compromise. Then, you must be patient – by giving your spouse time and not expecting them to be perfect – as they make an effort toward meeting the mutually decided expectation.
When blending a family, patience is going to be of high importance. Just like all parenting, it is important especially in how you respond to your kids’ questions and their mistakes. With a blended family, there are a few keys to focus on with patience. First, is upon blending your family, expect adjustment time. Children will need time to learn your new spouse, their step-siblings, and expectations in the changed household. This timeline will be dependent upon many things, including the age of the children and the children’s personalities, as well as how much time they actually spend together each week. It also may have some regression at times. As the adults in the situation, you will need to give them time to deal with the changes in their lives. Second, children have to emotionally process many things, sometimes they may still be processing the end of their parents’ marriage, sometimes they are trying to figure out their placement in the new family structure, and if you have shared custody, they are also dealing with differences between the households. You may need to guide them in finding healthy ways to process those emotions, including potentially helping them get counseling.
Your children will need clear boundaries and consequences, that are fair based on their ages, consistent, and do not vary depending on whose child they are. We also need to remember that children are not mini-adults, their brains are still developing and as a result, they will not process things the same as you, the adult, will.
Grace:
Grace is unmerited favor. Grace is something exhibited by God towards each and every one of us. It is blessings and benefits granted to us that we have not, and cannot earn. It ignores intentions and actions and is unconditional. It does not hold grudges. In our relationships, grace is not easy to show towards others. For that reason, it also is not common. We believe however that our goal for our relationships should be to exhibit grace towards each other.
Sometimes offering grace to our spouse, or our kids is really easy. In those cases, the perceived offense is minor and easily dismissed out of our desire to show them love. Most of the time, however, it isn’t that easy. Those times, it takes a lot of effort to show favor towards our spouse, or our child when they have done something against us. One of the questions that have helped us is to ask yourself whether this offense will be remembered in five years or not. Another is whether this “hill” is worth dying on. It might not be the death of your relationship on that hill, but minor offenses and grudges can lead to bitterness and resentment over time. These will damage your relationship. It is a good question to ask before taking a stand on something. Is the relationship worth risking over that situation? Sometimes it is, but I would argue that most of the time it probably isn’t.
For example, if your spouse is late and doesn’t tell you where they are or how late they will be. It is easy to get upset and feel as though you are in the right. But, that is a situation where grace should be granted. It is not a good time to put it all on the line in challenge and refusal to give grace. Then, when everyone is safe and calm, you can communicate with your spouse how it made you feel and what you would like them to do if the situation arises again. This will help build your trust with one another, and strengthen the relationship.
Offering grace when we feel hurt or wounded is not easy, and it is our pride that raises its head and demands to have justice. It is our pride that demands to be placed first in the line of importance and refuses to allow someone else to “get away with” something that our pride believes was wrong. I encourage you to take control over your pride, to force it to step aside and allow grace to bridge the gap between you and your spouse, to allow grace to maintain the relationship and build intimacy and connection.
When we are dealing with our kids and step-kids, grace becomes even more important. If we want our children to grow up understanding what a healthy relationship looks like, and having the skills needed to be healthy for a relationship, they need to understand grace in action. We have the opportunity to live out grace in their lives towards them, and also towards our spouses for them to see what it looks like and feels like. There will be times when your children will act out, violate rules, and push boundaries; and there should still be clear consequences. Grace can exist within the midst of that. Grace will help our children learn to distinguish between the consequences of their actions and retribution for their actions. We don’t want our kids to think they are worthless, failures, or will never measure up! We want them to know without a doubt that they are accepted, loved, important, and valuable. Our kids are going to be looking for where they fit with their step-parent. Whether you have the role of the biological parent, or step-parent, or both, you have the opportunity to build value within those kids through offering grace.
Grace gives space for making mistakes. It allows each of you, including your kids, the freedom and openness in the family to try, to hope, to learn, and to make a mistake without it being held against them and affecting the rest of their lives.
