Family Values
My now husband and I began dating sooner than I expected I would meet someone. I was divorced with a son, and felt like I walked around with a giant D on my forehead. I thought I would live the single mom life for a long time before meeting someone. I was pleasantly surprised to be wrong about this prediction.
He will admit that he noticed me and wanted to shoot his shot before anyone else scooped me up. Opportunist man that he is.
We took months getting to know each other as friends before dating. We both had fear of moving too fast.
After dating for a little while, we were eating lunch together on a Sunday afternoon. He looked at me and said “So, do you think this is headed in a long term direction?” He then took a big bite of his sandwich seemingly in an effort to quiet himself while he waited for my reply.
I smiled and tentatively nodded my head yes.
We continued to get to know each other, our families, and even had a couple sessions with a counselor early on to make sure our dating was going in the right direction. When we began to talk about marriage more seriously, we decided to begin pre-engagement counseling.
Once a ring is on your finger and a date is set, it’s hard to stop the wedding train momentum or see red flags clearly. We felt as though we had a healthy relationship and that life together would be good. Our families approved, our church leaders approved, but we wanted to be able to ask hard questions of each other and our relationship in front of one more set of eyes before fully committing to move forward.
Remarriage with a child can be complicated, and we wanted help navigating the waters.
For one of our sessions, our counselor had us talk through family values and rules. We would be parenting together from day one and he felt it was important we were on the same page. We both came up with a list of rules separately and then talked through them together.
I sometimes roll my eyes at counseling “exercises”, but these values really have begun to take shape in our home. I am thankful for Nathan and his desire to sift through what really matters in a day and a lifetime. He talks often about the brevity of life and it really helps us to focus out the daily frustrations or minutiae that don’t actually matter.
This list is what became of our conversation surrounding values and it will be God’s grace that gets us through as we keep practicing them together.
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Above all, we pursue fidelity to the word of God, no matter the outcome. We use kind words and eyes. We keep short accounts. We are characterized by working and resting hard. We are a team and we all pitch in. We tell the truth and have integrity with our words and actions. Our home will use technology in it’s proper place. Our family members are our best friends. We make a decision, and then we make the decision right. We believe you can choose your choices, but you cannot choose your consequences. We practice gratefulness for the people and things we have. We use listening ears and minds. We give the benefit of the doubt. We speak life over one another. We laugh together. We show up for one another.
We treat each other as if these are our last moments together.
