Grant walked in the door from a long day of work.  I was so happy to see him, but somehow, between his first steps in the door and dinnertime, I began to express frustration towards him. It had something to do with a pile of laundry and a pair of dirty cowboy boots.

Within minutes, I realized my mistake. How could I have so quickly torn my husband down with my words? I know better! I know God has called me to be my husband’s encourager and helper. I left the chaos in the kitchen and went into our bedroom and closed the door. “God, please forgive me,” I prayed. Had I ruined our evening together? Was he angry with me? I gathered my courage and walked into the living room to ask Grant for his forgiveness. He was sitting in his chair reading and looked up when I came in the room. Before I could get a word out of my mouth he said, “GraceAnna, I have been thinking and been meaning to tell you that you are just the best wife! I could not imagine being married to anyone else. ” I stood there with my heart caught in my throat. I saw the genuineness in his eyes and felt the love behind his words. I didn’t know what to say. “Grant…I came in here to apologize to you. Don’t you remember how I treated you a few moments ago?” Grant looked as if he was trying to remember, “Oh don’t worry about that, you are forgiven.” 

As I reflect on my marriage to Grant over the past four years, not a day has gone by where I haven’t sinned or failed in some way. Even though I am being changed more and more into the likeness of Christ, fighting my flesh is still a daily battle (Romans 7:15). I knew I would inevitably sin and hurt Grant before I got married, but what surprised me was discovering the grace of God in a new way through marriage.

The times when I sin against Grant and instead of retaliating with anger he bestows immediate forgiveness, grace overwhelms me. And this is the true essence of grace; it is not something that is earned, it is poured out on undeserving sinners who recognize their great need for it. It goes above and beyond. It’s not just “You are forgiven,” it’s “You are forgiven and now possess all the riches of Christ” (Eph. 1:18).

In chapter 3 of Romans, the depravity of the human condition is described. Every time I read it, I am completely humbled by verses like, “There is no one who does good, not even one,” and “Their throat is an open grave.” Then in verse 21, the good news breaks into the darkness, “But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the Law.” It is the righteousness of God alone that we receive by grace that justifies us (Rom. 3:24). And the grace of God is not just something we receive on the day of our salvation, it is what we cling to every single day.

When we live with someone in a marriage relationship, we see one another’s faults. While a husband and wife should help each other with areas of sin, we should strive not be faultfinders, but grace givers. Proverbs 19:11 says, “A man’s discretion makes him slow to anger, and it is his glory to overlook a transgression.”  When we are overwhelmed by the reality of the grace we have received in Christ, forgiveness becomes an overflow of a grateful heart. Instead of being professional speck finders, we are driven to our knees by the weight of our own sin. As wives, sometimes we can be so quick to see areas of fault in our husband. We can be quick to lash out with words that cannot so quickly be unspoken. But, if we were just to look in the mirror of God’s Word a little deeper, what we would find would silence our petty talk.

As I look forward to another year of marriage, I want to love more deeply, forgive more generously, and overlook small annoyances, even dirty cowboy boots.

This morning, I read a wonderful post over at CBMW on “Lies Women Believe While Wedding Planning.” As I read Brittany’s article, I remembered a little blogpost I wrote in 2009 when Grant and I were engaged and planning our wedding. I’m so thankful I had people in my life (specifically my mom and sisters-in-law) who spoke truth to me about the lies young women so often believe regarding their wedding day. The truth they spoke into my life saved me from much selfish heartache.

(July 2009)

I officially entered the world of wedding planning in May after Grant and I got engaged. I knew there would be a lot involved with planning a wedding, but I didn’t realize how much is involved.

After we got engaged, I thought I should probably pick up a wedding planner to help me stay organized. I walked into Barnes & Noble to buy one. I stood there in shock as I discovered how thick the basic wedding planners are! The first one I opened started with a checklist that said, “16 months out from the wedding.” Well, I already missed that deadline by over a year!

I thought that picking out a wedding planner would help keep me from feeling overwhelmed, not the other way around! Needless to say, I walked out of the store empty handed.

To be fair, there is a lot involved in planning a wedding (though not nearly as much as the “planners” would like you to believe).

As my parents and I prepare for my wedding, there has been one thing my sister-in-law Chesed told me at the beginning of the summer that has really helped me in this whole process of planning. She told me, “GraceAnna, whenever you get stressed or start to feel like maybe something is not working out the way you want it to, you need to remember something that my brother told me when I was planning for my wedding, ‘You deserve hell; anything else is grace.’”

I laughed when she first said it, and said, “Wow, that’s harsh!” But the more I thought about it, the more it resonated with me. Then she added, “And just remember to be thankful for the godly man that God has brought into your life to be your husband. You are entering a covenant relationship with him. That’s what your wedding day is all about.”

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve thought about those words. When I’ve been tempted to get overwhelmed by things, I’ve remembered, “I deserve hell, and look what God has given me!” When I contemplate this great truth, my heart is immediately filled with joy and gratitude. Whatever it is that I’m trying to make a decision about, suddenly pales in comparison. At the end of the day, the exact hue of the bridal bouquets and boutonnieres doesn’t matter. Whether the cake is moist and fluffy or dried and flaky, doesn’t matter.  Whether it’s a beautiful sunny day or gloomy and rainy, it doesn’t matter. 

I would definitely be lying if I said that I don’t desire to have a beautiful wedding day. I do. But what’s even more beautiful than all the trappings of a wedding is the redemption that has taken place in my heart and the grace of God in bringing a godly man into my life. Look at all of that grace! And it’s not just that I don’t deserve those wonderful things, it’s that I deserve hell and have been given eternal life.

I’ve already been given the best.

Job 33:28 says, “You have redeemed my life from the pit, and my life shall look upon the light.”

I’m so grateful for His redemption. I’m so grateful to be able to spend my life serving the Lord with a man who loves the Lord with all of his heart. The dress, the flowers, the everything else…that’s just something extra. Those things are just there to accent something that is already beautiful all on its own- the covenant of marriage which is a gift of God’s grace. And I have been so overwhelmed by it these past few months.

I was barely 24 years old, and a newlywed of only two months when I packed my bags and moved across the world to a small, military base on the coast of mainland Japan. Leaving everything I had ever known to join my husband overseas was by far the hardest thing I had done in my life. When I married Grant, I stepped into a world of many unknowns. He was a Marine Officer who felt God’s call on his life to one day become a pastor. In terms of what our future together would look like, that was all I knew.

The day I married Grant, I promised to walk down that road of unknowns with him. I vowed to go where he would go, stay where he would stay, and be wholly committed to God’s call not only on my life, but also on his. Those two things would forever be intertwined. I didn’t step blindly into my new role as a wife. One of the very first things Grant told me when we started dating was how he felt God leading him to the pastorate. He told me he had an insatiable desire to know and preach the Bible. This calling on his life was one of the reasons I fell in love with him.

Before Grant came into my life, I also felt God leading my heart to a life of full-time ministry. I didn’t know if God was calling me to serve Him as a single woman, or if I would get married one day and serve alongside my husband. I hoped and prayed that I would be a wife and mother one day. But one thing God taught me through my season of singleness was that if I did get married, I needed to marry a man I could follow. I wanted the desires God was putting on my heart to be able to flow in support of my future husband’s calling. When I was growing up, my parents described the uniqueness of marriage by saying that “Marriage is two people serving God better together, than they ever could alone.”  I saw this modeled very well in my parents’ marriage. My dad is a pastor and my mom has always served the body of Christ alongside him. Their roles in the church look different. My dad preaches and exhorts God’s flock. My mom encourages and supports my dad while also ministering to women in the church. My parents were never in competition with each other or torn between two varying passions in their lives.  When Grant and I got married, I vowed wholeheartedly to be his helper because God finally made it clear how my calling to ministry would flesh itself out. I would be Grant’s “helper suitable” (Gen. 2:18), and together, we would serve God in a better way than we ever could alone.

When Grant and I moved to Japan after our wedding, I was apprehensive. I wouldn’t describe myself as the adventurous type. However, as I made this big transition, by God’s grace, I trusted in the God who brought Grant and me together. I knew because I was called to be Grant’s wife, Japan was part of God’s plan for me. I also knew there was no better place for me to be than in the center of God’s will. I grew to really love Japan and the memories we made there. And much to my surprise, a year later, the military sent us back to the states and to my hometown in South Carolina.

Grant and I moved into our first house and sometime later I gave birth to our first child – a little girl. We were just getting settled, when unexpectedly, an opportunity arose where God opened the door for Grant to begin his seminary training sooner than planned. We felt certain God wanted us to walk through this open door. I was excited, but also shocked. I felt like I had just hung my picture frames on our cheery yellow walls, and now, I was taking them down. While my emotions were a sea of ups and downs, I was not despairing. I believed this was God’s will for our little and yet quickly growing family. God made the path clear, and my response in this scenario was to trust God and follow my husband’s leading.

As I grow as a young wife and reflect on where God has brought Grant and me in our marriage thus far, I have learned several things:

• If you are a single woman and God has placed in your heart a desire to get married, pray God would affirm a clear calling in your future husband’s life.  Our generation needs men who have huge hearts for God. Men who have visions to raise godly families and be a light of truth in our world. And these men need women who are strong enough to help them get there. I love how my mom has always put it, “Strong men need to marry strong women.” As Christians, we should all aspire to be strong men and women of faith and conviction. This kind of marriage combination is what she’s always called, “power couples.” Instead of asking God to give you an ordinary marriage one day, why not pray for an extraordinary one? Imagine what a generation of young, “power couples” who are wholly committed to God could do! Pray not for a perfect man (for that would be impossible), but for a man who is gripped by the person of Jesus Christ and who desires to do whatever God would have him do. And ask God to be guiding and directing your heart in order to be a strong “helper suitable” to him.

• If you are a married woman, be open to God’s leading in your husband’s life. Maybe the way in which God is directing him is not something you would have planned, but as you pray together as a couple, trust God’s leading through your husband. God gave Adam a task in the Garden of Eden and He created Eve in order to help Adam complete that task (Gen. 2:15,18). If you are married, God has clearly brought you to your husband. So help him, encourage him, pray for him, and be strong in the Lord so that together you can glorify God in bigger ways than you could alone.

• If you are a woman approaching marriage, or already married, remember that your calling as a woman should flow in support of your husband’s calling, not redirect it or run in conflict with it (Titus 2:4-5). As wives, we constantly need to check our hearts to see if we are being submissive to and supportive of our husband’s leading. Are we available to offer wise counsel and a listening ear? Does our husband know we are on his team or are we pressing an agenda that might even be contrary to his calling? We need to be women who are looking out for the welfare of our husbands, not preoccupied with our own. Women in whom our husbands trust wholly and fully (Prov. 31:11-12). Women who rely on the grace of God, because without Him we can do nothing well.

Lately, I have been incredibly encouraged by the life of Sarah, Abraham’s wife.  Sarah was far from a perfect woman, and she was not married to a perfect man either. But Sarah was a strong woman of faith despite her failings.  God set apart Abraham to be the father of a great nation that would be His witness to the world. But Sarah’s calling was just as important. Without her, there would be no nation, for she was to be the mother of a promised child. I can’t imagine what it was like for Sarah to hear the news from Abraham that God had called him to forever leave Ur and set out into a life of wandering, seeking the land of Promise. But she did. The Apostle Peter, through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, commends Sarah as a model for all women because she submitted to Abraham’s leadership. Peter also says, “And you have become her children if you do what is right without being frightened by any fear.”

May we, as women, be daughters of Sarah. And by the grace of Christ, may we live lives full of faith with our eyes focused on Christ, not overcome with fear, but trusting in the One who made us distinctly female.