I Can't Say I Told You So

I have prayed that somewhat dangerous prayer that God would either change my heart or change my husband's heart. It seems that the conversations that have occurred between my husband and I the past couple of weeks have been the beginning of the answer to that prayer. For me, it means letting go and letting God take control of these situations. No amount of my arguing and complaining is going to change his mind. Rather those things have just made him more stubborn! I am learning that I can best serve and submit to Christ when I serve and submit to my husband-rather than defy him. This is not an easy thing for me to grasp, let alone practice.

What Would I Want in My Eulogy?

I am taking a course called Perspectives on Death and Dying. For this class, we were required to journal about how we want to live our lives (i.e. what do I want people to remember about me?). The following is what I wrote.

Faith
Most importantly, I would want to have served Christ with my whole life—recklessly and wholeheartedly. I think it would be awesome to get to die for the gospel (if I am even worthy of that honor). I don’t want Christ to be ashamed of me, but rather that I would faithfully serve him.

Family
I want to love my husband, and I want to love my children in a way that I am willing to make great sacrifices for them. If I go before my husband, I want to have loved him in such a way that a second wife would never compare (though, I freely give my full permission for him to remarry)! I want to raise my children so that they can never say their mother didn’t spend enough time with them or that she didn’t answer their “why” questions.

Friends
I hope people will say that I wasn’t afraid of anything, that I wasn’t afraid to take risks and try new things. I want to live my life in a way that everyone I encounter can honestly know I didn’t gossip or cheat or lie while I was alive. I want to share wise advice whenever I can, never watering things down just to make people feel better; but I hope I never think of myself as wise.

Career
I want them to say I was multi-talented. I hope that I do not use all my resources in a single dead-end job for the rest of my life, but rather that I experience the whole gamut of what my talents will let me do. I hope I allow myself to be real with people and experience relationships—experience the bad and the good. I hope I let myself get hurt and that I see the positive when I do get hurt. I hope I’ll be remembered as a happy woman. Something I have already instituted in my everyday life is constant smiling in an attempt to make everyone else’s day better, everyday.

What I want to leave behind…
I want to travel all over the world, if I can. Being remembered as a world-traveler would make me seem mysterious and exciting to my grandchildren! I want to leave behind a gazillion photos for them to dig through along with my artwork, journals and souvenirs from my world travels. And finally, over the years, as I try recipes I want to make them my own and leave them behind for others to enjoy and remember: “Man, could that woman cook!”