Bending in Marriage

This is a brief discussion to enlist your personal self-examination and the view point that may be needed to review in line with God’s principles.

Bending – Is a verb to shape or force (something straight) into a curve or angle.  Notice, it isn’t to the point of breaking.  We do not enter marriage to break the partner of such an agreement.

Lets use Matthew 5:3-12, the Be Attitudes as the base of our thinking in marriage.  It would be well that one reviews each of these as situations arise between spouses.  God had given our spouse as a source of a person to aid us to confirm more fully to Him.  God choose that person in your life as He knew she or he would be a person to help the other understand some of the finer points in life and attitudes.  We need to consider that we are proud and bent on doing things ‘our way’. 

When we do things ‘our way’ we can really be doing things contrary to ‘God’s way’?  God wants to refine us (sanctification) to be more like Him.  God knows that within self we do not have a ability of unscrambling the mess of we are, thus God chooses the spouse to a help to us.

Review:  Matthew 5:3-12:

³ “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

⁴ “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.

⁵ “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.

⁶ “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.

⁷ “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.

⁸ “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.

⁹ “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.

¹⁰ “Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

¹¹ “Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. ¹² Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you.  ESV

We need to apply these “attitudes” in our marriage as of these apply to the situations in our spousal relationship. Are we being ‘meek’ when we seek to understand the difficulty or the bending areas/things that our spouse does that we frequently do not even know?  Are we merciful in our attitude to our spouse or do we say;  “I am the one that keeps bending and bending and bending, not realizing or thinking the other might be going through the same on other issues we do not see”.  Are we being ‘pure in heart’ when we only see ‘self’ and thus we are selfish?  Do we seek to be peacemakers or point out discrepancies without mercy?     We really would do well to consider all of them in our daily situations in life. 

Another arena would be changes/people in the church family.  When changes in the church occur do, we try to understand and accept by bending, if necessary, to God’s will?

Each person in the marriage can list the areas that they ‘bend’ different then if it was their way.  For example, list in your mind the things that you consider you have to bend the way of your mate.  Now, consider that the other one as would he such.  The things would be on the minor scale as the major ones would be most difficult to accomplish. 

Just a few examples generally spoken of even in the media:

The toilet paper roll to have a front hanging or back hanging piece.

The tooth paste would be squeezed from the bottom up and rolled up accordingly.

The food budget would be more or less.

The time of bedtime and arise time.

The driver when riding together.

AND more…

The point is that frequently we can only see the we consider we are ‘bending’ to the other and not our way. This discussion is aimed at giving us something to think about and perhaps to stop and consider the other person or persons involved. The problem is generally that we see our side very clearly and fail to try and hear/see the other side.

From this short topic one hope we take a look within ourselves to examine how we look at things and if it is ‘one sided”.   Bottom Line:  Since we can clearly see when we do the bending how cloudy is the view toward the other person?