Julie Fillinger

Is love enough for a happily ever after?

I met my soul mate in college. Eric is the one who understood me, who didn’t try to change me but instead celebrated me. So we got married and lived happily ever after, right? After about three years, our marriage started to need healing.

I realized you can love someone and still struggle to live with them. Mostly the struggles were borne out of selfishness and pride, which shouldn’t really come as a surprise since my basis for getting married was how this person would fulfil me. 

God used the struggles of marriage to expose me

God wanted to use the struggles of marriage to expose the parts of me I hadn’t given over to him. It took me awhile to figure this out. I was expecting my husband to fulfill the longings of my heart that only God could satisfy. When he was unable to meet those expectations, I started developing negative thinking. Then he could do nothing right. Everything he did supported the negative thinking I had about him. I became critical of how he was loving me and so I didn’t trust him as a leader.  Sure, he was a good provider, and I mostly felt protected, but I didn’t feel cherished and nurtured. In short, my evaluation was he was not loving me as Christ loved the church and that’s why I struggled to respect him and fought against him. We both loved the Lord and wanted to honor him with our lives. How could we be struggling like this? I can’t believe I am saying this out loud, but I started thinking one of us was going to have to die. Surely, God did not intend us to live like this. And divorce was not an option. 

I wanted to serve the Lord, but not my husband

When I would wake up each day asking my Lord what He had for me that day, His Spirit would often nudge me to help my husband. I didn’t want to. I love my Lord and I wanted to serve Him, but not my husband. The Lord showed me respectfully serving my husband was if I was serving Him. For a long time, Eric could not tell me how to help him. This led to more frustration, and yet the Holy Spirit kept nudging me to keep trying. Finally, Eric would give me something I could do to help him and I would try to do it as cheerfully and quickly as possible. But when he didn’t show the amount of appreciation I thought it deserved, I put that in the negative column as well. I wasted so much time and energy focusing on what Eric was doing wrong, I didn’t leave any room for what he was doing right. 

Is this as good as it gets?

My motivation to keep at it was hearing the voice of the Lord. I couldn’t stand not being able to hear from Him. I have never gotten over what He did to save me. And I wanted to praise and serve Him in response. But He kept pointing back to my marriage. We could always say I love you and it was rare that we went to bed upset with each other. So for a while we settled into a kind of this is as good as it gets routine. We were pouring a lot of energy into our children and felt like that was okay. Not a lot of excitement, but pleasant enough. We got along fine, tried to have date nights that were fine. Sure, I dreamed of more. But Eric knew everything about me and still loved me, so I quit fighting and became satisfied with that being enough. Or I thought I had. But really I had not resolved the bigger heart issue of God being enough, so the struggle kept coming back up in all these annoying ways that would leave me frustrated.

Finding God enough healed my marriage

God was working on my heart for years to get me to the point of believing He is enough. He is all I need. I do not need anyone or anything else to fulfill me. No one else can. Everything else fails to satisfy because it was never intended to. 

I have previously posted the blog, Is God Enough , to share with you the work God did in my heart to find His grace completely sufficient after the death of Nicholas. When I got to the point of being able to say, “okay Lord, You are enough. I am content with just You. If I had nothing but You, I would still be okay,” I discovered this applied to my marriage too. My husband was never going to be enough until my God was enough. Then when He was, he was.  I started preferring Eric over anyone else. Now I enjoy him and celebrate how God made me to uniquely compliment him. He is my best friend and lover all over again. This is the work of the Lord. To God be the Glory. 

God keeps working on me

You think I would be happy that God has used the awful tragedy of Nicholas’s death for good. Yet I can’t help but feel regret that it takes something so painful to change my selfish, stubborn heart. The struggle continues, But God will be faithful to keep working on me until I die or Christ returns, whichever comes first.

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