YOU CAN RESPECT HIM

Every man has gifts because he is in God’s image. Abilities, giftedness is there; you can trust that it is.

 

My husband, Eric, worked as an electrician's helper when we first married; the pay was minimum wage and we lived on it about four years in a rented mobile home; our first two sons were born in those years. Work he did not know existed came to him just after our third son was born. Eric had a natural bent toward organization and Logistics. His education at Boston University in secondary science, work as a Radioman on the U.S.S. Ponchatoula and now his interest in electricity all qualified him for a career in the Navy.

 

If it takes time for interests and gifts to come out, listen carefully to your husband day after day. Watch him with fresh hope and vision. Look deeper than the surface you will discover his strengths, his gifts. He will be very encouraged if he suspects you are seeing him this way. Passion will rise again; fascinating layers to his personality he may not even know are there.

 

Beyond his encouraged persona, you have hope, too. When you met and agreed to marry him, you saw something important and worthy of love and respect. With years of marriage, with the disappointments, you may have forgotten all the reasons. But no matter what he has or has not accomplished yet you can begin again to believe because he is created in the image of God.

 

Look and listen. Focus. A spark, an interest he demonstrates. Being closest to him, you may begin to recognize it! His uniqueness needs pride from you. Your power is because you are created in the image of God!  “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.” Genesis 1:27. 

 

For the minute, forget the past, forget the attitude of anyone else and think just of yourself, him, and God! Once you “see” with spiritual eyes and you decide to encourage what you see in your husband, you may just make the difference in his future . . . and in yours . . . in the future of your world.

With fifty years together, the solidarity, the agreement and love, Eric and I share covers even how we disagree. It has come from the Bible. 

"CALL UNTO ME"

In Scripture, there is an invitation to call on our Creator. The All Powerful One is there. We have needed Him in crises recently.

On the way out the door with instruments, music stands and time drawing near, we had to change the plan. My husband, Eric, our son Zach, and I have been ministering with Hymns and Bible verses at an assisted living home going on four years. Each month, we never knew what to expect: sometimes seventeen residents came. One month just one showed up, but she was confident enough to allow us to sing and read and quote the Bible just to her for an hour. Lately more have come.

Last month as we packed the car with what we would need, Eric had a pain in his chest, and a feeling of increasing weakness. It was time to show up for the Julin Family Hymns, but instead we talked him into going to the ER. It was the Sunday before Easter.

On the day before Easter, an intense pain (that had been increasing for months) took me to the ER. The Emergency Room is not where you ever want to be.

A CT scan, Ultrasound tests showed that I am healthy.

Eric’s tests for his heart also revealed nothing. Looking ahead, all we know is this:

“Call unto me, and I will answer thee, and shew thee great and mighty things, which thou knowest not.” Jeremiah 33:3.

What is going on? God knows. Our Creator is also our Redeemer.

“I love the LORD, because he hath heard my voice and my supplications. Because he hath inclined his ear unto me, therefore will I call upon him as long as I live. The sorrows of death compassed me, and the pains of hell gat hold upon me: I found trouble and sorrow. Then called I upon the name of the LORD; O LORD, I beseech thee, deliver my soul. Gracious is the LORD, and righteous; yes, our God is merciful. The LORD preserves the simple: I was brought low, and he helped me. Return unto thy rest, O my soul; for the LORD hath dealt bountifully with thee. For thou hast delivered my soul from death, mine eyes from tears, and my feet from falling. I will walk before the LORD in the land of the living.”

Psalm 116:1-9.