Friday High Five

Five Reasons Why I Love My Husband

5) He walks his talk. Mutual friends set Scott and I up on our first date. We were living a half a country apart but happened to be "in the same place at the same time." The female of this couple had told me three years prior if Scott and I were ever in the same place at the same time and not dating someone else, we needed to meet. So I was on vacation in Southern Maryland where he just moved. I asked my friend, who proposed that Scott and I should meet, "Why? I live in Texas and he lives here?" She told me he was just like her husband, whom I'd always admired. I was intrigued if for no other reason to meet a man in his late thirties and never been married but was a prize catch.

4) He met all the criteria on my "silly little checklist" and them some. Sometime early in my Christian faith, someone said I should pray for my future husband. So I developed a list of things for which to pray. A Friend of mine told me "That's a silly list, no one will ever meet all those points." This person obviously hadn't read Psalm 37:4 "Delight in the Lord and he will give you the desires of your heart." A preacher once taught on this passage saying it meant, "If you love the Lord and want to please him, He will place the desires in your heart for which to pray and then He'll answer those prayers." So I prayed for a military man, an engineer, with at least a Master's Degree who had been a strong and mature believer in Christ since he was a teenager, who still teaches people about Jesus and who never stops growing in all areas of his life. I guess by being that specific I was able to recognize the answers to my prayers when I met him.

3)He challenges me. He challenges me in a good way. When I was dating I met a lot of guys who challenged me. I like to be challenged to learn more, to stretch myself and to mature. I find that I'd loose respect for the guy I was dating if he started off in my mind "above me" and I was able to catch up or surpass him. After 11 years of being around my husband, he still challenges me. I'm surprised ever week in our small group bible study or occasionally when he preaches at our church, that he's still learning and growing. He's still sets the mark slightly out of my reach but still within sight.

2)He supports me. Not only does he support me, he encourages me and pushes me. When we got married, he asked me to become a stay at home mom. He knew this was a lot to ask of me because I'd worked all my adult life. I also had a significant position in a Fortune ranked company. He surprised me one day when he came home with an application for a Master's Degree level executive coaching certificate program. I asked him how we could justify paying graduate level tuition when we never planned for me to work. He said, "I want to make sure that you are challenged. I want you to have something else besides cleaning the house and raising the kids." Throughout our marriage, whether he's found something for me or I've found something for myself, he's supported me whether it was paying for training or taking time off to work to watch the kids.

1) He's romantic. Since the very beginning of our relationship he's been the romantic. Eleven years later he still brings home flowers on a regular basis. Our first year of marriage he brought home a rose for each month we'd been married on the monthly anniversary of our wedding until he reached a dozen on our anniversary. His wedding gift to me was a dozen gold dipped roses, a permanent reminder of his love for me. He even had a vase especially designed by a local glass blower. He insisted our honeymoon be in Paris and Rome, even though I wanted the Niagara Falls. But on our 10th anniversary he took me to Niagara Falls, booked a hotel right on the falls and a fancy dinner at a restaurant overlooking the falls. (P.S. I'm not knocking our honeymoon. We ate in the Eiffel Tower Restaurant on our first night there....life doesn't get any better.)