5 Things That Happen When Your Spouse Stands by You through Family Drama
Marriage
Audio By Carbonatix
3:00 AM on Thursday, November 20
By Amanda Idleman, Marriage
1. Builds Unity Through Life’s Hard Moments
Facing trials can increase marital unity and connection. As you face these struggles together, you can feel a sense of team growing in your marriage. Choosing to address these issues with unity improves your ability to stay close.
1 Corinthians 1:10 states, “I appeal to you, brothers, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree, and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be united in the same mind and the same judgment.”
As husband and wife are determined to live without divisions, unity grows in your home, and you can act with the same mind and judgment. You can trust each other as you each respond to your family together. Your bond as a couple grows even as you learn to live with unity, even though life’s hard moments.
2. Builds Each Other Up When Life Gets Messy
As you walk through drama together, you learn valuable lessons on how to provide emotional support for one another. 1 Thessalonians 5:11 reminds, “Therefore encourage one another and build one another up, just as you are doing.” As partners, one of the most important things we can do for each other is to be relentless in our commitment to encourage one another and build each other up. Of all the relationships we have in this life, our marriages are of primary importance. God invites us to love our partners as he loves us, choosing to be each other’s emotional support and forever cheerleaders through all of life’s challenges.
When we are committed to being there for each other, offering words of kindness, wisdom, love, and encouragement, a strong sense of security grows in our relationship. We gain this sense of invincibility as a couple—knowing we can face nearly anything as long as we remain a team and God is our leader! Validating each other's needs when life is messy is one of the best gifts we can give each other.
3. Builds Communication Skills When We Navigate Family Drama
Communication is key to a thriving marriage! When we struggle to effectively share our needs, worries, joys, and struggles, our marriages suffer. In moments of stress, such as when we are navigating family drama, we have the opportunity to practice more effective communication.
When we are feeling pressure as a family, it's important that we don’t make assumptions about each other's thoughts or feelings. We must slow down and take time to hear each other so we are best able to respond and support one another. These are the moments we can practice putting each other first, opening our ears to really hear each other, and responding with words and actions designed to protect our marriage.
James 19-20 instructs, “Know this, my beloved brothers: let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger; for the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God.”
For our marriages to thrive through drama, we must practice following the advice we find in James, which is to slow down so we are attending carefully to the words of our partner, choose our words wisely, and be careful not to let anger overtake us. Anger does not produce the righteousness of God. Develop these positive communication skills when working through drama.
4. Builds Resilience as a Couple
James 1:2-4 states, “Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.”
Trials by God’s grace produce steadfastness and increase our resilience as a couple. My husband has known this to be true in our marriage. We’ve learned the most about what it means to love each other and remain faithful when we’ve persevered through struggles and stress. Each time we think we’ve hit a wall as a couple that feels insurmountable, we must once again call upon the Lord and remember that we are a team. When we choose to do those two things, a breakthrough is always possible!
God is doing a good work in your marriage, and he promises to bring it to completion if we don’t give up. When we learn not to grow weary in the good work of supporting each other, we see good fruit grow in our lives. This doesn’t mean we are going to be perfect in our efforts to be there for each other, but as long as we remain committed to one another, growth and perseverance will happen.
5. Builds a Stronger Prayer Life as a Couple
Romans 12:12 commands, “Rejoice in hope, be patient in tribulation, be constant in prayer.” When life is more than we can handle on our own, the only recourse we have is to go to the one who is greater than us and is capable of doing more than we could ever ask, think, or imagine. Prayer is a powerful tool in marriage!
When we face uncertainty, stress, and troubles in our families, we have the opportunity as a couple to build a stronger prayer life. Starting and ending the day together in prayer can completely transform how you handle a situation.
My husband and I struggled through years of uncertainty as foster parents, not knowing how the drama of the families that our foster children came from would impact our future. There were so many moments we struggled with feelings of fear, anxiety, and frustration. The way through these challenging years was through a mutual commitment to trust the Lord, no matter the outcome of our situation. We prayed together often over our children, for their birth parents, and for our hearts, too. Through it all, God was faithful to care for us and the children in our care. Without God, I don’t know how we would have made it through these past years of waiting, praying, and challenges.
We each have our own unique stories that God is working through. He is a waymaker. A lamp unto our feet when we need to know how to move forward. Trials in our lives and in our marriage help teach us how to rely more fully on God. He is faithful.
