Under Attack

It’s been a while since I have updated my blog. A lot has happened and I have had to spend a great deal of time processing several different things. The year 2015 began with my husband and me taking a marriage class at our church. We started the class towards the end of 2014. We met with a small group of people every week for about 9 months. We learned what God intends a marriage to be and how to turn God’s intentions into a reality. I learned a lot through that process. I learned some really bad things that I wish I could forget. But most importantly, I learned about how the love God has for us can really change us. The catch is, it only works if we allow His love into our hearts. 

After we completed the course, our leaders told us that Satan would try to attack our marriage. They were right. Just a few weeks after “graduating” from the class, Satan found a way in. He attacked our marriage in a big, BIG way. Satan was trying to destroy our marriage and it was beginning to feel like he was winning. We had to do something. We began by reaching out to our leaders. On their recommendation, we went and saw the movie, The War Room, which is pretty amazing. I can’t wait to buy that movie.

The day after that, I woke up with a plan to kick Satan out of my marriage and out of my home. My husband and I dove into the Lord’s word and were obedient to Him. Satan was still lurking around, looking for ways to destroy our marriage. He attacked us a couple of times, but we were not going to let him win.
The reality is that Satan is always going to try to find a way into our lives. His primary goals are to kill, steal, and destroy. He wants to kill our spirit, steal our joy, and destroy our relationships. The only thing that drives Satan away is God’s love. This is hard to remember when Satan is attacking. That is why it is so important to remember God loves us so much that He gave us a choice. God will only come in if we invite Him in. Satan doesn’t want to give us that choice. He will work really hard to find a way in. He doesn’t care if he is welcome or not.


This year, I’ve learned quite a bit about myself. God has revealed to me why He put me on this path. I am learning how to accept the blessings God has intended for me. It is true that God doesn’t always give us what our heart desires. Sometimes it's because it isn't the right time. We have to be patient and wait. In the meantime, He blesses us in other ways. I pray everyone reading this will begin looking for God's blessings instead of focusing on a heart not getting what it wants. 

Sometimes God doesn't give us our heart's desires because He has a bigger and better plan for us. We have to be brave enough to step through the door God is holding open for us in that moment. I pray everyone reading this finds the courage to step through whatever door God is holding open for you.

Re-Engage Part Two

Yesterday I began posting about the challenges my husband and I have faced throughout our marriage. You can read that post here. I wrote about some negative feelings I was having but didn’t know how to turn those feelings into positive feelings without my husband’s help. For me, the first step in solving that problem was him using words and a tone of voice that showed me he cared I was hurting. On the flip side, I had to be able to let his love in. I had to allow him to love me.

After years of hurt, it was pretty hard to do. I wanted to keep my guard up and not trust his efforts were going to stick. I wanted to protect my heart from future hurt. But I knew that line of thinking would not help my marriage. In fact, that line of thinking was more likely to set my husband up for failure. I wanted him to succeed in his efforts.

It was my job to set him up for success. As long as he was willing to put forth an effort, his success was partially dependent on whether or not I was going to allow allow him to succeed. The only thing that would make my marriage grow was to allow his efforts to heal my pain. All while knowing in my heart that things he had been saying to cause the hurt, was most likely going to happen again.

It wasn’t easy at first. But the more I allowed him to heal my pain, the easier it became. Not only that, but the more I allowed him to to heal my pain, the easier it was for him to put forth the effort.

Did those things that caused the hurt happen again. Yes, they did. But things were beginning to change.

Accusations turned into ownership. Instead of saying, “You are out of control!” We said, “I am reaching my boiling point so I’m going to step away from this situation until I am in a better place to have this conversation.” 

As weeks turned into months, the things that happened to cause the hurt were still happening, but not as often as they had happened before. When they did happen, we’d spend time reflecting together afterwards. He’d ask me at what point in the conversation did I think things got out of control and why I felt it was out of control. He would share with me when he felt things were out of control. It helped us learn about each other’s boiling points. Knowing each other’s boiling points has helped us both keep difficult conversations under control.

Turns out I view stress differently than he does. What does that mean in conflict resolution? This next part might be confusing if you haven’t experienced it. For us, it meant I thought he had reached his boiling point before he was really there. Once I believed he had reached that point, it caused me to react. I thought I was reacting to his stress. It wasn’t his stress I was reacting to. I was reacting to my own fears from past hurt. Of course, that caused my husband to also react to my fears. And that made things escalate at a quick pace. 

Confusing as mud?

Re-Engage

My husband and I started attending a weekly program at our church called Re-Engage. We’ve only gone to three sessions and it looks like it will take about 6 months to complete the course. It’s a program designed to help your marriage grow. We’ve heard lots of good things from the program so we’ve been looking forward to getting started.

My husband has also been blogging about his experiences in our marriage. Between his blogging and joining this course, I’ve been thinking a lot about our marriage, what it was and where it is going. A little over two years ago, our marriage was pretty much over. I was dealing with a lot of negative feelings that I didn’t know how to fix on my own. I no longer felt like the love in our marriage was real. It didn’t feel like I was in love with my husband. I didn’t feel he was in love with me. To me, it felt like we were two people that just happened to live under the same roof and were raising the same children. There were times where my husband would be home, but to me, it felt like he wasn’t there. It was as if he was part of the decoration. To me, our home felt the same whether he was there or not. That wasn’t the kind of marriage I wanted to be in.

I talked to my husband about it. We had been attending counseling sessions at our church and communication was one thing we trying to improve at the time. I remember one night we got into a really big fight that ended with me driving off, not knowing what I was going to do next. I think I drove around for about an hour. I remember coming home and saying these words to my husband:

“I know you might not know how to fix the problem, but the least you could do is use your words to show me you care that I’m hurting, instead of using words to cause more hurt.”

I don’t remember if I worded it exactly like that, but you get the gist. The past two and a half years have been pretty amazing. We still have work that needs to be done. But it isn’t like it used to be. I’m so thankful for our church. I can honestly say I don’t know if we’d still be married today if it we had never stepped through those doors. We still struggle in some areas, but the negative feelings are no longer there and the hurtful words that were once in our relationship are getting to a point where they are almost non-existent.

2014 Year in Review

I haven’t been posting regularly and I am hoping to get back into the habit of regular blogging again. beginning with a wrap up of 2014. For the most part, 2014 was a good year. Like every other year there were highs and lows.

• We started the year with a wedding. My little brother got married! He and his wife are so good together and it is obvious that they are happy in each other’s company.
• My daughter tried out for the high school cheer leading squad. She didn’t make it, but she was close. It devastated her and we are still dealing with the affects from that today.
• We signed my two boys up for special needs baseball and bowling. Both boys fall on the autism spectrum, so this was exciting to be able to get them involved in something where they were accepted.
• We bought a new—to us—car, a Dodge Durango. It is perfect and had everything we were looking for. Also came at a great price.
• My husband started helping to teach our Sunday school class. He teaches once a month and I think he has learned a lot about himself from the process.
• The biggest high of the year was taking a week long vacation—without the kids—to Canada to see Niagara Falls. That was amazing! We are both big fans of road trips so we drove from Texas. We stopped at several places along the way there and back.
• I turned 40 this year. 40 has been a pretty amazing year.
• My oldest child started high school and my youngest child started kindergarten.
• My husband and I celebrated 20 years of being together, that’s half of our life!
• The biggest low of the year was my father-in-law passing away. That came with a lot of struggles, more than was necessary, because of anger from unresolved issues and certain family members fighting to get their way and not willing to compromise. We continue to pray for healing in that area.
• I’ve always wanted to go back to work, but having two boys on the spectrum has made that extremely difficult. My oldest son’s needs are too demanding for me to be a reliable employee to any company. I ended up finding a wonderful volunteer opportunity through a non-profit organization; National CASA Association, that works with abused and neglected children. It isn’t a paycheck, but I wasn’t really looking to make more money, I wanted something more constructive to do with my time. I love the work that I am doing and love that I can do most of the work on my own time. 
• My daughter got her first major role in a play at the community theatre. She had a great time and we are looking forward to the possibility of her participating in more performances with them.

All in all, a pretty good year. Looking forward to what 2015 has to offer. Already in the process of putting plans into place for some very exciting memories to be made with the family.

Random Thoughts: Beliefs

Every once in a while, out of the blue, random thoughts will enter into my head. There have been times where I have waken up, with a start, in the middle of the night because of these random thoughts. I don't know where they come from. They are not thoughts I would try to think up on my own. Maybe I heard them before and tucked them away somewhere. Who knows where they come from.

Anyway, today I was driving around town, not thinking about anything in particular, and one of those random thoughts popped into my head.

"Everyone has their own set of beliefs, and that's perfectly fine. A good solid belief is one you can really hold on to. Good solid beliefs can be proven true, over and over again. A good solid belief is not going to leave you feeling let down."

Autism

Today I am participating in a blog hop. Kelly’s Korner is hosting a blog hop specifically for parents of special needs children. As parents with special needs children, it can be difficult to connect with other parents who understand what we are going through. Kelly’s hope is to connect parents of children with special needs with other parents who have similar challenges. I have met a lot of great people online who have helped me in one way or another with the different challenges that come with raising a child on the spectrum. Hopefully I will continue to meet people or my story will help someone else going through similar issues.
Christopher is 10 years old. He has severe autism. He is non-verbal. I started to notice a difference in his behavior right before he turned two. When I say difference in behavior, I mean I noticed he was different from most children his age. He was always delayed with milestones and he had a lot of unusual quirky behavior for a child of his age. I know when I just say it like that it doesn’t sound like a big deal, but if you saw the things he was doing and how obsessed he was with doing those things….

At his 18 month check up, his doctor asked me if I was concerned about his development. I knew he was behind, but I wasn’t too concerned about it at that point. Somewhere between that check up and his 2 year check up, I started to get concerned. He wasn’t responding to people very much at all. He wasn’t trying to develop his communication skills when  he needed something. Most kids by age 2 would try to verbalize their needs using words, but Chris still got our attention by crying the way an infant does.
I Googled some of the symptoms that concerned me and found an article that listed 9 characteristics of autism. At the age of 2, Chris had 7 of the traits on the list. I printed that article and brought it with me to his 2 year check up. The pediatrician spent a great deal of time with us. She preformed a hearing test. She gave us further instructions on where to go to get additional testing done. She suggested the possibility of autism, but wanted a neurologist to give us the final diagnosis. We had several tests done and like most autism cases, the tests all came back normal.  The neurologist confirmed our pediatrician’s fears and my fears as well. Chris had autism.
We started speech therapy and occupational therapy right away. The therapists came to our house for almost a year. My husband’s job transferred us to another state. He started getting services from the school district when we moved. We were seeing some results, but nothing over the top extraordinary. About the time he got his 4 year shots, he got a new teacher. There was a lot of regression during that time. I started to notice that anytime there was change, he would regress. He also seemed to have the attitude that once he knew how to do something, there was no need to do it anymore.
Today he is 10 years old. It has been a while since we have seen significant progress in Chris. The good news is he is mostly happy. He is beginning to develop some aggression issues at school and we are trying to figure out how to deal with that. Hopefully that will stop now that it is summer vacation. He will attend the extended school year program which begins in July.
I’d love to hear from anyone who has a special needs child. Even if you aren’t dealing with autism, I’ve found we may not be dealing with the same diagnosis, but there are still some things that might be similar. Thanks for stopping by!
Jennifer

Cherished Sins

Our pastor has been doing a series of sermons on praying. Yesterday’s service was fantastic. He talked about our cherished sins. These are the sins we hold on tightly to with clenched fists, in an effort to protect them, cover them up, hide them from everyone else. Cherished sins are those sins you won’t talk to anyone about, not even God, even though that sin can’t be hidden from God. Ironically, these are the sins God wants to talk to you about. Talking about these sins builds your character, sets you free from guilt, opens your heart up to receive forgiveness.
I recently finished a bible study to go along with the concept of “cherished sins.” It was a Beth Moore bible study called Sacred Secrets. There are several different YouTube videos to watch about it. When I first started the class, I didn’t think I had any secrets. I’m pretty open to talking to people about anything I’ve done whether it’s good or bad. But there is one thing I have that I do not talk about unless someone else brings it up first. I have talked to God about this sin I have. I have come to terms and learned to accept the consequences of my own actions. I have also told people that are close to me about this sin. I’ve talked to others who aren’t close to me about this sin. But it is not a topic I have ever brought up on my own.
Luckily, God doesn’t expect us to share these secrets with everyone. He only expects us to share them with Him and when you share your secret sins with Him, He will reward you. Everyone has secrets, it doesn’t make you a bad person. What matters most is what you do with that secret. When you hold on to this secret sin with fists tightly closed, that sin becomes your baggage. That sin becomes a weight on your shoulders.
I challenge you to spend time thinking about your secret this week. If you feel brave, visit the website http://postsecret.com. It is a place people go to share their secret to help let go of the burden of carrying the weight of the secret around. Maybe seeing other people’s secrets will help you feel better about your own.