30 Days.
Dec 14, 09- (by JunkysWife)
- 3 responses
- Sober Salon
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I got to share some of the best medicine I’ve ever gotten today. A friend was struggling with her husband, and she’d thrown him out of the house in a fit of aggression last night. When he came home this morning, she’d sheepishly welcomed him back.
I know that roller coaster. I know that feeling: I should make him leave! I don’t want him to leave, ever!
That conflict is so hard to digest. I was in that spot myself, and my Al-Anon sponsor recommended a 30 day prayer. It was one of the best, most clarifying things I’d ever done to figure out what I want, what God wants for me, and how to proceed in my marriage. Her advice was that I pray, morning and night, on my knees, for 30 days, asking for God’s will for me in my marriage and the power to carry it out.
Here’s a version of it I shared with a sponsee not too long ago:
God, please guide my actions in my marriage. If it is your will for me to remain in this relationship, please give me the power to carry it out. Please help me to see my husband through your eyes. Help me to recognize that he is one of your sick children, and help me to relate to him as you would have me relate to him. Use me to minister to him however you see fit. Guide my words, my thoughts, and my actions in all my interactions with him, and open my heart to love him without enabling him, to detach from his weaknesses and embrace his strength, and to take care of him without losing myself in the process.
If I have learned all the lessons I am meant to learn in this relationship and it is your will for me to move on, please give me the power to carry out that move with grace, dignity, and love. Please convict my heart, and reveal to me the spiritual, financial, and emotional resources I will need to leave my marriage. Please get my will out of the way, and help me to follow the path that you have chosen for me. Help me to recognize that my husband has the right to live this way and that I do not have the right to control his choices about how he lives. Help me to put my energies into making myself happy and moving on.
Amen.
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I just read your blog - 29 more to go. Thanks again.
I like that prayer a lot.
Oh, that hurts. That prayer hurts! I prayed it with tears falling, wanting to scream out to God that I knew what was right and what decisions to make. So at the end of that prayer I added this: Please help me to believe what I have just prayed. Amen.
Thank you for your wisdom, JW. You have been a blessing to me tonight, when my husband is again gone out digging through trash cans to bring junk home b/c even though he isn’t drinking he has to be doing something destructive. So thank you.