Keeping Joy in my Ministry Marriage

We know that ministry is hard. It’s a given and it is not hidden and none are exempt. We all have our struggles, but we also have our joys. Our marriage relationship should be one of them.

I’m not going to pretend that my marriage is pretty all the time. There are words and miscommunications. There’s disagreement on time and money management. For us, there is the struggle of raising children. My heart doesn’t always leap for joy when my husband walks in the room.

There’s a distinction between joy and happiness. Are we always happy with each other? Nope. But joy is the longer stride, the marathon-type feeling instead of the sprint. We try to understand the circumstance, we try better next time.

We’ve walked tough roads together; we’ve leaned on each other more than any other earthly relationship. We’ve slogged through the difficult conversations, not always ending on the same page, but with a respect and understanding of one another. And here on earth, I’ve come to understand that this is the best we can hope for. Someone to cheer and comfort, to come alongside and encourage us to seek God’s face and glory.

That being said, we find an immense amount of joy in our marriage relationship. We love spending time together, and hardly ever tire of talking about books we are reading, cute things we saw on the internet, playing board games, or even just sitting side by side while accomplishing our own tasks.

It’s the slow and abiding type of joy that comes with 15 years of marriage and over 20 years of being a couple; the nuances where he knows how I carry myself when I am stressed or how I can tell by how he answers the phone as to what kind of day he’s had.

How do we have this type of joy, so that we still enjoy each other’s company?

Long ago I realized my pastor husband cannot fulfill all my needs, nor can I for him. I’m going to fail, sometimes multiple times a day, and so is he. (We’ll take an in-depth look at this next week.)

We schedule our time together and make those times count. This is probably the least romantic thing ever, but it gives us peace of mind and ultimately more joy in our time we do spend with one another. We schedule times to discuss what’s going on with church, kids, life, etc. This keeps us from throwing dates and times at each other, and it helps me keep everyone’s schedules straight. Luckily we both have Type A personalities so we are able to structure things (mostly) similarly, but we are not perfect at this by any means. We also schedule time to reconnect and recharge too. This is done separately and together. We schedule date nights, plans with friends, and we plan for “alone” time after the kids go to bed, where I can just sit and knit and Adam can read a book. We don’t have to spend all our free time together and it works out best for each of us. Sometimes there’s just not enough time for everything, but we try to make it work in between church and school and kid events.

Most importantly though, we begin with the Lord, knowing He is our strength and source of joy (Isaiah 12:2-3). We draw our salvation from Him who put us together and go from there. We know that when our focus is on what the Lord is doing everything else seems to get a little bit easier. When we’ve had conflict and I remember to push back with what God might possibly be teaching me through this, I seem to be able to get through the rough spot a little easier and settle into the joy of our relationship. When we keep this in mind, we tend to show each other a little more grace, a little more patience, we are quicker to pitch in a hand with the other’s workload. In the end we know we aren’t perfect, but we know that God made us perfect for each other.

This realization helps keep our focus on our purpose to glorify God in our actions and with our lives. Or at least that’s the goal. It helps us to back off a situation and gain a heavenly perspective instead of an earthly one. And from there, that space is where joy can creep in and take over.