Raymund’s Note: Denielle gave me this letter on our third wedding
anniversary. I wish to share it to all of you, with hope that you will find a
few treasures in it. God bless us all.
From Denielle
Dear Baby,
It has been a long three weeks for both of us. We
made everything possible to have muscles go beyond normalcy despite our ages.
In our swamped schedules, two things remain: I miss you and I love you more
each day.
We’re on year three of this wonderful marriage. I
know it is not so much to buzz about but we are blessed to have started right.
I’ve been praying for our family everyday for more than a month now and God has
truly shown me the benefits of doing so. When September opened up, I asked Him
to reveal to me things I need to pray for to strengthen us and he gave me
something that made me jump a bit: The hard part about being a praying wife,
other than the sacrifice of time, is maintaining a pure heart. It must be clean
before Me [God] in order for you to see good results. That is why praying for a
husband must begin with praying for his wife. I thought praying for you
meant focusing just on your daily activities. I never thought that was just the
tip of the iceberg. Anyway, I just
wanted to share the prayer with you so we would experience the same awe when
God answers.
Lord, help me to be a good wife. I
fully realize that I don’t have what it takes to be one without Your help. Take
my selfishness, impatience, and irritability and turn them into kindness,
long-suffering, and the willingness to bear all things. Take my old emotional
habits, mindsets, automatic reactions, rude assumptions, and self-protective
stance, and make me patient, kind, good, faithful, gentle, and self-controlled.
Take the hardness of my heart and break down the walls with Your battering ram
of revelation. Give me a new heart and work in me Your love, peace, and joy
(Galatians 5:22,23). I am not able to rise above who I am at this moment. Only
You can transform me.
Show me where there is sin in my heart, especially
with regard to my husband. I confess the times I’ve been unloving, critical,
angry, resentful, disrespectful, or unforgiving toward him. Help me to put
aside my hurt, anger, or disappointment I feel and forgive him the way You
do—totally and completely, no looking back. Make me a tool of reconciliation,
peace, and healing in this marriage. Enable us to communicate well and rescue
us from the threshold of separation where the realities of divorce begin.
Make me my husband’s helpmate, companion, champion,
friend, and support. Help me to create a peaceful, restful, safe place for him
to come home to. Teach me how to take care of myself and stay attractive to
him. Grow me into a creative and confident woman who is rich in mind, soul, and
spirit. Make me the kind of woman he can be proud to say is his wife.
I lay all my expectations at Your cross. I release
my husband from the burden of fulfilling me in areas where I should be looking
to You. Help me to accept him the way he is and not try to change him. I
realize that in some ways he may never change, but at the same time, I release
him to change in ways I never thought he could. I leave any changing that needs
to be done in Your hands, fully accepting that neither of us is perfect and
never will be. Only You, Lord, are perfect and I look to You to perfect us.
Teach me how to pray for my husband and make my
prayers be a true language of love. Where love has died, create new love
between us. Show me what unconditional love really is and how to communicate it
in a way he can clearly perceive. Bring unity between us so that we can be in
agreement about everything (Amos 3:3). May the God of patience and comfort
grant us to be like-minded toward one another, according to Christ Jesus
(Romans 15:5). Make us a team, not pursuing separate, competitive, or
independent lives, but working together, overlooking each other’s faults and
weaknesses for the greater good of the marriage. Help us to pursue the things
which make for peace and the things by which one may edify another (Romans
14:19). May we be “perfectly joined together in the same mind and in the same
judgment” (1 Corinthians 1:10).
I pray that our commitment to You and to one another
will grow stronger and more passionate everyday. Enable him to be the head of
the home as You made him to be, and show me how to support and respect him as
he rises to that place of leadership. Help me to understand his dreams and see
things from his perspective. Reveal to me what he wants and needs and show me
potential problems before they arise. Breathe your life into this marriage.
Make me a new person, Lord. Give me a fresh
perspective, a positive outlook, and a renewed relationship with the man You’ve
given me. Help me see him with new eyes, new appreciation, new love, new
compassion, and new acceptance. Give my husband a new wife, and let it be me.
The Power of a PRAYING WIFE, pages 44-46
I love you. Happy Anniversary!
Baby
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