I am studying “The Virtuous life of a Christ Centered Wife” by Darlene. Schacht.
I felt called to do this study being a newlywed and previously married, I felt I needed to begin a study to remind me of how to be the wife God has called me to be. I truly feel my ministry first is to my husband. We have no children in our home so we truly are a team.
I am very aware that we have a enemy who will do whatever he can to sneak into our lives and attempt to put a division in our marriage.
Realizing that everyday I must practice and exercise my virtues towards my husband in order to protect our union, I decided to get active in reminding myself how to be the wife God has called me to be.

Today’s lesson is so important to me because kindness is something I love to offer to others. Giving kindness often will change a person if it is offered with a sincere heart.
My husband when I met him was a very kind man, yet he had been through countless failed relationships and marriages just like me.
He had within him a giant heart that the first moment I looked in his eyes I saw. His life prior to our meeting was filled with a series of life long painful childhood issues, wrong choices, wrong relationships and situations that left him in a place of anger and bitterness.
His attitude towards the world as a whole was ….. Well I can’t really say but it was rather negative. The perception of many in his family was he was just a mean man, angry and basically a failure. That was the view they had because that is how he came off and the path his life had taken him. The truth of who he truly was was hidden underneath a heart that had been crushed from his childhood and continued until our very first date.
That’s when Kindness happened, that’s when kindness stepped in and brought the two of us together. Our gracious Heavenly Father stepped in and brought two broken people together and they shared that first gift to each other. The gift of kindness….
We had met just a week before at a skating rink reunion with a hundred of our childhood friends, all of us in our forties …We knew of one another but we had not seen each other since those skating days.
It was a divine meeting for us that night in August 2011.
The virtue of kindness happened our very first date and it has not stopped one day since. It’s a fairy tale relationship and now marriage, yet the reality of life is that we are in a broken world and we both came into this marriage with broken hearts, broken prior marriages, broken childhood homes and we have broken children. Kindness was our first gift to each other. Kindness is practiced everyday of our lives even when we don’t feel like it. Why? We both know the pain of failure, rejection along with regrets of our past.
I watched Kindness change my husband from a man who was bitter and angry at the world and watched him change his attitude, his life and see that not all women were like those he had known before me. Kindness changed him from habits that he had his whole life change.
I didn’t try change him kindness, compassion, love, mercy changed him.
I never once tried to make the changes in him or nag and say that’s a bad thing your doing or say you need to change I just loved him.
I did not do that in my marriages before I was trying to change them and it failed because we are not God, only through prayer can God change someone.

On my side when he met me I was on the heal of two divorces in 16 months. I was married almost 18 years and divorced then met someone and married and 11 months later I fled that marriage for my life.
So when Paul and I met I was a lil bird with two broken wings.
My life was so broken and I was trying so hard to heal but in life you can’t always find time to recover and you just keep going.
We met and our first date we spent hours just talking and telling our life stories and laughing, music was playing in the covered seating area outside a mall and we sat on a picnic table. It was just two friends sharing our lives. Kindness swooped in, so when I told Paul I had to move my things from a friends house to a storage and he offered to help me.
It was Kindness that I needed. at that moment. Simple little act but to me it meant the world. That began our great love-story and our life together sharing kindness to each other. In the last two and a half years that kindness changed this little broken birds wings and a angry man into a positive God loving man and husband.
Colossians 3:12 says to clothe yourself with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience.

My marriage is the first place I am to offer kindness.
When I said I do to Paul Stanley Humplik October 18, 2013 I told God that I would submit and commit to him and our marriage one hundred percent and he did the same. We communicate daily and we remember well from the marriages before how it felt to be treated unkind.

We must daily:
Be good
Speak wisdom & kindness
Forgive
Offer Grace
Give Mercy
Extend a hand
Help them
Bite our tongue
Put them first
Don’t nag
Be positive
Love them
Be kind always
Turn the other cheek
Have Empathy
Look at them in the eyes
Be proud
Respect him always

As I write this today I see places I need to work on…
In a failure of a marriage it truly is not all one sided.
It’s each of you giving 100 percent because…

When you get married don’t stop trying to win his heart because we cannot assume that something won’t try to sneak in and separate what God has joined together.