Reading In Between The Lines

I am going to be completely transparent in my writing to you today. My wife and I had an argument or as I would rather call it a disagreement the other night. I have to admit that I do a very poor job at reading the signs up to the disagreement. Looking back at it, the short answers to my questions, the cold shoulder, and the distance we had should have thrown up some flags for me. But I am a man and I see things for what they are literally, rather than in between the lines. My wife would admit that she does not do the best job at communicating when she is upset with me. So we both are working at our insufficiencies.

Let me give the men three points of advice:

1) Listen to her words

2) Listen to her actions

3) Listen to her hints

I do a poor job sometimes at listening, my mind is always racing on other things, ministry, God, children, business ideas, blogs, facebook, and what am I going to twitter next? And my wife quickly pointed out that I am pretty selfish and I have a few things out of order in my life. I will admit that in the past few months my order of priorities were God, Ministry, Family and then my Wife. I ask forgiveness right now for this and repent today of this. My priorities need to be GOD, My Wife, Family and then My Ministry.

So going forward on the things I have learned in the past few days is that I have to set boundaries for myself. There are times when I am going dark (offline), not going to answer my phone, not going to check my emails and make sure that I can focus strictly on my priorities.

We have to remember to communicate and be better with our words. Remember to watch body language and small silences. They actually speak a lot louder than the words.
So in this I ask you to pray for me to be first a follower of Christ, second a husband to my wife, third a father to my children and lastly a minister of His Gospel.

I appreciate your prayers.