Prayer 1

I started This book yesterday, so I'm catching up :)

HIS WIFE

Lord, help me to be a good wife. I fully realize that I dont 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 (Gal 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 regards to my husband. I confess the times I've been unloving, critical, angry, resentful, disrespectful, or unforgiving toward him. Help me to put aside any 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 this 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 confidant woman who is rich in mind, soul, and spirit. Make me the 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 a true language of love. Where love has died, create a 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 (rom 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 our marriage. Help us to pursue the things which make for peace and the things by which one may edify another (rom 14:19). May we be perfectly joined together in the same mind and in the same judgement (1 Cor 1:10)
I pray that our commitment to You and to one another will grow stronger and more passionate every day. Enable him to be the head of the home and 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 potentials 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 to 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.
(pages 44-46 in TPOPW)

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In this chapter, it really opened my eyes to many things. In order to pray for my husband, i have to wash myself clean with God's grace and see the faults that are within myself. You know, the whole take the plank out of your own eye before taking the speck out of someone else's. HUGE! This prayer is dead-on and so yesterday i prayed this with a fervor! And typing it again today only reminded me of the emotional/spiritual side of things that were making my marriage fail, that were on my shoulders as the spiritual leader of my home. (my husband is not a man of faith, but i pray for that too!) I should have been praying for our marriage long ago! I love my husband!