Our first year of marriage, my biggest struggle was unmet expectations.  Granted a lot of that has resolved itself.  But it can still be a struggle- and not just with my husband, but my kids as well.  The weight of expectations can suck the life right out of you and others.  So I am really working on enjoying the people in my life.  Love who they are.  Love how they live around me.  Love the ups and downs, ins and outs, highs and lows, the exciting and the mundane.  And my goal is to give grace where I can- it feels good to get it and it feels good to give it!

I am reading this book right now that has been great.  In it is a quote by Elisabeth Elliott form her book Love Has a Price Tag:

A wife, if she is very generous, may allow that her husband lives up to perhaps eighty percent of her expectations.  There is always the other twenty percent that she would like to change, and she may chip away at it for the whole of their married life without reducing it by very much.  She may, on the other hand, simply decide to enjoy the eighty percent, and both of the will be happy.

Don’t you just love that?  Don’t you feel that labor of hacking away at others, trying to mold them into our expectations.  But we aren’t the Potter are we?  We aren’t the ones with the vision for their lives since before they were born.  We didn’t knit their bodies in their mother’s womb.  We were just commanded to love them, serve and honor them.  We can be tools to help them become more Christ-like, hopefully!  But we (speaking to myself) just need to relax, let go and love the socks off of them.  In the end, I want them to be changed through my love and not my anger!