Mirroring left to right, and right to left

As a sort of mental / soulsearching exercise, I was asked this at a training course I was recently sent to: what are you most grateful for?  What are you most proud of?  And what are you most looking forward to?  Such a simple but great series of questions to ask.  They compel me to think positively about my past experiences, and hence identify my strengths and passions.  This then leads me to what I'm going to do about those strengths and passions.  People are so much more driven and inspired by purpose, rather than tasks - so if we can identify our purpose, then our lives, whether at work, in our ministry or at home become so much more than just "onethingafteranother".

So what am I grateful for?  So much that I'm pretty sure if I were to write them all down here, I'd have lost your attention well before I'm done.  So let me start with this - I have a wife that I'm utterly convinced God prepared for me from the beginning of time!  For a number of years as teenagers, we were neighbours, but didn't know it - she was at number 24, I was at number 42.  I remember our very first email addresses (which we got as part of the university deal, way back when email was a new thing, imagine that!!) were also mirrored - mine was something like law50027, hers was law50072.  Besides email, Law School also photocopies and dumps stacks of notes and cases into numbered lockers/mailboxes which are stacked left to right sequentially by number. Although our mailbox numbers were very different, out of the hundreds of mailboxes on campus, my mailbox ended up... exactly on top of hers.

This thing about mirroring left to right, and right to left, even extends to our personalities in many ways.  She's a worrier, I'm an optimist.  She's empathetic, I'm detached.  She's organised, I'm messy.  She's hopeless at maps, but has a great innate sense of direction.  I have a hopeless sense of direction, but am great when I have a map in front of me.  We're a walking cliche of male-female contrasts!

But that contrast is just great.  When tough times come calling, I'm generally silent and stoic.  This isn't always a good thing, and she helps me to process my feelings and release the pressure, just by talking it through with her.  In other words, I've learned that internalising everything with a grimace (or a smile) is not always the right thing to do.  Conversely, when she's frantic and harried, we've agreed that it really helps that I'm a calming presence (or perhaps it's just me being blur, but we've also agreed that in practice it hardly matters, since it's the appearance of calmness that counts at that very moment :)).

And after being married all these years, I've learned.  I like to think I'm much more organised now.  She's learned to live with a bit more chaos.  This one time, we went to a hypermarket in Perth, got separated while we wandered the aisles with 10,000 different things on sale, and found each other 30 minutes later, both clutching just the one thing we thought was worth buying - the exact same chocolate chip cookie bag!

I'm super grateful that God put us together.  She's a great mum to our kids, she works and brings home her fair share of the bacon, she makes sure I turn up wherever it is I'm supposed to be for our weekend errands (haha), she encourages me to be the husband I should be to her, the father I should be to my children, the son I should be to my parents (she is such a great example of being a great daughter and daughter-in-law) and the leader I should be in my ministry.  And of course, it doesn't hurt that she's cute :)

I must confess, I started out this note wanting to talk more generally about how looking at our past experiences and gleaning our strengths can help us to identify our purpose and galvanise our day to day lives.  But here we are, six paragraphs in, and it's all been about my wife!  I thought about rewriting this, and saving this topic for another time - maybe our 14th anniversary which is coming up in a couple of months, but then I figured, why only give flowers on special dates?  So Lyn, Happy Weekend!  You were meant for me!

So dear reader, if you've somehow forgotten that you feel the same way, go tell the same to your spouse (or your Mom, Dad or children for that matter)!  Happy Weekend!

 May your fountain be blessed,
And may you rejoice in the wife of your youth.
Proverbs 5:18

 In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies.  He who loves his wife loves himself.  After all, no one ever hated their own body, but they feed and care for their body, just as Christ does the church.
Ephesians 5:28-29

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