{"id":451,"date":"2006-08-06T18:44:29","date_gmt":"2006-08-06T18:44:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/65.175.102.14\/?p=451"},"modified":"2011-11-26T18:55:30","modified_gmt":"2011-11-26T18:55:30","slug":"can-you-believe-its-been-a-year-already","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bismarckmandanblog.com\/?p=451","title":{"rendered":"Can you believe it&#8217;s been a year already?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><center><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter\" style=\"border: 0pt none;\" src=\"https:\/\/www.bismarckmandanblog.com\/images\/anniv_roses.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"350\" border=\"0\" \/><\/center>No, not the blog&#8230;my marriage to my beautiful bride, Stacy! We celebrated after church with the unequaled Peacock Alley brunch buffet. Their deep-fried french toast is absolutely my favorite breakfast food.<\/p>\n<p>Some people say the first year of marriage is the hardest. If that&#8217;s the case, it ain&#8217;t all that bad. Of course, we&#8217;ve been very blessed in that we have not faced a ton of adversity. I admit that, as a long-time bachelor, it&#8217;s been a bit of a challenge to change my ways. I&#8217;ve gone from 5 or 6 motorcycles to 3. My time is no longer my own and I can no longer fly by the seat of my pants; girls like to make plans. No problem. It may be a big change, but a worthy one.<\/p>\n<p>The Bible tells women <em>&#8220;Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church: and he is the saviour of the body. Therefore as the church is subject unto Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in every thing.&#8221;<\/em> That&#8217;s in Ephesians 5:22-24. Notice something important here: it tells this to the wives, NOT to the husbands.<\/p>\n<p>What does the Bible tell husbands? &#8220;Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it;&#8221; &#8230; &#8220;So ought men to love their wives as their own bodies. He that loveth his wife loveth himself.&#8221; &#8230; &#8220;Nevertheless let every one of you in particular so love his wife even as himself; and the wife see that she reverence her husband.&#8221; That&#8217;s in Ephesians 5:25, 28, and 33. Guys aren&#8217;t told &#8220;you&#8217;re the head of your wife.&#8221; We&#8217;re instructed to love them as we love ourselves. Not just that&#8230;we&#8217;re told THREE TIMES. Sometimes it takes us a few time to get it into our heads.<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s just one example of what the Bible says about husbands and wives. It&#8217;s not intended to discriminate against women or render them subservient. It&#8217;s outlining the structure of a godly marriage. If both parties of a marriage fulfil their roles, things work the way God intended them to. If my wife looks to me to be the head of the house, I (assuming I have any character at all) will knock myself out to live up to that role for her. If I am a take charge kind of guy and take up my responsibilities as a husband, she can feel secure in letting me handle them. It just plain WORKS.<\/p>\n<p>I, as any of the guys I know would say of themselves, have married a far lovelier woman than I deserve. I looked for her forever without success. I would pray for God to bring along a nice Christian woman to be my wife, then get up off my knees and try to find her myself. Only shortly after I finally prayed &#8220;okay, I will leave it up to you, I won&#8217;t try to do it myself,&#8221; that he finally brought her along. And I&#8217;m gonna love and serve her forever.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>No, not the blog&#8230;my marriage to my beautiful bride, Stacy! We celebrated after church with the unequaled Peacock Alley brunch buffet. Their deep-fried french toast is absolutely my favorite breakfast food. Some people say the first year of marriage is &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bismarckmandanblog.com\/?p=451\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-451","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-family-friends"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bismarckmandanblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/451","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bismarckmandanblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bismarckmandanblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bismarckmandanblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bismarckmandanblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=451"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.bismarckmandanblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/451\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":482,"href":"https:\/\/www.bismarckmandanblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/451\/revisions\/482"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bismarckmandanblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=451"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bismarckmandanblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=451"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bismarckmandanblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=451"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}