Sunday, April 30, 2006
Sabrina and Ted
Sabrina and Ted have been married for over twenty years. Sabrina always thought that she had the most loving, caring, and giving husband in the whole wide world. Then one day, she started receiving little messages that would rock her world.
One day as she stood in the kitchen preparing her dinner, Sabrina heard her phone ringing. On the other end of the telephone was a woman’s voice that she had never heard before. She stood in the kitchen with the telephone in her hand and asked the woman was there something she could help her with. Mrs. Ted, you don’t know me but my name is Lisa. You don’t know me but your husband and I work together. Mrs. Ted, I just wanted you to know that your husband and I have been having an affair.
Sabrina felt her world crumbling around her. She couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Her response was, “You must have the wrong house or the wrong man because I know my husband and he just wouldn’t do something like that.” But as she stood there denying what she knew in her heart to be true, the woman at the other end of the telephone began to tell her things about her family and about herself that she knew was not public knowledge.
Not only had her husband had an affair, but he had also related the most personal information that only the two of them had shared, to someone else. To add insult to injury, this woman with whom he had shared some of their most intimate secrets, had also shared that personal information with her husband. You see, the woman told Sabrina that she too was married and had confessed everything to her husband. Sabrina’s life was never to be the same again.
As a result of this newfound information, Sabrina and her husband Ted went to a marriage counselor. Her eyes began to be opened. You see, not only did this new information bring enlightenment about his infidelity, it forced Sabrina to exam all aspects of her relationship with this man. You see, Sabrina had been having problems with her husband from a financial aspect for years. It had gotten so bad that from time to time she felt as though their finances would be the one thing to force her to leave her husband.
Over the course of their marriage, Ted who had a Masters degree had been fired from several different jobs. The common denominator in most of the cases was that he couldn’t provide written documentation to support what he was being paid to do. In each case he always blamed his employers for giving him too much work to do. During one of these periods of unemployment, Ted had been out of work for over three years. For the duration of this three-year hiatus from work, Sabrina was the sole provider of their household. It was not until she got fed up with being the breadwinner of the family and she gave her husband an ultimatum, did he seek employment again.
After confronting her husband and after having to take a long hard look at their marriage, Sabrina realized there was a very common theme that stood out. She had bought and paid for everything that they owned. The down payment for their home, all the furniture, and appliance. Even the present on their children’s birthdays and at Christmas time.
Her husband had not bought one single thing that they professed to own together. Not even the cars they drove. Sabrina had paid for it all. In over twenty years of marriage, Sabrina couldn’t even remember her husband buying her a gift for any of their anniversaries, her birthday, or at Christmas time. She didn’t even know what he was doing with the money that he earned each week.
On several occasions when she went to the bank, she was unable to withdraw money from their joint account because either it wasn’t there or he had failed to pay one of the many bills that came directly out of that account. In more that one instance she has had to pay several hundreds of dollars in parking tickets on her car because he has very little regard for parking statutes. In other words, her husband, her lover, the father of her children have used her, her helpmate, for over twenty years.
1 Timothy 5:8
If anyone does not provide for his relatives, and especially for his immediate family, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.
Ladies, it is the responsibility of your husbands to take care of you, not for you to take care of him. Especially if he professes to be a Christian. I am not saying that we don’t contribute to the well being of our family and home, but we are to be the helpmate not the provider. We are crippling our men when we don’t allow them to lead and provide.
This does not mean that you as a woman do nothing and expect your husbands to do everything. Your role is to take care of him, your children, and your home. I know that I will catch a lot of flack for this statement, but again I will say that we have allowed the world to dictate to us what is right in our own homes. I do understand that it often takes two incomes to sustain a household, but when you get down to the real dynamics of the roles we are to live, think about what we have gained materialistically and lost spiritually. Has it really been worth it?
Colossians 3:18
Wives, submit to your husbands, as is fitting in the Lord.
This particular passage of the bible has created a lot of controversy. Both men and women often misinterpret this passage. Ladies, this does not mean that your husband is to rule over you. Men nor does it means that your wife is a slave for you to use as you will. What it does mean is for a husband and wife to work in tandem to be a true Christian family. As in any partnership, there should be someone who is the primary leader. But the sign of a great leader is the ability to listen to those that they lead and to utilize the knowledge and skills of his mate to make good decisions for the partnership.
Ladies, no matter what you have heard and want to believe, men and women are different. Our psychological make-up is very different. Women are meant to be nurturing, caring, and to think more with their hearts. Men are meant to be strong, tough, and less emotional. This is not to say that men and women can’t share these traits. The bottom line is that we are meant to be different. There is nothing wrong with being a strong woman, just as there is nothing wrong with a man being emotional. But our roles in the family are meant to be very different.
When you look at the breakdown of the family, do you not have eyes to see just how we are destroying and ruining our own children by not adhering to the standards that God has pre-ordained? How can our children learn to be faithful men and women of God when they don’t have the right examples to follow? How can my sons learn to be good men without having the example of their father to follow? Make no mistake; I am doing my best to raise my two sons with good Christian morals, teaching them to respect women, God and the sanctity of the family. But I can’t teach them something I don’t know. How to be a man.
Psalm 80:15
the root your right hand has planted, the son you have raised up for yourself.
According to the national center for Health statistics, the last-reported U.S. divorce rate of which we are aware is 0.41% per capita per year, as reported on 9/6/00 for the 12-month period ending in Oct. 1999.
Only 18 percent of black women who married in the 1940s eventually divorced, a rate only slightly higher than that for white women of that era. But, of that far smaller number of black women who married in the late sixties and early seventies, 60 percent have already divorced." 14% of white women who married in the 1940s eventually divorced. A single generation later, almost 50 percent of those that married in the late sixties and early seventies have already divorced" ... Between 1970 and 1992, the proportion of babies born outside of marriage leaped from 11% to 30%."Amara Bachu, Fertility of American Women: June 1994 (Washington D.C.: Bureau of the Census, September 1995), xix, Table K. Cited on page5 of “The Abolition of Marriage, by Maggie Gallagher.
What did our mothers and grandmothers know that helped to sustain their families that we are now lacking as we attempt to raise our own families? I am not saying that we haven’t made some gains with the women’s liberation movement, but what I am saying is that in our quest for equal rights, greater freedoms, and our refusal to work with our mates, we are destroying our own families and not equipping our children to raise families of their own.
This statement does not preclude the fact that being submissive to your husband means that you are to follow a fool. We have to learn to make better choices in the man who is to be your husband. Keeping in mind that you can’t change grown folk, only God can. You can’t make someone love you. If you are with someone and he doesn’t want to make you his wife, Go! Leave him! Don’t waste your time! Ladies, stop getting married for the sake of being married. It won’t work! You are doing a great disservice to yourself and your children. But if you are married to a good man, keep him! Work on it! Work out any problems you may have! The grass only looks greener on the other side. Remember, there is no such thing as perfection in a relationship. It’s only as good as the effort that you put into it.
1 Timothy 2:11
A woman should learn in quietness and full submission.
Ladies, stop trying to rule over your mates. Let them be the leaders of the family. Start putting him at the forefront of all of your decisions. Support his decisions, his wisdom, and his vision of where your life as a family should be going.
Believe it or not, you don’t know everything and you don’t have all the answers. Just like many of the things that you know you learned from experiencing them first-hand, so too must the men in our lives learn.
Boy, did I get off-track. I am not sure how or when it finally hit me that what I wanted from a man is not what I was really getting from Danny, but it hit me hard. I realized that as long as I allowed this man in my life and in my bed, things between he and I would never change. Not only that, as long as he was in my life, I would never have a chance to find the type of man I really needed.
Being the coward that I was and not really sure how I could end this relationship, I did the only thing that I knew how to do. I ran back home to my parent’s house. You see I knew that we couldn’t get intimate in my parents home and I had too much respect for his mother to spend the night at his house, (yes ladies, he still lived with his mother).
Another added advantage, my sister Nita couldn’t stand Danny. She did everything in her power to see that we couldn’t spend anytime together. If he came to our house, she would make him as uncomfortable as she possibly could. She would talk against him whenever his name came up. She even went so far as to try to set me up with other men. Eventually Danny and I did stop seeing each other. Life went on.
One day as she stood in the kitchen preparing her dinner, Sabrina heard her phone ringing. On the other end of the telephone was a woman’s voice that she had never heard before. She stood in the kitchen with the telephone in her hand and asked the woman was there something she could help her with. Mrs. Ted, you don’t know me but my name is Lisa. You don’t know me but your husband and I work together. Mrs. Ted, I just wanted you to know that your husband and I have been having an affair.
Sabrina felt her world crumbling around her. She couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Her response was, “You must have the wrong house or the wrong man because I know my husband and he just wouldn’t do something like that.” But as she stood there denying what she knew in her heart to be true, the woman at the other end of the telephone began to tell her things about her family and about herself that she knew was not public knowledge.
Not only had her husband had an affair, but he had also related the most personal information that only the two of them had shared, to someone else. To add insult to injury, this woman with whom he had shared some of their most intimate secrets, had also shared that personal information with her husband. You see, the woman told Sabrina that she too was married and had confessed everything to her husband. Sabrina’s life was never to be the same again.
As a result of this newfound information, Sabrina and her husband Ted went to a marriage counselor. Her eyes began to be opened. You see, not only did this new information bring enlightenment about his infidelity, it forced Sabrina to exam all aspects of her relationship with this man. You see, Sabrina had been having problems with her husband from a financial aspect for years. It had gotten so bad that from time to time she felt as though their finances would be the one thing to force her to leave her husband.
Over the course of their marriage, Ted who had a Masters degree had been fired from several different jobs. The common denominator in most of the cases was that he couldn’t provide written documentation to support what he was being paid to do. In each case he always blamed his employers for giving him too much work to do. During one of these periods of unemployment, Ted had been out of work for over three years. For the duration of this three-year hiatus from work, Sabrina was the sole provider of their household. It was not until she got fed up with being the breadwinner of the family and she gave her husband an ultimatum, did he seek employment again.
After confronting her husband and after having to take a long hard look at their marriage, Sabrina realized there was a very common theme that stood out. She had bought and paid for everything that they owned. The down payment for their home, all the furniture, and appliance. Even the present on their children’s birthdays and at Christmas time.
Her husband had not bought one single thing that they professed to own together. Not even the cars they drove. Sabrina had paid for it all. In over twenty years of marriage, Sabrina couldn’t even remember her husband buying her a gift for any of their anniversaries, her birthday, or at Christmas time. She didn’t even know what he was doing with the money that he earned each week.
On several occasions when she went to the bank, she was unable to withdraw money from their joint account because either it wasn’t there or he had failed to pay one of the many bills that came directly out of that account. In more that one instance she has had to pay several hundreds of dollars in parking tickets on her car because he has very little regard for parking statutes. In other words, her husband, her lover, the father of her children have used her, her helpmate, for over twenty years.
1 Timothy 5:8
If anyone does not provide for his relatives, and especially for his immediate family, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.
Ladies, it is the responsibility of your husbands to take care of you, not for you to take care of him. Especially if he professes to be a Christian. I am not saying that we don’t contribute to the well being of our family and home, but we are to be the helpmate not the provider. We are crippling our men when we don’t allow them to lead and provide.
This does not mean that you as a woman do nothing and expect your husbands to do everything. Your role is to take care of him, your children, and your home. I know that I will catch a lot of flack for this statement, but again I will say that we have allowed the world to dictate to us what is right in our own homes. I do understand that it often takes two incomes to sustain a household, but when you get down to the real dynamics of the roles we are to live, think about what we have gained materialistically and lost spiritually. Has it really been worth it?
Colossians 3:18
Wives, submit to your husbands, as is fitting in the Lord.
This particular passage of the bible has created a lot of controversy. Both men and women often misinterpret this passage. Ladies, this does not mean that your husband is to rule over you. Men nor does it means that your wife is a slave for you to use as you will. What it does mean is for a husband and wife to work in tandem to be a true Christian family. As in any partnership, there should be someone who is the primary leader. But the sign of a great leader is the ability to listen to those that they lead and to utilize the knowledge and skills of his mate to make good decisions for the partnership.
Ladies, no matter what you have heard and want to believe, men and women are different. Our psychological make-up is very different. Women are meant to be nurturing, caring, and to think more with their hearts. Men are meant to be strong, tough, and less emotional. This is not to say that men and women can’t share these traits. The bottom line is that we are meant to be different. There is nothing wrong with being a strong woman, just as there is nothing wrong with a man being emotional. But our roles in the family are meant to be very different.
When you look at the breakdown of the family, do you not have eyes to see just how we are destroying and ruining our own children by not adhering to the standards that God has pre-ordained? How can our children learn to be faithful men and women of God when they don’t have the right examples to follow? How can my sons learn to be good men without having the example of their father to follow? Make no mistake; I am doing my best to raise my two sons with good Christian morals, teaching them to respect women, God and the sanctity of the family. But I can’t teach them something I don’t know. How to be a man.
Psalm 80:15
the root your right hand has planted, the son you have raised up for yourself.
According to the national center for Health statistics, the last-reported U.S. divorce rate of which we are aware is 0.41% per capita per year, as reported on 9/6/00 for the 12-month period ending in Oct. 1999.
Only 18 percent of black women who married in the 1940s eventually divorced, a rate only slightly higher than that for white women of that era. But, of that far smaller number of black women who married in the late sixties and early seventies, 60 percent have already divorced." 14% of white women who married in the 1940s eventually divorced. A single generation later, almost 50 percent of those that married in the late sixties and early seventies have already divorced" ... Between 1970 and 1992, the proportion of babies born outside of marriage leaped from 11% to 30%."Amara Bachu, Fertility of American Women: June 1994 (Washington D.C.: Bureau of the Census, September 1995), xix, Table K. Cited on page5 of “The Abolition of Marriage, by Maggie Gallagher.
What did our mothers and grandmothers know that helped to sustain their families that we are now lacking as we attempt to raise our own families? I am not saying that we haven’t made some gains with the women’s liberation movement, but what I am saying is that in our quest for equal rights, greater freedoms, and our refusal to work with our mates, we are destroying our own families and not equipping our children to raise families of their own.
This statement does not preclude the fact that being submissive to your husband means that you are to follow a fool. We have to learn to make better choices in the man who is to be your husband. Keeping in mind that you can’t change grown folk, only God can. You can’t make someone love you. If you are with someone and he doesn’t want to make you his wife, Go! Leave him! Don’t waste your time! Ladies, stop getting married for the sake of being married. It won’t work! You are doing a great disservice to yourself and your children. But if you are married to a good man, keep him! Work on it! Work out any problems you may have! The grass only looks greener on the other side. Remember, there is no such thing as perfection in a relationship. It’s only as good as the effort that you put into it.
1 Timothy 2:11
A woman should learn in quietness and full submission.
Ladies, stop trying to rule over your mates. Let them be the leaders of the family. Start putting him at the forefront of all of your decisions. Support his decisions, his wisdom, and his vision of where your life as a family should be going.
Believe it or not, you don’t know everything and you don’t have all the answers. Just like many of the things that you know you learned from experiencing them first-hand, so too must the men in our lives learn.
Boy, did I get off-track. I am not sure how or when it finally hit me that what I wanted from a man is not what I was really getting from Danny, but it hit me hard. I realized that as long as I allowed this man in my life and in my bed, things between he and I would never change. Not only that, as long as he was in my life, I would never have a chance to find the type of man I really needed.
Being the coward that I was and not really sure how I could end this relationship, I did the only thing that I knew how to do. I ran back home to my parent’s house. You see I knew that we couldn’t get intimate in my parents home and I had too much respect for his mother to spend the night at his house, (yes ladies, he still lived with his mother).
Another added advantage, my sister Nita couldn’t stand Danny. She did everything in her power to see that we couldn’t spend anytime together. If he came to our house, she would make him as uncomfortable as she possibly could. She would talk against him whenever his name came up. She even went so far as to try to set me up with other men. Eventually Danny and I did stop seeing each other. Life went on.
