Friends Uncaged

Elizabeth - Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I've found that listening prayer opens up opportunities to hear exactly what Holy Spirit / Jesus / God is saying. Examples of Words of Knowledge are given throughout the OT prophets as well as in the New Testament (I didn't take the time to find the verses) where people listened for God's voice and received information. In my own life, 2-way prayer journaling (me writing what I think/feel and then listening for His response), has provided specific approaches to situations that I never would've thought of....or chosen (when I'm not excited about it). Keep asking Holy Spirit to guide you towards a fuller understanding. Either way, we're glad to have you in the community and welcome your participation in the comments. :) ~Kris

I sooo related to the spoon story! My husband has a secret code of which condiments, sauces, or cheeses go with which kind of dish! It took me a long time to learn it because I was used to just using what we had on hand or doing without. But he would either not eat it or go to the store to get the missing ingredient. He also didn’t accept a dish that wasn’t from an “official” recipe. I never followed recipes! I would improvise and just get inspiration. Finally over the years I have helped him to loosen up and realize that someone threw things together to make that “recipe” in the first place and I could also write down what I did and it would be a “recipe”! Lol.

The thing that really drives me nuts when we first married was that he expected me to get up before our kids (we have 9 but we are a blended family so we started off with 6 together - 3 from each of us and I got pregnant basically 3 weeks after our wedding)…so here I am with 6 teenagers and then rapidly had three more babies together in our first years of marriage and he expected me to get up while he was getting ready for work and cook a HUGE southern country breakfast before he had to leave for work. He wanted eggs, bacon, sausage, biscuits, gravy, and fruit. Fresh and hot. And I would be nursing a baby and trying to tiptoe around so no other kids woke up and would be literally in TEARS secretly while I cooked because I hadn’t slept the night before. Looking back I want to grab myself by the shoulders and yell, go back to bed and tell him to stop the fantasy!!! That’s ridiculous! But I was so afraid of his condemnation and tantrum! Eventually somehow I woke up and just faced the fact that it was an abuse against me and started doing it less and less until he was eating cereal on his own and by himself because I was no longer willing to get out of bed or cook at that hour. He made comments for years…just comments about how he would love to eat together and have a hot breakfast before work. I would mutter something like, that’s nice, and roll over and go back to sleep 🤣. I think the breakfasts that I made all those years were so huge they carry brownie points for decades to come. Ohhh and in the years I was doing all that, he started to even say that he could not enjoy eating it if he could see that the kitchen was a mess from the cooking and he wanted me to clean the dishes as I cooked so that when we sat down to eat it was all clean! I was flabbergasted! He also didn’t want me to air dry any dishes because if I towel dried them they could be put away immediately and not left out in sight. I just looked at him like he was nuts and went about my business. But he has tried to get me to do that for years and even still tries sometimes. On the super rare occasions that he cooks a couple times a year, he always “shows me how it’s done” by cleaning as he cooks and feels so proud to show me that there is no mess for after the meal. But he forgets the part where I’m keeping the kids out of the kitchen when he cooks and he has zero interruptions. But for me, I’m cooking and still taking care of everyone’s needs and interruptions. (Sigh…bless his heart).

I could go on and on with all of his special rules that change every six months or so to some new obsession…not walking on the grass, using a different entrance to the house than the obvious main entrance, changing how the cars have to be parked in the driveway… I have learned to not take these too seriously anymore while still being respectful! I think it’s all about controlling the environment in order to calm his inner self, which is feeling chaotic.

Amen! Good stuff! Thanks, @Libby Clark