Musings, hopefully turned useful

Sometimes I find myself spending entirely too much time considering things like this:

• Am I am the lowest priority in your life?
• Is there any thing in your life, any activity to which you give your time, which matters less to you than taking care of our home and nurturing our life?
• Is there anything that you would just think on your own that it might be nice to move around in your schedule so that we can just spend some quality time together instead?

But this question is more important for me to focus on:

• What do I need to do to be the person I want to be, in the way that best helps us become the couple I want us to be, too?

Two unrelated thoughts in this regard:

1. The corollary to "you can't forgive someone for being who they are," has got to be "you can't expect anyone to change in the ways you wish they would."  Of course, we're all going to change.  The essence of life is change.  "You're not the person I married" has to be the most self-evident statement ever made, even if what we really mean more often is, "You're not the person I thought I married."

While it's true, as Matthew Kelly says, that the essence of Christianity is change, it's a particular type of change that is the core of our faith.  But our journey through time is a series of changes from one moment to the next, with the large ones we focus on being made up of a series of smaller ones that we can't even perceive.  Here's the rub: I can never expect the changes that another accepts and embraces to be the ones I would choose for them, even if my desire to do so isn't chiefly my own self-interest, which I think it too often is for most of us.

2. Suppose a couple has spent decades of their life with one primary strength that has come easily to them and sustained their relationship through turmoil. Even when they have - by choice or circumstance, and mutually or unilaterally - stepped away from that area for a while, it has been a harbor to which they ultimately relished returning.  Everything else good about their relationship has been something that one or the other of them has had to work at, sometimes quite hard. Then suppose that, for reasons completely beyond either of their control, that one strength is taken away from them, very possibly forever.

That thing that has always come so naturally seemed to serve as patching cement for the cracks that have occurred through the years, but maybe it has become so prevalent as to cause them to wonder whether it has become the chief material on which their life is built.  It may then be revealed to have been mere filler, not able to serve as a strong undergirding for their house.  In fact, this is likely if it has been anything other than their commitment to become, each of them, the best version of him- or herself, the reflection of Christ's presence in the world.

If that happens, it seems to me that they'd better both be ready to jump into some serious structural work.  But they should be relieved, and count themselves most fortunate, if some of those areas over which they've previously labored, individually and jointly, have in fact formed a stronger foundation for them than that one area ever was on its own.