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Strength, wisdom, and a soft heart

lol oh yeah, good catch. Ooops. It IS a part of who I am lol. My bad.

Met with Joe today for lunch and he said essentially the same thing. :(

I hear you guys loud and clear. I hear what God is saying. But I'm still worried about her response, I love her and don't wish to cause her hurt. I wish for a way to do both (cause no pain AND pursue God's call :( )


Enjoyed your company immensely. I think you’re on the right track in many ways, keep it up and wait on God. He’s capable even when/if we lack as husbands and leaders. (Not saying that I think you lack, just that @Well loved wife and I are a witness that He can do exceeding abundantly above all we can ask or think)
 
Praying for y'all.

Just my two cents but it sounds like y'all are standing at your line in the sand already. You care for the other woman. She cares for you. A lot of women think the toughest part of polygamy is sharing her husband's body. It isn't. It's sharing his heart. It sounds like you may be there already.

I get the insecurity and the jealousy and the pain that your wife is feeling, I really really do. If she wants to speak with someone already in a plural marriage, I'm available. :)

Well...

And actually, I haven't told my wife about the other woman's confession.

For two primary reasons. Firstly, because the other woman currently is uncertain of PM and while she's praying about it, I'm content just being friends with her. So, I don't want to 'make it more real' than it needs to be if nothing ever comes of it.

Secondly, because unless she wants to pursue it, I don't feel right breaking her trust by telling my wife something that we are already working around, setting limits on how we spend time together, etc, in order to just be friends.

IE...she doesn't KNOW that's she's already sharing my heart lol. :(
 
My husband said the traditional vows as well. For a long time, I held those in my heart as a way to not let him progress in this because I didn’t want him to. I felt safe in holding that over his head, where if a relationship progressed, I could say, “ah ah ah, but you promised to FORSAKE ALL OTHERS” (even if I knew it was in ignorance). I did NOT want to release him, and that was out of fear and control. It really came down to if I trusted him with my life, and more importantly, if I was willing to be responsible for not allowing God to move in his life. During this time, he wasn’t pushing me to do anything but I knew that was his hope- but I also knew that he wouldn’t let me keep him from where God was leading him, promise or not, God was who he would listen to.

I tearfully released him of his vows.

For me personally, the releasing of vows felt like a loss. I knew our marriage didn’t change and that he was still going to care for me as he had always done, but it’s another breaking of our cultural conditioning.

Keep conversations going, keep showing her she is loved, keep reassuring her that you aren’t trying to replace or upgrade her. Get her talking to other women.

One of the sweetest things my husband has done in the process was creating a new statement of love and commitment that was scriptually sound. It give me a replacement to the wedding vows and was actually more meaningful because they have been tested and have been proven true year after year.

Just because the potential has expressed feelings it doesn’t mean it is time to jump with both feet into a marriage. Time is needed on all sides.


I LOVE this. There is just so much maturity and spiritual growth evidenced in this short post. It truly strikes a cord with me. @Well loved wife and I were talking about our “released” and replaced vows just today. For us, it revolved around a study I’d done on the Adown that we’d been discussing for a while, coupled with the realization that the traditional boilerplate vows that we’d utilized had clauses that our Adonai would have never let stand, and a visit to the Amelang’s in February of last year. While we’ve waded our own rivers over this issue, and still have maturing left to do, I think we have come to the point that our recent vows and the date, come pretty close to being as important to us as our original exchange of vows coming up on 20 years ago this fall.

On a side note, our replacement was done not because there was a potential candidate waiting in the wings, (not that there’s anything wrong with that) but because we wanted our vows to be pleasing and acceptable to our Master regardless of if anyone was ever to be added to our family. IMO, there’s just a special blessing when your familial covenant vows are in line with His expectations.
 
Even if she was is support of poly and wants you to get a second, the fear and insecurity may well still be there. The question is, how she handles those doubts.
I would say "may well still be there for a time"; maybe that's what you meant. Eventually she'll recover. Takes time in the situation to sort out.
 
IMO, there’s just a special blessing when your familial covenant vows are in line with His expectations.
And that ladies and gentlemen is why we're "biblical families" instead of "plural families". What matters is whether our relationships are operating according to God's design. Whether that results in one wife, more than one, or none, is secondary.
 
I'm so...tired of this...

This is just the starting line of the marathon you are embarking on. Take a breath and take one step at a time. You have a long road. How you respond to your wife now will make or break her.
 
This is just the starting line of the marathon you are embarking on. Take a breath and take one step at a time. You have a long road. How you respond to your wife now will make or break her.

This really is the truth. It's just the beginning. Slumberfreeze probably spent almost every waking minute that he wasn't at work the first 6 months trying to help me get my head around this. And now he still is helping me a year later. It is a loooong road just accepting it. Let alone living it.
 
Yeah. Deleted my posts because I don't want to come across wrong.

I love my wife dearly. I do not feel any need to force her right now. I do ask for continued prayer, of course. For both of us.

Men are fixers. Women are feelers.
We know you love her dearly and want to fix her pain.. like right now. She needs to feel her way through some of the emotions and learn how to manage them. :) looking back, I wouldn’t take back the 2 1/2 years of this journey BECAUSE I can now see the beauty from the ashes of the junk God had to burn away in my heart.
 
Just a thought I had.

What is everyone's perspective of 'praying and waiting'?

By that I mean...
If my friend felt this was what she is called to do, and I wanted to respond but also have a peaceful house and my wife on board (even if it is painful, at least with her willingness to try?), is praying for my wife and waiting for her...
Well, I guess I'm just a bit apprehensive that perhaps that would just be allowing her to control the situation by never 'working on it' so to speak...or am I wrong?
 
IMO, praying and waiting does not necessarily mean that you can do nothing while you are praying and waiting. The waiting (for me ) would be the waiting for the Lord’s timing for the covenant aspect of the relationship. While you are P&W ing, you should still be moving in the direction the Lord is directing you in. There seems to be so much work relationally and financially and organizationally that is better done before you covenant.

Work while you wait and pray and you’ll be surprised how much needs to be done foundationally before you start adding on to your house.

Praying for you.
 
I really recommend getting the Experiencing God workbook. It's not specific to plural marriage but has helped me see so many things I needed to change in my thoughts and has helped my view of poly. The book is all about having a great personal relantionship with God and in the procress it is weeding out the things that aren't from Him. It's helped me to understand the way He invites us to take part in His work and how to hear His voice. Just from what you've written I can think of many parts in the book may be helpful and encouraging.

My idea of waiting and praying is just that. She can't control the situation by "working on it" if you are praying and waiting because if it's the Lord's will it will come to pass regardless of if she may be stalling. The Lord seems to be very pleased when people take time to be still and wait on Him. In the Screw Tape Letters CS Lewis made the point that we often think of all the things possibly ahead and get distracted by futures and outcomes in our mind but really the trial isn't in what happens in the future and what we may face but the trial is the waiting.
 
praying for my wife and waiting for her
Make that "praying for my wife and waiting on the Lord" and you're fine. You're not waiting for her permission; you're waiting for the Spirit to show you the next step.
 
I would say "may well still be there for a time"; maybe that's what you meant. Eventually she'll recover. Takes time in the situation to sort out.

Maybe, maybe not. I could well see the jealousy aspect never leaving. It's like temptation, always there, depends how she reacts to it. Some use it as excuse for bitterness, envy and strife, others for motivation to be better and still others to rev their engines so to speak.
 
In the land of "maybe, maybe not", anything's possible, so we shouldn't really be arguing as much as maybe we're just looking at this differently.

Maybe she won't recover; that's possible. But my experience, in my own family and observing others, has been that after an admittedly traumatic transition, peace comes, and jealousy, fear, and insecurity aren't the issue anymore. Doesn't mean there won't be conflict (any two or more people living in the same house will have conflicts), but those conflicts aren't based on the same fundamental emotions and culturally-imposed expectations (and the subsequent culturally-induced disappointments).

Sidebar: I smoked cigarettes off and on from my teen years to the day before my 35th birthday. I 'quit' many times, only to pick it up again later at some point until I 'quit' again. One of the characteristics of those cycles was that when I wasn't smoking I always still sort of missed it.

A week before my 35th birthday, I knew God wanted me to quit once and for all. I had a week to 'get my affairs in order', so to speak, and then it would be over. I knew it was an act of obedience, but on the human level I had another motivation in mind: I wanted to live long enough to have relationships with my grandchildren. However I got there spiritually and psychologically (I'd say both), from the morning of my birthday I have never again missed smoking cigarettes or been tempted in that direction even a little bit.

Another story: A friend of mine went straight sober many years ago after years of struggle with multiple drug addictions (everything from alcohol to narcotics, to pick up both ends of the moral outrage spectrum). His wife still parties regularly with alcohol and cannabis. I had a conversation with him awhile back (while having a drink) about how he got along with all that, and whether I should drink in front of him. His testimony was that he could care less what others were doing, that that was just an excuse people use to blame others for their behavior, and that he wouldn't consider himself healthy if he couldn't be around other people without being tempted.

Those are stories of physical addiction as well as psychological, but as I see it that's why they serve as useful parables: because they make concrete and tangible an idea that would otherwise be an abstraction.

My word to all husbands generally and EternalDreamer in particular is that the goal is to get out of Romans 7 and into Romans 8. Don't settle for a life of misery and temptation, fear and insecurity; press through to the bold, victorious life. Do not expect, on purpose, that your wife will always be a miserable basket of insecurities. Expect that one of the positive outcomes of this transition is that she will be delivered from her cultural conditioning, and she will find a new and better foundation for her self-image and self-worth.

I may not ever be able to put a whole magazine in the bull's eye at 25 yards, but I know what I'm trying to do, I know what the objective is, and I'll keep working at it until I figure it out. I take the same view of the emotional health of my women—the objective is complete transformation, and I'll keep working on that until we're there.

Getting past the cultural conditioning is sort of like being able to hit the paper consistently, or hit within the rings consistently (or to switch metaphors, like getting a black belt in a martial art discipline): it means you've figured out the basics, and now you can get to work on the real art and science of your training.

Once your women quit feeling sorry for themselves and have experienced the real benefits and strength of biblical marriage, then you can start figuring out the good stuff: why God brought you together in the first place and what His purpose in all of it is, what He has in mind for you to do with the team he has formed.
 
In the land of "maybe, maybe not", anything's possible, so we shouldn't really be arguing as much as maybe we're just looking at this differently.

Maybe she won't recover; that's possible. But my experience, in my own family and observing others, has been that after an admittedly traumatic transition, peace comes, and jealousy, fear, and insecurity aren't the issue anymore. Doesn't mean there won't be conflict (any two or more people living in the same house will have conflicts), but those conflicts aren't based on the same fundamental emotions and culturally-imposed expectations (and the subsequent culturally-induced disappointments).

Sidebar: I smoked cigarettes off and on from my teen years to the day before my 35th birthday. I 'quit' many times, only to pick it up again later at some point until I 'quit' again. One of the characteristics of those cycles was that when I wasn't smoking I always still sort of missed it.

A week before my 35th birthday, I knew God wanted me to quit once and for all. I had a week to 'get my affairs in order', so to speak, and then it would be over. I knew it was an act of obedience, but on the human level I had another motivation in mind: I wanted to live long enough to have relationships with my grandchildren. However I got there spiritually and psychologically (I'd say both), from the morning of my birthday I have never again missed smoking cigarettes or been tempted in that direction even a little bit.

Another story: A friend of mine went straight sober many years ago after years of struggle with multiple drug addictions (everything from alcohol to narcotics, to pick up both ends of the moral outrage spectrum). His wife still parties regularly with alcohol and cannabis. I had a conversation with him awhile back (while having a drink) about how he got along with all that, and whether I should drink in front of him. His testimony was that he could care less what others were doing, that that was just an excuse people use to blame others for their behavior, and that he wouldn't consider himself healthy if he couldn't be around other people without being tempted.

Those are stories of physical addiction as well as psychological, but as I see it that's why they serve as useful parables: because they make concrete and tangible an idea that would otherwise be an abstraction.

My word to all husbands generally and EternalDreamer in particular is that the goal is to get out of Romans 7 and into Romans 8. Don't settle for a life of misery and temptation, fear and insecurity; press through to the bold, victorious life. Do not expect, on purpose, that your wife will always be a miserable basket of insecurities. Expect that one of the positive outcomes of this transition is that she will be delivered from her cultural conditioning, and she will find a new and better foundation for her self-image and self-worth.

I may not ever be able to put a whole magazine in the bull's eye at 25 yards, but I know what I'm trying to do, I know what the objective is, and I'll keep working at it until I figure it out. I take the same view of the emotional health of my women—the objective is complete transformation, and I'll keep working on that until we're there.

Getting past the cultural conditioning is sort of like being able to hit the paper consistently, or hit within the rings consistently (or to switch metaphors, like getting a black belt in a martial art discipline): it means you've figured out the basics, and now you can get to work on the real art and science of your training.

Once your women quit feeling sorry for themselves and have experienced the real benefits and strength of biblical marriage, then you can start figuring out the good stuff: why God brought you together in the first place and what His purpose in all of it is, what He has in mind for you to do with the team he has formed.
Amen.
Thank you as always Andrew :)
 
Don't settle for a life of misery and temptation, fear and insecurity; press through to the bold, victorious life. Do not expect, on purpose, that your wife will always be a miserable basket of insecurities.


This reminds me of some of my favorite Bible verses that I used to remind myself of when going through a rough patch.

I would have lost heart, unless I had believed
That I would see the goodness of the Lord
in the land of the living.
Wait on the Lord;
Be of good courage,
And He shall strengthen your heart;
Wait, I say, on the Lord!
Psalms 27:13,14
 
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