Who comes first?

I was scrolling through Facebook a while back, and I came across a cartoon that stopped me dead in my tracks.  It was a woman and it said “Spouses come and go, but your children will always be your children.  Be careful who you put first.”  I was stunned. It was probably the closest I’ve ever come to wanting to argue with someone on social media.  But I didn’t.  

I have kids, I get it.  They are important.  They also require a lot of time and take attention away from other things.  However, nothing is more important than our spouses. - Except for the Lord Jesus Christ, of course.- Marriage was set up by God, and the church is the spouse of God just like we are the spouse to our husband.  We shouldn’t put anything before the church, just like we shouldn’t put anything before our spouse.  The Bible says “forsaking ALL others...”. That means our kids too. Trust me, they’ll understand and appreciate it the older they get. Your spouse needs attention and affection in order to feel needed and wanted.  Perhaps the author of this cartoon had problems because their spouse was no longer being given the things they desired in a marriage . Once the kids came along they weren’t needed anymore.  What were they, a sperm donor?  

I say these things for one reason:  I. Lived. It.  I’ve made the mistakes.  I’ve paid the price, and I did my time.  I’d love to pull every new Mom aside and tell them my story.  I’d tell them the opposite of what the world is trying to say, so that maybe in ten years they’ll still be married to their kids’ dad.  I know, no one thinks it will happen to them.  I thought that too.  But here’s the problem, if a husband is not getting what he needs from his wife at home, all the devil needs is for him to have one second where he lets himself enjoy the attention from another woman and he’s got him.  It’s happening all around us, and even the strongest marriages are failing.  The devil can find the weak areas in a marriage.  Don’t think he can’t.  

One of the biggest problems is that no one wants to take responsibility for the things that go wrong in their lives.  It’s always that “good-for-nuthin cheatin’ jerk’s” fault.  That’s not the attitude we should have, which is another lesson I had to learn.  If we have too much pride to look at a situation and see what we might’ve done to cause it, then we’ll soon find ourselves in the same situation all over again.  

The other thing we need to think about is the image we’re portraying to our kids.  Children learn how to raise their own kids by how they were raised.  If they see Mommy ignoring, disrespecting, blowing off or griping at Daddy, they’ll grow up to do the same.  But if Mommy listens to, respects, encourages, and shows affection toward Daddy then the course of history has just been changed!  It’s no surprise divorce rates are doubling and tripling, people are only doing what they were taught to do.  We need to break this vicious cycle.  

This subject is one of many that I’m trying to get to the bottom of.  I’ve been working my way backwards through the chain of events that led to my divorce.  If the cheating happened because the spouse was feeling neglected or unwanted, then I have to think about when those feelings started.  If they started after the kids were born, then I think about how I treated him since they were born.  And so on.  I’ve thought about this to the point of exhaustion.  But it’s necessary.  Yes, he committed the sin, and we are now divorced because of it.  But what could I have done different to keep the sin from happening?  And what can I do different in the future to make sure it doesn’t happen again.  These are the hard questions I’m out to answer, and to hopefully help others by answering them.  That way the small cracks that might be happening in a marriage don’t become gaping holes until it falls apart.  

God bless

LLM