CONTENTS

• JUST VISITING
• FEATURE ARTICLE: PEACEFUL CO-EXISTENCE WITH IN-LAWS
• IF I WERE FILLED WITH THE SPIRIT, I WOULD...
  THE CHRIST-CENTERED WIFE
  Hope That Transforms - Part 2
  by Mikal Frazier
  
• FROM THE E-MAIL BAG "Response to the Spirit Filled Wife Series"

JUST VISITING

Your response to Mikal's "Spirit Filled Wife" series has been tremendous. In today's "E-Mail Bag section, we share some of the feedback we've received from our readers.

We continue to grow. We've now passed the 1500 level in subscriptions. If you think the newsletters helps, please tell others about it.

Norman

Too many people regard the wedding ceremony as a declaration of war against newly acquired relatives. Some think the only way to get along with in-laws is to eliminate all contact and focus on one's spouse.

When I'm relaxing with my guitar, I often sing, "With someone like you,/ A pal good and true, / I'd like to leave it all behind and go and find/ A place that's known to God alone,/ And let the rest of the world go by." It's a nice thought, but it's not very practical. We'll liquidate cockroaches before we eliminate in-laws.

Isolate yourself from your "relatives by marriage" and pay the price of reduced satisfaction. "Appreciate your relatives, and you increase your chances for a happy family life. Downgrade your in-laws, disagree with your relatives by marriage and you are in for trouble" (Evelyn Millis Duvall. Faith in Families. p. 123 - 1970).

A few short decades ago, most newlyweds acquired in-laws whom they had known long before their wedding day. My father had nine brothers and sisters. Most of them married spouses from two neighboring families. I have three married children. Their spouses were reared in different regions with virtually no knowledge of family backgrounds prior to courtship. Today's married couples typically know little about their spouse's family of origin on their wedding day.

Can today's married couples peacefully co-exist with in-laws? They can if they observe certain principles.

1. Leaving and cleaving. "For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh" (Genesis 2:24.) Successful marriage requires physical and emotional separation from parents. Couples must concentrate major energy on bonding with one another, while making sure they don't shut their parents out of their lives.
2. Mutual respect. My oldest son's father-in-law once said to me, "In the things that matter most, we are one." He was talking about our mutual commitment to Christ. What a tremendous foundation for building shared trust between two families who haven't previously known each other.
3. Desire. When their husbands died, Ruth and Orpah chose different relationship patterns with Naomi, their mother-in-law. Orpah returned to her people, ". . . but Ruth clung to her" (Ruth 1:14). Ruth developed a strong union with her mother-in-law because she desperately wanted that bond. How much do you want to get along?

Hope That Transforms - Part 2

I very confidently turned in my paper to the professor. My last semester of graduate school in the marriage and family therapy program was swiftly coming to a close. From the beginning of the two-year program a frequent topic of discussion was the personal theory paper we would all be required to write in the last semester for the advanced theories class. Mine was completed and I had no doubt as to my belief in what constituted healthy, functional relationships.

At the top of my paper I had written a quote which captured the core that guided my personal theory: "It matters not so much what happens to us, but how we respond that makes the difference." I had heard those words from someplace and really relished them, but did not know the author, so I assigned the quote as being from an unknown source. When my paper was returned, my confidence was rewarded with a very good grade, but there at the top of my paper where I had written "unknown" beside the defining quote, my professor had written "Epictetus."

I chuckled to myself, "Oh well, so much for being a little sophisticated, Mikal," as I realized this must be one of those Aristotle or Socrates type guys. Sure enough, my trusted World Book Encyclopedia confirmed my suspicions. Sure enough Epictetus was a first century Stoic philosopher.

Perhaps sometime I will be able to take a beginner's course in philosophy.

To this day, though, my belief in this guiding principle for relationships remains undaunted.

Dear Christian women, as children of God, no matter what circumstances we may meet in our marriages, because of the power of the Holy Spirit and the Hope He gives, we have choices about how we will respond to our perceived difficulties and injustices in our relationships.

The other day my daughter's friend was telling us about the school she would be going to in Texas as a new teacher. She was reporting several positive aspects which had her quite enthused. Then she told about watching a little boy run out of the office and tell a teacher a message he had taken from someone on the telephone. He was not very clear on the message, so the teacher asked, "What were you doing answering the telephone, anyway?" The lad answered, "Well, it was ringing." The fact that he had no business even being in the office never occurred to him. To him a phone was ringing and the next move is to answer it, a choice we have all been conditioned to make.

A similar sequence of events can occur in our relationships. Something negative occurs, a stimulus, and we have a conditioned response to it, usually a negative response. We act as if we have no choice in the response.

If we act with a conditioned response, we will likely be exacerbating the problem. We will be contributing to it. This pattern has long been recognized in the study of human behavior.

Stephen Covey examines this pattern in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. He reminds us of Viktor Frankl, a psychiatrist who was imprisoned in the Nazi death camps. While Viktor Frankl was undergoing the most inhumane of experiments and torture on his body, he began to realize that even in this most heinous of circumstances, he still had a choice of how he would respond to the treatment. He had the power to choose his response.

Covey states, "In the midst of the most degrading circumstances imaginable, Frankl used the human endowment of self-awareness to discover a fundamental principle about the nature of man: Between stimulus and response, man has the freedom to choose."

Covey states, "Between stimulus and response is our greatest power -- the freedom to choose." Covey describes a map of a proactive model illustrating the freedom to choose. Our freedom to choose emanates from self-awareness, imagination, conscience and independent will. If these elements are tempered by the indwelling Spirit of God, then we can lay claim to the hope that transforms.

An unhealthy response comes from false beliefs. A core false belief which destroys marriages, is that our culture has taught us we are "entitled" to certain occurrences in our relationships. We are entitled to love, loyalty, happiness, a supportive co-parent, fairness, romance, gratitude, etc. We forget that as slaves we have no entitlements. Our response is to Jesus, not to our spouse, and Jesus has called us to take up our cross and follow him.

In Romans 12 Paul begins a description of the transformed life and how the transformed life behaves in relationships. He proceeds on to chapter 15, verse 13, where he says, "May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit."

Ladies, please be patient with this study. Most of what I have shared with you up to this point is still ground work. To have to give up your feeling of entitlement can be a tough pill to swallow. You do not have to do it just yet. Just hang in there, and keep following along. You must first know what God has planned for you, and then we will learn how to get there. The avenue I want you to take WILL lead to the abundant joy and peace Paul describes in Romans 15. He says so.

"Thank you for your newsletter, I'm not sure of the reason that Juno is having problems. I have had trouble getting mail from others also. It could be that they have had an abundant growth in Juno users lately. I'm going to check into it. Meanwhile thank you for making sure I get my newsletter. It makes my Monday to read it first thing. I appreciate the fact that you have gone to the trouble of finding ways to get it to me. One note to Mikal, I am very much enjoying her series on the Christ Centered Wife. Thank you."

The next two are from men. One lives in London, England. The other lives in Minnesota.

"Well, Mikal, you've done it again. Another ace job in your piece `The Christ-centred Wife'. Well done!

However, it applies just as much to us men as to our wives! We have been raised to have the same romantic expectations and the same idolatrous focus on a lover. This lie has been spoon-fed to us by nearly every story-teller in our culture, especially the movie makers. And hours of absorbing it via television have nearly made us a nation of divorcees!

But, as one preacher put it: only when we die to seeking to get feelings of security, significance and happiness from the world and from other people can we come alive to the fulfilment we are meant to receive from Christ and to our identity in Him.

Thanks for reminding us!"

" I was just reading Mikal Frazier's article about hope. About ten years ago several of my coworkers and I had a conversation about lottery tickets during lunch. None of us scientists had purchased one and it is highly unlikely we will. We all agreed that it is terribly illogical to purchase them and it seems that the poor buy most of them, the very ones who can least afford them. We were discussing this paradox when one of my friends said that that he believes the poor purchase lottery tickets to obtain hope. I believe he was right."

NEXT WEEK'S FEATURE STUDY: "DEVELOPING TRUST IN A MARRIAGE"