Doing Dating Differently This Time

I have to say how blessed I am to be dating a Christian man who is taking on a leadership role in our relationship. To have a cornerstone of Jesus Christ for our relationship puts us leaps and bounds ahead of where he and I have been before.

One aspect that has been important to both of us is doing a devotion daily (when possible). We started off doing a devotion for couples, but it was often times geared towards married couples. And although we’d both been married before, we hadn’t experienced the same situations together that the devotion wanted us to discuss.

For now we’ve put that one aside and found another one that is leading us to journey in our walk with Christ together. It has us talking about heavenly things instead of relationship things, which we talk about plenty on our own. Both are important to our relationship.

This new devotion has really been a good one for us, especially this past week discussing Grace. How to accept grace from God and from each other as well as how to extend it to each other and others. It’s something I definitely need to work on!

Speaking of “work on”, I have found myself very intentional working on my side of the relationship lately with Fred. Remember how I had talked about dealing with trust? Yes, well, it’s still hard, but God is bringing me/us through it. It’s not easy and I have moments of “WHAT?” lol and Fred simply explains and we move on.

One thing about myself that I have been working on is trying to wait until the end of the day to discuss something with him. Before, and I know it will still happen, I would react in the moment and it just made for a miserable conversation. Working on our communication has definitely been key! Being able to talk to him and say, “This is what I need,” or, “This is what I was expecting and this is how I felt when such and such did/didn’t happen,” has actually been very freeing for me. It also allows Fred to not have to respond defensively. He can listen to me as I calmly (key word here for me) explain these things to him, we can discuss it, and grow!

It’s amazing how light and joyful my heart is to be dating a man who desires to love me as Christ loved the church. It’s very evident in the way he treats me and communicates with me. Is he perfect in that? No. Neither am I, but we desire to work on it together, to strengthen our foundation and to grow spiritually together, something neither of us had before.

At some point I’m hoping we can begin to build strong friendships with couples who are building up their marriages so we can learn from them in our dating relationship. Fred and I both want God’s will for our lives individually and together. Finding those relationships will be really important for us as time moves on, as we move towards a future.

I’m so very thankful that God has chosen me to share my time with this fantastic guy! I pray that I will continually remember to live that out in my life.