Do you need to let go of control in your marriage?

A big thank you to Shannon Popkin for her guest blog this week as I finish up edits on my latest devotional, Find Hope!

Guest Blog by Shannon Popkin

Back when I had two kids in diapers, a friend mentioned one day that she had seen my husband at a coffee shop.

“Really?” I asked. “When?”

“It was yesterday,” she said. “Early evening . . . maybe 5:30 pm?”

I thought it was strange, but shrugged it off. Then another friend saw him there around the same time. And that’s when I discovered my husband’s daily coffee shop habit. I was not pleased.

5:30 pm was the time, each night, that everything was coming unglued. There were babies crying, things on the stove burning, and nerves unraveling. The thought of him serenely sipping his dark roast brew in my moments of compounding stress was infuriating! How dare he?

 But when I expressed my shock and hurt, he explained that it wasn’t personal. He wasn’t trying to be insensitive; he just needed a few minutes to decompress after work, so he had built these stops at the coffee shop into his routine. When he walked in the door, he wanted to be ready to serve his family. His desire was to succeed, not only at work, but also at home.

The way he saw it, he wasn’t stopping at the coffee shop out of selfishness; he was actually doing it for us.