I know that many of you enjoyed the Piano heart treasure (My Piano Keys) I shared last time and it has led to much discussion, both online and offline. Thank you for all the feedback, it has been incredibly encouraging to me. But today, I want to point out an additional lesson I learnt from this story that changed my marriage.
I mentioned that there is one person that plays all the keys on your piano, who touches every aspect of our personality and character, His name is God Almighty. Only God can fully satisfy every aspect of our character, because He made the piano and it is “fearfully and wonderfully made.” (Psalm 139) He knows how to play that piano for its best tunes because He designed it to play specific tunes in the world. He is more than capable of meeting all our spiritual and emotional needs all on His own.
But, because He is good and knows what is best for us, God sends people into our lives to play tunes on our piano; they help meet the emotional needs we have. One of the most important amongst all these people is our marriage partner.
Make it your goal, that your marriage partner plays the most keys on your piano, and together you explore the keys to find tunes never played before. But here is a warning: even the love of your life, cannot play every key on your piano. It is impossible. There will always be aspects of your personality and character that he cannot fulfill. Only God can do it 100% correctly, every time!
God did not just provide a marriage partner, He also provided close friends whom we have relationships with. We as woman sometimes neglect time with our girlfriends and then expect our husbands to fulfill the needs we have. We keep bringing our piano to him and telling him to play on it. If you are expecting your marriage partner to play all the keys on your piano you are not being fair to them, it is impossible for them to fulfill all your emotional needs.
You need to be spending time with God and then spending time with other people in your life, just like your partner needs other people in his life, to meet all your joint emotional needs. It is good for you to have girlfriends that you spend time with, just as it is good for our marriage partners to have male friends that they are able to spend time with, without being made to feeling guilty. They play a different tune in his life, which only your girlfriends can play in your life.
When we look to our marriage partners to play all the keys on our piano, even the tune that they are playing becomes “not good enough!” They know what we are asking them to do, but try as hard as they might; they know that they are never going to be able to meet all of our emotional needs because they don’t know the tune to play, to touch those keys. In the end, whatever he plays jars at our nerves because we haven’t allowed others to play on our piano.
His attempts to meet our needs like a knight in shining armor, becomes the dude on the donkey that does not get it right!
We don’t see the knight that he is, we only see what he is not doing, what he is not saying, what he is not being! Some of us need to give our husbands a break and let a few good girlfriends play piano, so that they can fill our need to be loved, cared for and appreciated. Our need to laugh, giggle, talk and share is at times more than our man can provide. This does not absolve our partner, it merely gives them and us an opportunity to hear some other tunes.
Perhaps there is nothing wrong with your knight in shining armor, perhaps he is just overworked. Perhaps he just needs time doing what boys want to do, permission to listen to the tunes of sport, beer, meat, TV, isolation. Perhaps if you spent the time listening to other girl-tunes, became less demanding of the tune he is playing, he will get better at the tune that he has been wanting to play all along!
Took me a while to realize that my poor knight needed time away from the princess and that the princess needed to make sure she saw her girlfriends. I also needed to see that although he only needed to hear a few songs on his hit parade of friends, I needed a top 100 hit parade, to meet my emotional needs! No wonder he was exhausted! The moment I stopped looking to him to play all the notes on my piano and started spending time with girlfriends on my hit parade and extra time in the presence of the Lord, the strain between us became less and we started to hear the romantic melodies again. He stopped looking like a dude on a donkey and started looking like my knight again.
Only God can meet all of our needs and play all the keys on our piano and He sends people into our lives to meet some of those needs. Don’t expect your marriage partner to play all the keys on your piano, expand your hit parade to include the tunes of close friends. Your marriage will be the richer for it!
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aaahhh love ‘the dude on the donkey’!!!! What an amazing analogy, i can see that this image is gonna stick with me for many a giggle
Dx