As Iron Sharpens Iron

Imagine a guy that works hard to provide for his family yet stops frequently to spend time with them; someone who takes his sons camping and hiking, reads to them and tickles them; who changes dirty diapers, vacuums the house, buys his wife chocolate and never complains when her dinners aren’t Betty Crocker. That guy is my husband, Paul. When I got married, I didn’t know what it was going to take to make a relationship last or what storms it would encounter, but one thing is for sure, I could  not have married anyone but Paul. If the person I had married would’ve been a push-over, they’d have me walking all over them, telling them what to do, whining and pouting and pitching “fits” to get my way, always having the last say, manipulating them with tears. The first time I tried  those tactics on Paul they backfired – the more I whined to get my way, the more stubborn he became not to give in; the silent treatment was a joke, he pestered me until I talked and resolved the conflict; no other (childish) behavior worked, either and boy am I thankful! Of course, it wasn’t pleasant not getting my way, but I soon learned if I’m just quiet (tor-ture) and pray or just straight out ask for something things turn out much, much better. Through this “tough love” he has earned my respect and I love him for it.

Paul is like windshield wipers set on high — mist, sprinkle or downpour. I’ve never seen anyone do things as fast as Paul does them — by the time I make the list of what needs to be done, Paul’s already done it all and a little extra; I’ve also never seen someone NOT procrastinate so much! He never complains about work, never says he’s too tired to work, never puts it off and  always gets the job done sooner than expected; he only complains if he isn’t working or if someone (*ahem*) is working too slow.  His life motto could be “Why talk about doing something when you could be actually doing it?”  Getting Paul to sit still and “plan” is not fun and I should have seen it sooner, it’s because he really doesn’t need to sit down to plan; I don’t exactly know when he plans, but he somehow gets everything done when and how it needs to be done (I attribute it to the fact that Paul’s brain is like an organized filing cabinet, while mine is more like “52 card pick up”). He inspires me to get to work and stop “planning” (aka procrastinating) so much; really and truly, his work ethic inspires me. 

My awesome youth pastor, Eli Hendricks, who was also Paul’s youth pastor, once asked my brother and I to come pull weeds out of his flower beds (I think we needed money for camp or something), so we got to his house and saw “ALL THOSE WEEDS” we had to pull (looking back, it’s embarrassing how few weeds there really were), and after pulling up a few weeds, we started complaining about “oh my goodness, it’s way too hot out here and there’s no way humanly possible to pull up this many weeds and we need gloves and we’re so homeschooled” and on and on. Finally after what felt like hours, Eli comes to inspect our job and pay us and he says to us, “Look at all those weeds still in the ground! Man, I hired Paul Breedlove to do this just last month; he wasn’t even here an hour and he had “AWL” them weeds pulled up.”  Well, he’d never said anything like that before; I figured either he was lying (since I barely knew Paul at the time) or Paul was some super-human; either way, I decided I’d stick to singing on the youth praise team and leave the weed-pulling to “Paul Breedlove”. I can honestly say if I had to pick one area where Paul has helped me the most, it would be in this one. After being married to “Paul Breedlove” for seven years (this month),I say, show me some weeds, I’ll get ’em “awl”!  How someone can find joy in working so hard, doing jobs that make me want to crawl back in bed, is still astounding and has rubbed off on me in many areas of my life. 

There’s so much more that I could say if only it wasn’t 11:30pm! So, I’ll just say, “To be continued…”