To Love, Honor and Cherish

by Sabrina Beasley

Often husbands express the importance of cherishing their wives. It’s easy to think of a wife as something to cherish. Women are often soft, fragile, easily hurt like china. So men can understand how a woman would need to be cherished.

But the traditional wedding vows also include a promise from the wife to cherish her husband, as well. This is a little more difficult to imagine. We don’t often visualize treating men like china, but rather sturdy reliable wood.

To cherish your husband is not to treat him like china, but to treat his successes, his secrets, his self-image, his thoughts, his opinions, his heart like china, treasuring and caring for the intricacies that make up his persona.

Most of us married our husbands because there was something about them that we cherished and admired, but it’s easy for those feelings to fade. Yet, admiring your husband is no less important now than it was the day you got married.

Marriage is no house party; it’s not a college campus or a stimulating political row or an athletic contest. But you ought now and then to remember what he was, to ask yourself what it was, really, that caught your eye. Come now, you will say to yourself, you didn’t marry him because he was a great halfback, did you? No, you married this person. Whatever the inner qualities were that enabled him to do the things he did then, are still a part of this person that you go to bed with and eat breakfast with and wrestle over the monthly budget with. He is a person with the same potentials he had when you married him. Your responsibility now is not merely to bat your eyelashes and tell him how wonderful he is, but to appreciate, genuinely and deeply, what he is, to support and encourage and draw out of him those qualities that you originally saw and admired.

He is a person with feelings and a heart that can be broken, with the ability to learn and develop and transform. And our husbands are longing for us, as wives, to delve into their inner persons and find out the layers of their souls hiding underneath.

Embracing the man God made your husband to be is not a matter of just tolerating his behavior, but truly valuing the makeup of his personality and the traits he has to offer. Although this skill takes practice and time, these three tips will help you communicate and display admiration for the man who desires to impress you most.

First, stop nagging! In the book of Proverbs, the wisest man on earth, King Solomon, warns men about a nagging wife.

Constant nagging is like putting a pressure washer to your husband’s self-worth. When a wife nags, it doesn’t matter what words are coming out of her mouth, most of the time a husband hears, “You’re not good enough. You don’t meet my needs. I would be better off with someone else.” That’s enough to make most men wonder, Why try?

Instead, if you have suggestions for your husband, have patience. Tell him that you’re proud of him. Talk to him, but don’t get frustrated and fight. Make your requests and then respect his decisions.

Thought for today:

"As a wife, there is no greater gift I can give than to appreciate my husband, not just for what he does for me, but for who he is"