The Power of a Praying Husband

Dear Friends, this past Friday, late afternoon, was a difficult time for me.  My husband was home from a 4 day work related trip to Indiana and I had just finished work.  I was in the shower trying to talk to my husband about some of my frustrations with respect to my eating and I had a meltdown.

A full-fledged, blubbering mess kind of breakdown.

My poor husband must have thought that I was losing my mind.  If there was ever a time where he would have been justified to have walked away shaking his head, this was it.

However, he did something that spoke volumes to my heart.  He wrapped his arms around me, drew me close and prayed for me.  Not a prayer that I would be okay but a heart-spoken, emotional prayer with our daughters present.

If he wasn't holding on to me I probably would have fallen down on my knees.

The best part was not just the prayer, not just the fact that right there I knew my husband loved me unconditionally, nor the fact that our daughters witnessed their Daddy praying for their Mommy.  It was the incredible sense of peace that washed over me as he spoke those words to our gracious and heavenly Father.

Dear friends, my husband has endured many years of hearing me complain about my weight and my health and my lack of self-esteem and appearance issues.  He has scratched his head along with me as I have gone through many different cycles of eating healthy and then binge eating.  Losing weight and then gaining it back.

I have cried many tears in front of him as I tried to make him understand what it was like for me.  He would just hang his head and say "I don't get it."

Yet as late afternoon passed into evening I think he slowly had a "get it" moment.  A brief glimpse into the burden this has been for me year after year.

I have always known that my husband loved me.  There was never any doubt of that in my mind.  Time after time he would tell me that I was beautiful and he has always been good at complimenting me when I am wearing something that he really likes.

Yet when you are a person who struggles with your appearance due to your weight, sometimes the words just weren't enough.  Sometimes they didn't really reach me deep down like I needed or wanted them too.

However, when he prayed for me, as I stood there wrapped in his arms, his words were more than enough.  Because you see, at that very moment, there was no where else in the world that I would have rather been.