"Humility comes before honor." Proverbs 15:33

Mr. Smith learned that his neighbor, Mr. Jones, had presented flowers and a gift to Mrs. Jones five nights in a row. He thought, "That must be what wins a woman's heart." So Smith went out and bought a big box of candy and a bouquet of his wife's favorite flowers. Arriving home a little early that afternoon, he rang the doorbell. When Mrs. Smith appeared, he passionately embraced her.

Suddenly she sagged and fell in a heap on the floor.

"My goodness! What's wrong?" he exclaimed.

When she regained consciousness, she explained.

"Oh, this has been the worst day! Our son received a terrible report card; Mother was admitted to the hospital; the roast burned; the washing machine broke. Now to top it off, you come home drunk!"

If your partner can't even fathom the possibility that you would bring her flowers or a gift (or some similar surprise), take the hint. It's time to work on honoring your mate!

Just between us…

Would you be shocked if I brought you flowers or some other gift?
What's the best surprise I ever gave you?
What kind of thoughtful gesture would be enjoyable and honoring to you?
Do you prefer being surprised in front of friends or in private?

Lord, we confess that the hurly-burly pace of living often threatens to suffo- cate our relationship. Remind us to care for each other. Help us to encourage others who are struggling in their marriages. Amen.

by Dr. Ann @ The Marriage Checklist

Do you ever wish your husband would just talk more?

That he would tell you what he was feeling? That you knew more about what was really going on in his mind?

Here is a key idea from Becky Hunter's book, Being Good To Your Husband On Purpose:

Learn to speak your husband's language.

What does that mean?

Think of it this way: we're able to understand what our children want before they can speak a word. We make it our business to figure out what they're trying to say to us.

What about our husbands?

I've heard many women say that they wish their husbands would communicate more verbally. It's widely thought that women speak more often than men do, and that we use more words when we speak. (There's no hard data to back this up, though!) Women are also felt to be more emotionally wired than men.

As a result, we may equate lots of talking with being emotionally available.

Yet our husbands may already be loudly communicating, expressing themselves, and wearing their hearts on their sleeves. All without saying too many words.

Perhaps we need to pay closer attention. And translate!

My husband and I don't "speak" the same way. But once I started to listen to him more carefully, here are some of the things I heard:

• When he fills my car up with gas and reminds me about my almost overdue library books: "I know about the little details in your life. I'm thinking about you."
• When he wants a quiet night home: "I enjoy re-fueling in the comfort of your company. I feel safe and relaxed with you."
• When he goes out to work faithfully each day: "I want to provide for you and our family. I'm here for you."

The language of love. When we make the effort to understand our spouses' native speech, it's amazing what lovely things we can hear.

Question: In your own marriage, have you learned to "speak" your spouse's language of love? When you do this, what kinds of things do you hear?

About The Author:

Dr. Ann is a Christian M.D., wife to a fantastic husband, and mom to a lively gang of three. At The Marriage Checklist Ann blogs about marriage, motherhood, and more! She helps women build better life balance and grow great marriages. ...

by Msgr. Charles Pope

In a series of two posts I would like to ponder the glory of something we call order. I do this more in the form of a meditation than a treatise. Some may argue that I am oversimplifying complex philosophical concepts. That may be true, but I am a pastor not an academic. And though I summarize here, I do not think I have been inauthentic in setting forth the concepts and problems that have birthed the modern age. My intended audience is people who seek some understanding of the mess we're in today, but don't have all day or all week to study it.

Thus permit me this meditation on the glory of order. In this first part, I set forth how the appreciation and understanding of order has suffered in the modern age. In part two (tomorrow's post), I will meditate on the glory of order under four headings. For now, though, here is part one.

The English word "order" comes from the Latin ordo, which is a row or series ranked in some intelligible way. It indicates that something is arranged methodically toward some desired end or purpose. To give someone an order is to give authoritative direction for the purpose of attaining a willed outcome.

We live in times that are marked by increasing disorder. Socially, a lot of our disorder stems from the disorder at the heart of our families. As the family, the basic unit of society, breaks down, a fundamental order is lost; this brings disorder to the community, Church, state, and nation. But even here, there is a deeper disorder at work, more intellectual than merely social.

Intellectually, many today fail to appreciate order. Why is this?

In ancient and biblical times people saw the world as ordered by God and imbued with a wisdom that ordered it intricately. God created everything through His Word. He said, "Let there be light," and there was light. By His Word (Logos) He spoke things into existence. But also by His Word He imbued everything with a logic (logike, a word that comes from Logos).

In the Old Testament this was known as the wisdom tradition. In the New Testament this vision is carried forward but with a glorious transposition, for the Word (Logos) became flesh and dwelt among us. Thus Jesus is the wisdom of God, the Second Person of the Trinity among us.

Yes, the ancient and biblical world saw creation as ordered. Jewish and Greek philosophers alike esteemed order and sought to learn from it. When chaos or disorder was noted it was seen as a departure from the normal order, as an anomaly, or as a paradoxical example of some deeper, hidden order.

This thinking and this respect for order continued largely intact from biblical times through the age of the Fathers and on to the High Middle Ages. God is a God of order. His creation, even this fallen version of it, bespeaks that order.

But this appreciation and understanding of order began to break down as early as the 14th Century with the rise of nominalism. Nominalism (from the Latin nomina (name)) was a theory of knowledge that came to dispute the existence of "universals." Universals are the "form" in which similar things participate. For example, a tree participates in the universal we designate "treeness." And while individual trees have unique qualities, they all share similarities in a basic form that we perceive as "treeness."

As I stated above, this is not a philosophical paper and I cannot adequately summarize hundreds of years of debate in a paragraph, but fundamentally the nominalists (William of Occam, et. al.) argued that universals do not actually exist but rather are merely constructions or abstractions of the human mind. They are only names or categories into which we intellectually place things that are similar. In this case trees are stored in the category named "treeness." (As an aside, the word nominalism comes from the Latin nomina, meaning name.)

Now whether "treeness" is real or just an abstraction may seem debatable and highly academic. But as nominalism became very influential in the 14th century, the focus started to shift away from the physical world to our minds. Reality used to be something we went out to meet, and having observed its order and its laws, learned from it and sought to base our thinking and our life upon what was actually out there.

After the dawn of nominalism, what we call reality became increasingly understood as more of a projection of the human mind than something that the human mind receives and learns to obey. As the centuries ticked by, man moved toward the center; creation and creation's God were pushed to the edges. Perceived order came to be more of a projected order. And if man projects order and meaning then he can also change it. There is less to obey and more to command.

Welcome to the beginnings of the modern age and the seeds of thinking that one can, for example, create reality by deciding whether one is male or female, rather than determining it from the obvious physical data. Of course all of this took time to trickle down through the centuries, through the Cartesian divide and the Enlightenment.

Increasingly gone was the notion that order existed in creation and could easily be discovered and obeyed. The human mind, not creation, was the locus of order. Darwin spoke of creation having evolved, not out of order and someone who ordered it, but as the result of blind, random chance. There was thus no order, intelligent cause, purpose, or finality to be discovered. It was just all there by chance.

All sorts of other movements (e.g., nihilism) came from the shift that nominalism introduced, the shift of focus from reality to the mind. Since order could not be discovered and agreed upon, but rather just existed in the minds of individuals, the result was disorder, the tyranny of relativism, and a sort of despair in the modern age that anything really has intrinsic or universal meaning at all. The mind is a very lonely place when we sever it from what God has set forth in the Book of Creation and in His revealed Word.

As a believer, I have strongly resisted these modern notions, rooted ultimately in nominalism. I cannot say that I haven't been influenced by such notions, but I have consistently resisted them since early adulthood. To me, the world shouts, "Order, order, order! I was designed! Come and meet my designer!"

Order is a beautiful thing. In creation God's order is deep and intricate, vast and wide. It is apparent in the vastness of the entire cosmos and in the intricate workings of cells, molecules, and atoms. What glorious order is all about us! Discovering God's order, I find peace, meaning, and order in my own life. Reverence for God's order, an order that is actually out there and not just in my mind, gives me joy and helps me to trust. God has a plan. God has a purpose for every human person as well as for creation itself. Creation does not exist merely in my mind. It is an aspect of what God has created and permeates it. It is "out there" to be discovered and obeyed. It reaches my mind and includes my mind, but it is not just in my mind; it is actually there in what God has made through His Logos, which gives it a logike (logic) that I discover.

In tomorrow's post, I will offer a brief spiritual meditation on order under four different headings that help to define the experience of order in practical ways:

Life is ordered energy.
Beauty is the splendor of order.
Virtue is ordered love.
Peace is resting in order.

Here are some words related to order/disorder:

Chaos -- utter confusion. It comes from the late-Greek word khaos, referring to the primeval emptiness of the universe; this was as opposed to Kosmos, the ordered Universe. The extended sense of chaos (the void at the beginning of creation) has thus come to mean "orderless" confusion.

Pandemonium (pan-- (all) + daemonium (evil spirit)) literally means "all demon." More figuratively it means "demons everywhere." John Milton coined the word in Paradise Lost as the name of the palace built in the middle of Hell.

• Anarchy -- without a ruler, chief or principal
• Disarray -- lack of arrangement or order
• Discord -- without a common heart (dis (without) + cor (heart))
• Disorder -- without order
• Lawlessness -- the state of living apart from law

by Max Lucado

I've heard people say, "Why talk to God about my problems? He can't understand." According to the Bible--he can! The writer of Hebrews says, "he himself has shared fully in all our experience of temptation, except that he never sinned" (Hebrews 4:15 Phillips).

He himself! Jesus himself shared fully, not partially, but entirely! In all our experience; every hurt; all the stresses and strains; with no exceptions! Why? So he could sympathize with our weaknesses.

Every page of the Gospels hammers home this crucial principle: your God gets you! God knows how you feel. When you tell God you've reached your limit, he knows what you mean. When your plans are interrupted by people who have other plans, he nods in empathy. He has been there. He gets you. He knows how you feel!