Reader Babs shared the following story with me back in June. The information hoarder I am, I filed it to use when I hit the topic of marriage. Voila! See? Clutter can come in handy!

One day I was driving somewhere and had Dr. Dobson on the radio. This was back in the nineties sometime. The show was a tape from a women’s conference on marriage. I don’t remember much about the tape, but the woman spoke about how we care for flowers by giving them attention, feeding, and watering them. She then compared them to our husbands; that they need attention and nurturing in order for a marriage to flourish. For some reason the image stuck and I thought it important enough to request a copy of the tape.
A week later, just before Mother’s Day, I had a dream in which I was in this beautiful white-washed room overlooking the Mediterranean. The water was incredibly blue as I lay in a bed furnished with the finest white sheets imaginable. My husband walked in holding a pot of flowers in front of him. He presented them to me with a sheepish, almost embarrassed look on his face.

At first I thought they were tiny begonias because the flowers were so small, but then looking closer, I saw that they were small roses — wilted and dried up. The soil they were planted in was so dry it was cracked; the flowers appeared as though they had been in a drought. The plant looked dead. I reached over next to the bed, picked up a pitcher of water and poured it on the thirsty plant. Like time-lapse photography, the flowers sprang to life and were beautiful, red roses.
I knew what the dream meant — that my husband was the wilted plant in the parched earth and I held the means to make him, and our marriage come back to life.
A week later on Mother’s Day, he had two plants — one for his mom and one for me. One was a cactus and the other miniature red roses. He said that he finally decided to give me the roses. (You can tell how great we were doing — he had to give it thought: “Cactus,,, mother?… wife? The cactus was probably more appropriate for me.) I took a picture of him holding the roses in front of himself and kept it in my Bible, along with my journal account of the dream.

During the following ten years I worked in therapy on the problems I brought to our marriage. Many times I thought it was unfair that I was being called to do something, while he seemed to get off scot-free. How about me? What about my needs? Our marriage continued to deteriorate as I continued therapy. My progress was slow. But over the last eighteen months, I became aware of changes in myself that allowed me to see and appreciate my husband in ways I hadn’t before. When he began to feel valued he tentatively responded (having been burned by my words and actions over many years).
All these years later, I am now finally giving him what he needed to flourish, and as God promised (because I see the dream as prophetic), my husband is blooming — as happy to see me as I am him. I couldn’t change him and his part in our troubles, but I could change me. My gift of love and respect for him, turned out to be a gift to me, because he is returning to me, what I am giving him. Our marriage grows stronger every day, and our grown children are happy for us. (They think we are cute!)
I have a lot of work yet to do in therapy but when I have a hard time trusting God (because of the abuse from my dad), my counselor reminds me how my trust in God’s promise brought us to this point in our marriage.
Marriage is a matter of give and take. In some cases, it is the wife who needs nurturing and respect. Depression takes a huge toll in relationships and sometimes you feel like everything is hopeless. I know that was my feeling. Somehow through God’s help, we both hung on and slogged forward. The tape, dream, and roses, are icons of the possible which I will always treasure.