30-day Husband Encouragement Challenge Update: Days 1-5

Today is day 6 of the husband encouragement challenge. For 30 days I am not allowed to say anything negative about my husband to him or to anyone else and I am also supposed to go out of my way to encourage him. Every morning I take a few minutes to read that days challenge which I printed from the website and keep next to my bed.

My goals for this challenge were 2 things:

1) To encourage my husband! He has been working so much lately and I know he needs the boost
2) To get some of my bad habits under control. I am terrible at holding my tongue

So how have I been doing so far?

I have to say that I have been incredibly surprised with how easy this has been (apologies to any of you who have found this to be excruciating!). It seemed that what I really needed was to decide that I was going to start holding my tongue and being more encouraging, and that is what happened!

The first four days were pretty smooth sailing. I don't think my husband has caught on yet that I am doing a 30 day challenge, but I can tell he has definitely noticed my encouragement and lack of bad attitude. In return, I have noticed he is being more sweet and loving towards me. THAT makes it even more easy to be sweet back to him! I have realized that this is all a cycle. My attitude towards him really affects my husband's attitude towards me.

Yesterday was a little rough. I didn't sleep well and was a bit tired and cranky all day. Unfortunately, this challenge doesn't have built-in free passes for cranky days. I reminded myself of a quote I heard from a Bible study recently: "Am I strong or am I just spoiled?". In other words, am I only doing well with this challenge because things have been going well, I've felt good and rested, and my husband spends the majority of his day at work, or am I doing well because I've been strong and worked at it even when things were difficult?

So I was determined to fight through yesterday. I sent him a few sweet text messages while he was at work, got dinner set up for him, and prayed about my bad attitude.

And I ended up doing pretty well. I didn't explode when I got angry and annoyed, but expressed myself calmly, then moved on. I made an extra effort to show my husband love even though all I really wanted to do was be alone and mope around (please tell me I'm not the only one who has days like this!).

One key I have learned to being successful at this challenge is to do that day's reading first thing in the morning. I found it more difficult to build my day around the challenge and keep it in my mind when I read it later on in the day.

I do have some real challenges ahead this month, however. A family party this weekend where we will be staying at my brother-in-law's house may prove challenging, as well as another trip out of town for memorial day. It is not too difficult to be sweet and loving when I am alone with my husband, but it might prove more challenging when we are in front of others and spouse bashing from others starts flying around our heads.

Have any of you taken the opportunity to take this challenge? If you aren't doing it with me, I hope you will consider doing it on your own. After 30 days of this, I am praying that my good habits will continue!