Are you headed for a heartache? That is what Patty Lovelace asks in her swinging, jivey-in-a-country-sort-of-way song “Blame it on Your Heart.” I’m here to say, if you have ovaries you are always headed for a heartache of some kind. At the hands of your man or his children that you bore in great pain.
So what are you going to do about it? Eat 5 pounds of chocolate every night while you read romance novels? Go to the honky-tonk and have a revenge affair? Spend all of your husband’s money on high heels and scrapbooking supplies?
If you want to read a man-bashing post, you won’t find it here. I’m just inviting my girlfriends into my red tent for coffee, pomtini’s, biscotti and walnuts. Because we all know that when there are no men around, we say things we wouldn’t normally (I hope) say. So if you’ve got to say something you don’t want a man to hear, come on in and say it here because “what happens in the red tent, stays in the red tent.” In fact, we learn best how to deal with our heartaches from each other. Same for men, especially if they are accountable to other God-fearing Christian men.
Why would the KM write about a cheating song during Lent? Because Lent is a time to offer up our suffering, to learn how to suffer as Jesus suffered, to examine our own behavior and repent, and ultimately to forgive.
We are always worried about our men looking elsewhere. For some reason, the Lord made them visual beings. You can read about this in all sorts of Christian books about how to understand your man. There is a wide spectrum of this behavior from the run of the mill snapping around of a male head to look at a woman crossing a street to a demonic enslavement to debasing pornography.
I really hesitate to give advice beyond saying go to confession a lot, especially if you can find a good spiritual director, talk to the older, godly woman mentioned in the New Testament, and read good Christian books for women, taking care to discern what is good advice and what isn’t. Of course we have to be careful to put the marriage first and not violate that sacred trust except within the confessional or with a professional therapist or with that really Godly older woman who has great discernment.
I think I will say that it is essential to maintain our dignity, in a quiet and gentle spirit sort of way in front of our men but when you are in the red tent, you can let your hair down! We need to vent, with the right women of course, and then it is time to pray for a radical trust that the Lord will always provide in His Providence no matter what. That's hard sometimes. Then you can walk out of the tent with all kinds of dignity.
All I know is that some times such a song will reduce me to tears. Other times like this morning when I was singing to it at the top of my lungs and my man-child looked at me with a “I’m not sure what is going on with her but I’m not going to get in her way kind of look,” I have a really light heart. And if I have a light heart it is because there are all of these women who pray for me and we pray for each other, because I am learning to bear my crosses a little better, and I can always call a girlfriend or look at your awesome wife/mama/still-sassy-girl blogs and know there are always opportunities to get together and laugh and cry and to buck each other up.
Want some more coffee? A hankie?
