Welcome to your first guest blog from Melissa! Matt and I could turn this Stains and Other Mishaps thing  into a whole devotional series, eh?

Matt did such a great job expressing the spiritual lessons we’ve learned the past few weeks through our foibles – I wanted to share something that happened in my heart as a wife with our carpet stain catastrophe.

We have such power with our words and actions. With a single word we can build our spouse up, or cut them to shreds. It is a decision we have a split second to make, but that split second determines how the next ten minutes, the next hour, the next entire day is going to go.

So here is what happened from my perspective on that fateful Sunday morning:

I was in our downstairs bathroom doing my makeup, sipping my tea, generally enjoying the fact that the day was going pretty smoothly. When I heard the crash from the deck and Matt’s exclamation of shock, my peace was immediately shattered. With great trepidation I peeked out of the bathroom – my eyes went straight to Matt, who was standing frozen in the middle of our deck in a puddle of stain, to the trail of dark brown spots on our beige carpet. “What happened?” I asked impatiently. “I dropped the can – it slipped out of my hand,” Matt replied. I could hear the extreme frustration in his voice. I drew my head back into the bathroom and stared at myself in the mirror for a moment. And I thought about…beans.

Yes, beans.

Several weeks ago at church, our senior pastor told a story. Pastor and his wife went over to the home of one of the associate pastors for dinner. When they arrived, the assoc. pastor’s wife greeted them with a smile and served them a wonderful meal, which included the most fantastic beans they had ever had. The assoc. pastor’s wife laughed lightly when they complimented her on the beans, and with a twinkle in her eye at her husband said “We’re lucky to have beans tonight – my husband was working in the basement and had to turn off the power for a little while and forgot about the crock pot. But I turned it back on when I came home for lunch and it had plenty of time to cook!”.

What’s interesting about that is she had a moment to make a choice when she walked in the door at lunch. She could have shouted down the basement stairs, “You moron, you turned off my crock pot!! Pastor and his wife are coming for dinner and the beans are RUINED!”. But she didn’t. She recognized that it was a mistake, turned the crock pot back on, gently reminded her husband to please be mindful of the crock pot, and went on with her day. Then, when she told the story that night, she had another choice: She could have told it in a manner that humiliated her husband and made him look foolish in front of his boss. But instead, she told it as a funny story without cutting her husband down. She understands the power of how her reactions affect others.

And somehow, as I was staring at myself in the mirror in the split second after the Great Stain Catastrophe, that entire story flashed through my mind. Beans. This was my Beans Moment. And I realized I had a massive responsibility – how I chose to respond in the next thirty seconds was going to set the tone for the entire rest of the morning, perhaps even the rest of the day. And we had a busy day ahead of us working with my mom’s ministry to women! Was I going to send us into that day at war or at peace?

With a deep breath (with which I inhaled the stench of fresh stain – blech!), I came out of the bathroom, and proceeded to give my husband what must have been the shock of his life. Instead of responding in anger, I calmly said “Honey, it’s okay – it was an accident. There’s nothing we can do about it right this second. Why don’t you get cleaned up, go take a shower, and we’ll worry about it later. It will still be here to deal with when we get home this evening.”

Long story short, we got out the door, to church, to my mom’s house, and through the rest of the day just fine. Joyfully, even! We had more fun that afternoon ministering with my mom and the ladies than we ever expected to. And the issue of the stain on the carpet got solved just fine, in its own time. (The smell took a little longer…)

What happened that morning really impacted me as a wife. We all hold a tremendous power with our spouses. With just one word or a simple tone of voice, we can either make our spouse feel like a superhero or we can cut their eg0 to shreds. When something happens, and we have that split-second between the event and our response, essentially we’re holding the power of life and death in our hands. Our response is going to determine how the rest of the situation unfolds. Wow. That’s pretty heavy stuff. And I’ll be the first person to admit I usually go with the power of death. My husband fully expected me to come flying out of the bathroom shrieking to high heaven about what an idiot he was to get stain on my carpet. And that, people, is just plain SAD. I have the ability to choose life over death, and most of the time I just default to death. I don’t even make an effort to choose.

And then I realized…my kids are going to be watching me, and learning from me. I have a responsibility to teach them to choose to respond in a lifegiving manner.

Ouch.

Like, OUCH.

But there’s hope! That Sunday morning, I proved to myself that I can choose life. And so I’ve made a commitment to choose life from now on. To respond not with words of anger, but with words of gentleness. To catch myself when I start speaking in a harsh tone and change it. Because I have the choice. Am I always going to do it perfectly? Of course not – that’s why God gives us grace and forgiveness. But the point is, I’m making the conscious decision to not go to the “default” setting any more.

Proverbs 25:11 – “A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in settings of silver.”

I hope from now on, whenever I have a Beans Moment, my words will resemble apples of gold more often than they resemble barbed arrows.

So…which are you going to choose the next time you have a Beans Moment?