Do You Have Time For a Chat?

You may have to work hard at it, but learning to chat well will bring great satisfaction to your life and your marriage.

My husband is a brave man. He appears to me to be not afraid of much of anything, except grizzly bears he tells me. There are three words, though, that I observed could make the hair stand up on the back of his neck – “Can we talk?”

Recently a friend asked me if my husband and I spend time just having conversations. Yes, we do! We love to chat with each other – about lots of things – ideas, opinions, dreams, etc. However, it has not always been so.

My friend was feeling like she and her husband had drifted away from the habit of connection by just chatting. Ah, so easy to do. Life comes at us in waves of busyness and responsibility and all the must do’s and we sometimes forget just how important it is to take time to stay connected.

Discussing important matters of life is indeed necessary and must not be avoided. Often though, for my husband and I, those “talks" created more distance between us than closeness. Our strategy needed to change. Here are three lessons we have learned that made a big difference!

1. Start from a sound foundation. Make sure your heart is filled with what you want to come out of your mouth.

Luke 6:45 (Good News Translation) A good person brings good out of the treasure of good things in his heart; a bad person brings bad out of his treasure of bad things. For the mouth speaks what the heart is full of.

Unforgiveness, despair, disrespect, feelings of rejection, pride, anger, and so many other issues can reside in our hearts and taint our words. We all come to God lost and broken in some way. I came to Him with a damaged heart and a wounded soul. I am keenly aware of and exceedingly grateful for His power to heal and repair broken people. When we surrender our hearts to Him, He restores, repairs and re-fills. He re-fills us with a “treasure of good things” in our hearts.

Is your heart full of peace, love, good thoughts, good intentions, encouragement, agreement, respect, praise and hope? If so, your husband will be blessed by your conversation, no matter what you are talking about.

If not, ask God to help you do a heart inventory today and work with Him to fix what is broken. Your conversation depends on it.

2. Set the goal of your conversations to building up the relationship and maintaining close connection.

Ephesians 4:29 (Good News Translation) Do not use harmful words, but only helpful words, the kind that build up and provide what is needed, so that what you say will do good to those who hear you.

A dear friend and mentor spent Wednesday afternoons with me for several weeks. I was a new Christian and needed help navigating marriage, motherhood and my own personal struggles in view of God’s Word. One day she said to me, “Why do you continue to tell your husband about his flaws? He is well aware of what they are.” Yikes! That puts a different perspective on it. When we are tempted to constantly remind our husbands where they have failed, they don’t really want to talk to us much anymore. On the other hand, when we remind our husbands of all the wonderful things we love about them, how thankful we are for the pleasure of being married to them, how we see them humbly allowing God to work in their lives, our words are doing good to them, edifying and encouraging them. These are helpful words that invite closeness and build up the relationship. Talk to God about the places where you struggle in your relationship. You will find that He is already working there!

3. Learn some pleasant, healing words, in fact learn lots of them. Then begin the practice of using them every day when speaking to your husband.

Proverbs 16:24 (New American Standard) Pleasant words are a honeycomb, Sweet to the soul and healing to the bones.

If you asked my husband, he would tell you that I love words. He would also likely say that I love to say a lot of them! But he says that affectionately because he loves to chat with me as much as I love to chat with him.

I don’t say those three scary words anymore. Instead, my invitation is, “Do you have time for a chat?” It may be a casual conversation or it may include having to make some important decisions. Whatever the need is, we do our best to use pleasant, helpful, healing words that are sweet to the soul and do good to one another.

Yes, we do argue and disagree and fuss but years ago we made an agreement that, even then, we would work at using our words wisely. I am happy to report that the majority of the time we still do honor that agreement. It is so important to establish our conversations to be a safe, inviting, peaceful place where we can both come away stronger and closer.

And, by the way, these are not the only scriptures that tell us how to “talk” to one another. Take some time and check out the many others. You might be surprised at how thoroughly the subject is covered in the Word. Apparently God knew how we would struggle in this area!

Happy Chatting!

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