I’m starting a new series on this blog about my life as a young married minister. I am hoping it will encourage anyone who is considering ministry, especially those who want to serve overseas. The purpose of this series is help demystify the life of a missionary and help you to see how God can call you the same way he has called me.

Arguing over Values

One of the most frustrating moments of being engaged was trying to plan a wedding on a missionary’s budget. We wanted to keep the costs low so we could pay off my seminary debt and we both agreed on all the areas where we would try to save money. There was one area though where we argued a lot. The wedding invitations in my opinion should cost less than a dollar each. Carmen wanted to spend more than a dollar each. It was an increase of more than 50%! I remember we had huge fights over it because I thought it reflected a core weakness of Carmen. She didn’t want to save money!

It was funny that in the end it all worked out because I realized the difference in price was really negligible in the grand scheme of things. I realized that in the end Carmen shared my values of saving money but we had different ideas of what that meant in this instance.

It was through pre-marital counseling that we learned how dumb our fight was. The counseling turned out to be one of the best parts of being engaged. Me and Carmen did our pre-marital counseling with Pastor Steven at CEC and it really helped us to identify some of our core values as individuals and the ways we preferred to communicate. After being married more than a year now I can see that I have changed in the ways I relate with my wife; I think for the better.