Are You a Gift Seeker for Your Husband?

By Fawn Weaver on Friday, April 25, 2014

Are You a Gift Seeker For Your Husband

A few weeks ago, I had breakfast with a wonderful friend.  Actually, it was a double date.  Keith and I on one side of the table with Carolyn and Bob on the other.  

As we sat across from one another, enjoying our eggs and toast, Carolyn began to share with us the amazing gifts she’d discovered since being diagnosed with nasopharyngeal cancer.

She’d already begun losing hearing in her left ear and learned from her doctor that, post surgery, all of her hearing in that ear would be lost.

“But so many great things have come from this,” she told us while smiling.  

She’d gone to church for the first time in many years.  She and Bob had grown close to several couples there and enjoying time with them brought a sense of comfort and community.

“She’s been talking to her sister,” Bob interjected.  ”They actually have a relationship again,” he said proudly.  ”I’m Carolyn’s ‘gift seeker’.  I look for the gifts in everything that’s going on to help her through this time of change.”

The moment he said that, I gave Keith’s leg -where my hand had been resting- a little bit of a squeeze.  ”I love that!  You’re her gift seeker.”  Then I immediately turned inward, as I usually do, and thought, Am I a gift seeker for Keith?

When he’s having a challenging day at work, can he always count on me to look for the gifts in it all?  Rather than trying to help him solve the problem or come up with a solution, why not make it my mission to look for the gifts in the situation to help turn his day around as quickly as possible?

As Bob continued listing many of the gifts they’d discovered throughout this trial, I realized, Carolyn was in the best place I’d ever known her to be and I’ve known her for close to 10 years.  Her spirit radiated gratefulness.  Her heart was at peace.  And she got there, in part, because Bob determined from the offset of her diagnoses that he would seek out -and find- every gift there was to be found in Carolyn’s life.  And he would continue to remind her of these things daily.

Could I call myself a “gift seeker” for Keith at that moment when I was inspecting my heart over breakfast that Saturday morning?  Maybe.  But I knew I wasn’t intentional about it.  I’m working on that now and if you ask me about this in a month, I hope to proudly declare, “Yes, I am my husband’s gift seeker!”

YOUR TURN: Are you a gift seeker for your husband?

Until Monday…make it a great weekend!

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Fawn Weaver is the USA Today® and New York Times® bestselling author of Happy Wives Club: One Woman's Worldwide Search for the Secrets of a Great Marriage, adopting the same name as the Club she founded in 2010. The Happy Wives Club community has grown to include more than 900,000 women in over 110 countries around the world. When she’s not blogging or working on her next project, she's happily doting over her husband of nearly eleven years, Keith.

 

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  • Britta

    That is so inspiring!!!!
    I always try to think of nice things to do for my husband, like picking up his favorite magazine or leaving little love notes… but I never thought of that. I will start right away!
    Thank you for this amazing post!

    • http://www.happywivesclub.com/ Fawn @ Happy Wives Club

      Thanks, Britta!

  • Nicole Silliman

    What exactly does this mean though?

    • http://www.happywivesclub.com/ Fawn @ Happy Wives Club

      Being a “gift seeker” for your husband means you are constantly looking for the “gifts” in every situation. Even those that seem challenging. Make sense?

  • Susanne

    There is Carolyn and Bob, Keith and Fawn…who is Jeff?

    • http://www.happywivesclub.com/ Fawn @ Happy Wives Club

      Yikes!! Thanks, Susanne, for pointing that out!! At first, I’d written this using aliases and then thought, “Why in the world am I using aliases when Bob and Carolyn would more than welcome this?” So I changed the aliases out to their real names. I can’t believe I missed changing the alias I’d given Bob (Jeff) in a few places. Wowzers.