I am a work in progress in this area.

Asking for what I want meant I had to know what I wanted. I didn’t know how to do that.

Asking for what I want was against everything ingrained in me about what it meant to be a servant leader.

Within the first month of being married I was seeing a psychologist regularly. He came highly recommended by a friend and I knew enough to know this was a choice towards a healthy marriage.

I would sit in the peaceful waiting room before work; there was a keurig and a trickling water fountain. It was the calm before the storm.

I appreciated the calm before the storm. When I walked through those doors and sat in that big comfy chair the storm came. I’m pretty sure it was the first week when he asked me to draw a line down the middle of the paper. He instructed me to write down my wants on one side and my needs on the other. This might have been the first time I ever intentionally had to have these thoughts and it was legitimately frightening.

Now 10 years later I still get nervous depending on the situation, but I have learned that asking for what I want is not just for me, it’s for him too. And now as a mom, it’s for my kids as well.

Friend, let this be your gentle reminder that it’s okay to know what you want and ask for it. No, you won’t get it everytime. Yes, it will take courage and even faith.

You will have done the deep discovery of getting to know yourself. The more we know ourselves the more we can be loved and love in return.