Welcome back to the Ending Well series. This is week five of looking back over the year, letting God redeem the hard parts, and choosing who we want to become as we step into a new season.

Today's episode is all about marriage — but even more specifically, the kind of wife you want to be. Not the Instagram version. Not the performance version. The real, healed, whole version.

This year, God radically reshaped how I see myself as a wife. I didn't set out to "become a better wife," but as He broke my addiction to productivity and constant performance, it transformed our marriage into an even safer place, a deeper gift, and a stronger home base.

Episode Snapshot

In this conversation, I share honestly about:

• The "strong, high-capacity, always-on" identity I lived in for years

• How that mindset spilled into our marriage and made me controlling, critical, and exhausted

• The follower's question that changed everything:

  • "What did you do to change that brought this out in him?"

• Why sometimes you have to go first in doing the inner work

• The difference between survival-mode marriage and a marriage built on connection

• How God used pruning, slowing down, and healing my nervous system to completely shift my role as a wife

We also name an important reality: There are marriages where abuse, betrayal, or deep harm is present, and "trying harder" as a wife is not the answer. I am not speaking into those situations; I am sharing from a context where I am married to a good man, and our biggest battles were often with our own mindsets, wounds, and habits.

Key Shifts God Made In Me This Year

• Letting him lead

  • Moving out of constant control mode

  • Asking for his thoughts and actually listening

  • Giving him room to step forward in decisions and in parenting

• Becoming less reactive, less critical

  • Recognizing how perfectionism makes you hard on yourself and everyone around you

  • Learning the difference between reacting and responding

  • Owning moments where I project my own embarrassment or anxiety onto him

• Allowing myself to be supported

  • Letting him help with dishes, laundry, the mental load, and home life

  • Receiving service as an expression of love instead of proof that I am failing

• Integrating my calling and my home

  • No longer seeing ministry or work as competition with being a wife and mom

  • Letting God reorder my priorities: Jesus, marriage, children, then everything else

  • Moving from "two separate versions of me" to one whole, integrated person

Underneath it all, God shifted me from: "More of me, doing more, performing more" to "Less of me, more of Him — loving from abundance instead of exhaustion."

A Scripture to Sit With

"Unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labor in vain." Psalm 127:1

This is true of literal houses and of marriages.

Reflection Questions

Take these to prayer, to your journal, or into a gentle conversation with your spouse:

• What kind of wife do I actually want to be — if no one were watching but God?

• Where am I over-functioning, trying to hold everything together in my own strength?

• Do I criticize my husband more than I pray for him?

• Where might God be inviting me to soften, slow down, or make space for him to lead?

• Am I willing to let Jesus make me whole, instead of just more productive?

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