Grace to Grow: Loving the Person Your Spouse Is Becoming
"This isn't the person I married."
If that thought has ever crossed your mind, I want to stop you right there before the guilt creeps in, because you're probably right. And that doesn't have to be a bad thing.
Where We Started
Ryan and I got married after dating for just five months. We hadn't had time to learn how to fight fair, let alone figure out where we stood on faith, money, or the future we each pictured. We also came from completely different worlds. He grew up on a farm with two married parents and a close-knit community. I grew up in the city, where my mom was a single parent juggling many roles in career and family.
Different backgrounds meant different instincts for conflict. I learned to avoid it: get quiet, get busy, let it pass. Ryan learned to meet it head-on, then start fresh the next day. Put those two styles in a one-bedroom apartment with a brand-new marriage, no money, and zero margin, and you get exactly what you'd expect: disconnection.
Four months in, with two counselors telling us it wasn't going to work, we separated. We were listening to every insistent voice around us instead of the quiet one that would have said, keep talking, keep trying to understand.
A few weeks later, we found our way back to each other. Ask us today how that happened and you'll get two slightly different versions of the story, but the ending is the same. Quitting would have been the easy road. We chose to try again. Marriage, we were learning, is a choice to keep showing up even when walking away feels simpler.
Grace to Grow
Here's what I've learned in 36 years: the person I married at 19 is not the person I'm married to now. And thank God for that.
Over three and a half decades, we've moved more times than I can count, supporting Ryan's career from one promotion to the next. I went back to school in my thirties and built a career in healthcare I'm genuinely proud of. I found confidence I didn't know I had teaching spin classes. Ryan left corporate life for a season to run a food truck with a neighbor, then returned to the business world. Our interests shifted. Our styles evolved. What lit us up changed more than once.
And through most of that, Ryan was the one extending grace. In my twenties, I was a Mary Kay director, which meant frequent travel for business and conferences, and Ryan stepped in with the kids and the meals so I could chase that goal. When I decided to make school my full-time focus, he supported that too, even though it meant less of me at home. Fitness was never really his thing, but he showed up to my classes anyway and made room for the time it took to get certified and keep teaching. He's given me grace through every interest I've picked up and set down over the years: running, painting, singing on the worship team, writing, the drums, an inside dog that probably wasn't in the original plan. And he's supporting me now as I build a second career as a Christian life coach for women, learning a whole new space outside of healthcare. There was even a season when my priorities became blurred, and he extended grace through that too.
None of it threatened our marriage. It was the marriage: two people growing, sometimes in the same direction and sometimes not quite, choosing again and again to close the gap instead of letting it widen.
A Season We Didn't Plan For
More recently, we've walked through something neither of us saw coming. Ryan has faced real struggles with his mental health, along with chronic pain that has reshaped what his body and energy allow from day to day. The man who built his identity on being confident, driven, and the strength for everyone around him is now learning to live at a very different pace, one that includes daily rest, real limits, and adjusted expectations for us both.
Why Grace Matters More Than Compatibility
If marriage is a lifelong process of two people continuing to grow in career, health, faith, and capacity, then grace isn't optional. It's what lets you stay close to someone while they change instead of quietly turning cold and distant because they're not who they used to be.
Here's the piece I keep coming back to: marriage isn't just about the two of us. It's a relationship designed by God, which means the grace we extend to each other reflects the grace He extends to us every single day as we stumble, get back up, and keep going. When we choose to see each other through God's lens instead of our own frustration or fear, seeking understanding comes a lot easier than building a wall.
It's not natural. It's a choice, usually a daily one, sometimes an hourly one.
When the Gap Feels Wide
Maybe for you, that gap doesn't feel like a small stretch. It feels wide. Years of hurt, miscommunication, or distance can make grace feel like a lot to ask right now. If that's you, hear this: grace isn't a switch you flip all at once. It starts as one small choice, today, to soften just slightly toward someone you've been keeping at arm's length. That still counts. That's still grace.
And if marriage isn't your current story, if you're single, divorced, or walking a different kind of relationship altogether, this same grace still applies. Every close relationship in your life, whether with a parent, a sibling, or a close friend, asks the same question: can you make room for someone to keep growing instead of holding them to who they used to be?
This Week's Invitation
Think of one way your spouse, or someone else close to you, has changed over the years: a shift in season, interest, capacity, or role. This week, instead of measuring them against who they used to be, ask God to help you extend the same grace He's given you. Then take it one step further and tell them. Name the change you've noticed, and let them know you see it, and that you're for them, not against them, as they keep growing.
Here's what I can tell you from the other side: the marriage we have today, built through all that grace, is so much better than anything we could have planned in that one-bedroom apartment 36 years ago. It was worth every bit of the work. It still is.
Next week, we're talking about Rooted in Truth, and why honest communication, spoken in love, is what real intimacy is actually built on.
With you in it,
Tonya
Did you miss the introduction to my four-part series on nurturing your marriage with faith and intention? Catch up here.