Man Stabs Wife With Word-Sword

Matthew 26:52 Then Jesus said to him, "Put your sword away! All who use a sword will be killed by a sword.
My wife and I have been planning to buy a house for the last six months or so, and we have been doing our best to save up for the 3.5% down payment we need for an FHA loan. It should be easy. Since the price range we are looking at is around 100,000, we only need 3500 dollars, but we were counting on a tax refund that was relatively close to what we received last year ($1500), but when my aunt did a cursory glance at our taxes, we were looking at owing 2000$, not receiving 1500. When I told this to my wife, she was upset. Now, she was upset only briefly, and with good reason—two reasons actually. First, she was upset because I had made some ancillary income from an ebay business, and I owed taxes on it. Secondly, she was upset because I had made a mistake on my w4, and claimed her as a dependent even though she has a job. This would have been acceptable if I would have paid in the extra 85$ a month that the government recommended I take out from my check to make sure that we didn't underpay, but I didn't do that, thinking that my withholdings would be high enough. So when I told my wife that we might owe as much as $2000, you can imagine that she was not happy. And I felt bad about it, bad that I didn't withhold enough from my check, and bad that we were going to have to pay taxes on money that we had already spent. So I spent some time looking for deductions, and my wife and I were able to take off some for business expenses, as well as relocation expenses, all of which greatly reduced the taxes we owed. The funny thing, though, was that during the process, we uncovered some more income that we had to claim from a grant my wife received in 2008. Normally the grant would have been offset by the deduction of tuition expenses, but my wife graduated in 08 and paid all of her tuition fees at the end of 07. Now, I had no intention of going home and using this knowledge as a weapon, to be honest, I didn't even know I was carrying a weapon but when I came home, she said something to that put me on the defensive, and out came the sword!I shoved it all the way up to the hilt into her side, and when she complained of the pain, I wiggled it around a bit and said, “You made me feel bad about my taxes!” as if this justified me trying to hurt her with the knowledge of her unpaid taxes. It is sort of funny, now, but to be honest, I learned a lesson from it.You have to actively guard your heart against any kind of grudge, and you need to willfully choose to go into situations where you feel accused, or where you are accused, as Christ did before his accusers, quietly, without the need to defend yourself, silent as a lamb before its shearers. If there is some new “weapon” that you are given through a circumstance or some fresh knowledge, you need deliberately drop it at your feet and offer it to the Lord. If you don't proactively deal with it, you are going to bludgeon someone to death while scarcely even recognizing that you are holding a cudgel. But if you prepare your heart before hand, you will be ready to keep the weapon at your side, though you will still be tempted to pull it out. You will know what will happen if you bring it out--Death--and you will choose to let it rest, beating it into a plowshare, and using it to cultivate the relationship for life instead of shedding blood for death. If you aren't prepared before hand, you (if you are anything like me) will reflexively try to defend yourself, and then a few minutes later you will be asking Jesus to heal the ear you just lopped off of you figurative marital body. Trust me, I speak from experience.

My wife forgave me, though, and its not because I paid off her taxes, since after all of our deductions we ended up with a 600$ refund between state and federal. GO DEDUCTIONS! Woot!

God bless you, and Thanks to my wife for reading this :P