Taking Up Our Positions: 

September 16, 2026

Lately, I have been thinking a lot about positions.

Not positions in the sense of titles or status, but the positions we occupy in one another’s lives.

I am a daughter. A sister. A wife. A mother. An aunt. A friend. I was a teacher. I am a businesswoman and a leader in certain spaces. Every one of these positions comes with responsibility.

In Christian language, I think about taking up our cross. There are things God has entrusted to us to carry. Part of maturing is learning what actually belongs to us and becoming willing to carry it faithfully.

I think we create a lot of unnecessary pain when we become more concerned with what someone else should be doing in their position than with what we have been given to carry in our own.

We know what our spouse should be doing. What our parents should have done. What our children should understand. What our leaders should be doing differently.

Meanwhile, we may not have stopped long enough to ask:

What is mine to carry?

Taking up our position does not mean controlling another person or taking responsibility for their choices. It does not mean tolerating mistreatment or refusing healthy boundaries. It means understanding what belongs to us.

And I have learned that knowing our position is one thing.

Learning how to carry it is another.

I think most of us learn through struggle.

Through conflict. Through disappointment. Through mistakes. Through unmet expectations. Sometimes through seasons when we are absolutely convinced that the other person is the problem.

When I look back over my own life, I can see that some of the positions that mean the most to me were also the ones I had to struggle the hardest to understand.

There was struggle between my mother and me before I truly understood my position as her daughter. There was always love between us, but there was also turmoil. I was becoming my own person, and there were things about her I would not understand until much later in life.

We had to grow into our relationship.

Teaching was the same way.

I did not become the teacher I wanted to be simply because I earned the degree and stood in front of a classroom. My first couple of years teaching in the United States were incredibly challenging, and there were experiences that could have hardened me.

But I knew the kind of teacher I wanted to become.

I wanted to be a teacher who loved, who cared, who advocated, and who saw the child before the behavior.

I had to fight to become that teacher.

Sometimes taking up our position means refusing to allow the struggle surrounding the position to determine who we become within it.

And then I became a wife.

Marriage has probably been one of the greatest teachers of this lesson in my life.

When I got married, I loved my husband. He loved me. Looking back, I do not believe love was the problem.

We simply did not know yet how to be married.

We were two people carrying our own histories, expectations, wounds, insecurities, habits, and immaturity, and somehow we expected the other person to know exactly what to do.

There were things I needed from my husband that I could not always articulate. One of those things was steadiness.

I needed to know that when my emotions, baggage, or immaturity surfaced, he was not simply going to walk away.

That did not mean he needed to excuse unhealthy behavior. There were things in me that needed to change. There were ways I communicated that were wrong. He needed boundaries too.

But I needed to know that his love was secure enough to say, in one way or another:

I am still here. We are going to work through this.

And while I was very aware of what I needed from him as my husband, I had to learn what he needed from me as his wife.

That took time.

I had to learn him, just as he had to learn me.

We learned the hard way.

There were fights, finger-pointing, blaming, unfair arguments, and a lot of scorekeeping.

We became very good at identifying exactly what the other person was not doing.

Looking back now, I can see the problem more clearly:

We expected our spouse to know their position when we did not even know our own.

And I think that happens in a lot of marriages.

Sometimes love is not necessarily what is missing.

Sometimes love is buried under resentment, poor communication, old wounds, pride, unmet expectations, and years of keeping score.

Two people can love one another and still have very little understanding of how to occupy their positions well.

We enter marriage with ideas about what a husband should be, what a wife should be, and how our spouse should respond. Then we become disappointed when the real person standing in front of us does not match the picture we created in our minds.

Marriage requires learning.

We have to learn the actual person we married.

What makes them feel loved? What makes them feel respected? What wounds do they carry? What do they need from us?

And we have to be humble enough to allow them to learn us too.

That sounds simple when I write it.

It was not simple to live.

Because marriage does not only reveal the other person.

It reveals us.

It shows us where we are impatient, defensive, controlling, insecure, unforgiving, or still carrying wounds we thought we had already healed from.

Relationships expose us.

And sometimes that exposure can feel like the relationship is failing when it may also be showing us where we still need to grow.

That does not mean every troubled marriage should remain intact at all costs. It does not mean abuse should be endured or destructive behavior ignored. Taking responsibility for our position does not mean taking responsibility for another person's choices.

But for two imperfect people who genuinely desire a healthy marriage, there is something powerful about asking:

What belongs to me?

What is mine to correct?

What is mine to apologize for?

What is mine to communicate?

What is mine to learn?

Because marriages can easily become a standoff.

I will change when you change.

I will listen when you listen.

I will soften when you go first.

And slowly, two people who love each other can end up standing on opposite sides of the marriage waiting for the other person to move.

Someone has to be willing to put down the scorecard.

Not because one person should carry the marriage alone, but because each person has to become responsible for what belongs to them.

Maybe that is where taking up our position begins to resemble taking up our cross.

Because there is surrender involved.

Sometimes we have to surrender pride.

Sometimes the need to be right.

Sometimes an expectation we never communicated.

Sometimes the belief that another person must change before we can become who God is asking us to become.

That kind of surrender is uncomfortable.

But maybe struggle is part of becoming.

I can see the pattern throughout my life.

My relationship with my mother confronted parts of me that needed maturity.

Teaching confronted parts of me that needed courage and conviction.

Marriage confronted parts of me that needed healing, humility, accountability, and surrender.

Motherhood, leadership, and business continue to reveal areas where I still need to grow.

Every new position seems to expose another place where I am unfinished.

Maybe that is part of what our positions are meant to do.

They do not simply give us titles.

They form us.

They stretch us.

They teach us responsibility.

And if we allow God to work through them, they change us.

I think differently about marriage today because I no longer believe a good marriage is one where two people instinctively know how to be good spouses.

I think a strong marriage is often two imperfect people who remain willing to learn.

They learn themselves.

They learn one another.

They learn how to apologize, communicate, forgive, set boundaries, and repair after hurting each other.

Sometimes love is patience.

Sometimes love is correction.

Sometimes love is saying, I was wrong.

Sometimes love is standing your ground.

And sometimes love is continuing to become better at carrying the position that has been entrusted to you.

I am still learning.

There are positions in my life that I carry better today than I did ten years ago, and there are positions I am still trying to understand.

Maybe maturity is not reaching a place where we finally know exactly what to do.

Maybe it is becoming humble enough to continually ask:

What does this position require of me now?

What still needs to grow in me?

What belongs to me to carry?

And what do I need to surrender to God because it was never mine to control?

We do not become wives, husbands, mothers, fathers, daughters, sons, teachers, leaders, or friends simply because we are given the title.

We become them over time.

Through love.

Through mistakes.

Through correction.

Through forgiveness.

Through surrender.

And very often, through struggle.

Maybe taking up our position is not about having it all figured out before we begin.

Maybe God sometimes gives us the position while we are still becoming the person capable of carrying it.

And maybe part of faithfulness is staying willing to be formed by what He has entrusted to us.