How To Make A Marriage Work

On Hero TV today, we’re going to be talking about how to make a marriage work. And I know that when we talked about this topic, this is what I was excited to hear about. So we’ve got Chad Hymas here. Stay tuned. How to make your marriage work? this is a topic I, I struggle with a little bit. Because I haven’t always been the best husband but I do want you all to know right off the bat that my beautiful wife and I had celebrated 23 years of marriage and for 17, of those years I’ve been a quadriplegic so think about that for a second. We had six years together that were wonderful before the accident occurred and after that, you know, Chad Hymas myself, I was in an accident. Don’t want to talk about that right now. Want wanna talk about marriage. Was in an accident which rendered me the loss of everything beneath my armpits and complete use of my fingers and hands. And so now, I just celebrated 24 years. So 17 of those 23 years I have been confined to a wheelchair without the use of all four my limbs. How have we done it thus far? let me get the principle. The first thing is to remember that, I think intimacy is a very sacred part of marriage. I want to hit intimacy very very closely. It’s not about self gratification. No, no. I say this because I have young kids that are watching this now. Two high school kids that are watching this. We have caused students away that are watching this from their dorms, how to make marriages works and I talk about intimacy because I think that amazing what you hold sacred to all of you that are watching this. To all of you that are in this little chat right here, this little chat room. It’s amazing what you hold sacred in your life when you lose it. So I got some messages to hold it sacred now. Today I have high school students that give away that for free.

I have people to give that up and play with, play with it as though it were some game. They’ll get hooked on the internet, get up to our garbage. And I think that, that doesn’t destroy their marriage. Listen, my kids, I’ve got four. I’ve got a 19 year old, I got a 17 year old that are both boys, got a 12 year old girl from Guatemala. We adopted Grace when she was three days old, and we just barely got our fourth child who’s 8 years. We’ve had him two months. He’s from Ethiopia, his name is Caleb. I talked to all four of those children about the internet all the time. Because even though none of those four children are married, what they do today, what they watch, what they look at, could destroy their marriage in the future if they get if they put those images in their mind. And so, I like to call it intimacy or the alternative is pornography. I, I’m just being bold on this. People, they get caught up in that, look at that stuff, don’t wonder why your marriage goes to pause. I mean you create that for yourself. One of the successes to to our nice marriage is the fact that neither one of us have engaged in that. We have made a commitment to each other that we will not look at trash on the internet or even let our minds go back to that and you can even find it on social media. You can find it on YouTube, you can find it on on Instagram, you can find pictures anywhere you want. It’s to you for. It’s available to you for free.

Can I just warn you it as a friend watching this, to exercise what you look at with extreme betting and caution. Number two is a little bit more difficult for me to talk about. I’ll just share a personal story with you that happened with Shondell and I. I travel a lot around the world, sharing a very very personal message by nature. Not just about marriage but about many the principle of life. Happiness, overcoming challenges, adversity, talking about team building, teamwork. I love, I love to travel and I speak and I love to write books. When I travel, I take care of my own needs and I get dressed by myself and that works all, works out well for me. I get on a plane and people help me get on a plane. But I travel alone as a paralyzed individual. I do travel the world alone. When I’m at home, this is where it gets into the marriage aspect. I can still take care of my needs. I mean, I can take care of getting dressed and showering, I can take care of that myself. But the truth is ladies and gentlemen, my dear young friends watching this, it takes me a couple of hours to get dressed and it takes me a couple of hours to shower by myself that is the truth. My wife has asked me to allow her to help me get dressed when I’m at home. Takes her five minutes to get me dressed. And allow her to help me shower. Takes her 10 or 15 minutes to help me shower.

This is very personal to Chad Hymas to make very very personal but I’m sharing this with you in the hopes that it will help you. Shondell is nice about it I mean she loves to help me. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t like it because I’m married to her. I just, listen she’ll be nice and she’ll ask me, sweetheart what do you want to wear? she always asked me that. Then I’ll tell her, sweetheart I’d like to wear my Wrangler jeans and one of my Harley Davidson t-shirts. And then she puts on me whatever she wants. I mean think about that for a second, I’ve discovered that when I’m home I wore outfits. I’ll let you laugh out loud. You can LOL for a second. When I’m on the road, I don’t have to, I can wear whatever I want. But when Shondell’s with me, I gotta wear what she wants me to wear and so that might be a downside but here’s the thing that I’ve learned, here’s the principle, when I allow Shondell to help me, I realized that the marriage is not about me. It’s letting her serve me. Now we got to be careful with this because some people use this to their advantage and they abuse it, they misuse it, and they make their spouse serve them at every corner. I’m not, that’s not the message. The message is, the most successful marriages are the ones that realize it’s not about them, their own self-gratification, their own self-worth, what they want to do that night instead of what their spouse wants to do that night or that day. Whatever they realize that a marriage goes both ways and doing whatever you can to serve that person whom you love, show them that. Not just by saying I do and not just by making the first couple years of your marriage happy but continue to date and court and to be spontaneous. I didn’t say you had to be creative but to be spontaneous in your actions and to think on instinct. Another thing happened to help Shondell a nice marriage, she was helping me shower a few years back. My body was wet and it was somewhat slippery and she was helping me transfer from the shower chair to my wheelchair so that I could go into the bed and dry off and get warm. And during that transfer, she accidentally dropped me. Now, I say accident because I do believe it was an accident but the jury’s still out on that one. So she dropped me and I fell to the floor and she immediately came down to my rescue and tried to help me get back up. She felt horrible. But I saw something that really just, it lit me up. I mean, it just made me furious. I saw a bead of sweat coming down from her head cross and right down her cheek. I saw sweat. This is how much she was serving me and when I saw that beat a sweat come down hurt the side of her face, when I saw that sweat, I kicked her out of the bathroom using vocabulary to my wife that should never ever be repeated.

Now in truth, it wasn’t directed to her although I said it to her. I was mad at God, I was mad at my circumstance, I was mad that she was laboring serving me, I was mad that she had to sweat and serve me in that way. I just didn’t like it. I didn’t, I didn’t like any part of that and I said things so strongly to her that it caused her to weep right then and there and then she left. But she didn’t go further than the other side of the bathroom door. So she is 5 feet away from me but she is on the other side of the bathroom door and I can hear her crying. And I’m stuck naked on a tile bathroom floor because I’m paralyzed and I can’t move. I can’t go anywhere. The only help I can get is from, I’m not by a phone writing call 9-1-1, I can’t call the kids, nobody’s home. I mean she is it. I mean that that’s the help that I got. Her and God. And my creator is not going to help me until I learned to help myself by allowing the lady that I married an opportunity to serve as well. So I apologized to Shondell, whereupon she opens the door, she comes into the bathroom, and she says, I knew you weren’t talking to me when you said that. I just want to help you. And then she says that means something that’s very profound that has probably saved our marriage. Here it is, she said, if I was paralyzed and the roles were reversed, would you want somebody to come into our sacred bedroom, in our sacred bathroom and shower me whether it be a nurse, a CNA, a doctor? And I’m not knocking those people. I think they’re wonderful people. They’ve
done a lot of good for me in my life. But she’s asking me, would I want a nurse to come in and shower her and take care of her personal physical needs? or would I want to step up to the plate do it myself? And I can tell you with every ounce of pride that I have in this body, I got a lot. I would not let anybody come into my house no matter what her wishes were. Just because I got that much pride and I want to serve that lady and I wanted, I would do anything for Shondell. I would give both my kidneys for my wife to live. And that’s a fact. I would, I would give anything for that girl to be happy. She said, that’s how I feel too. So if you’d let me serve you without you
getting mad and not worry about me having to sweat, it is truly an honor to help you, she said that to me. And I want you to know that, that one principle, has saved this same man’s marriage. No, no. I know I can’t mow the lawn and I don’t cook dinner. And I know that I don’t do the dishes ever. Of course I never did it anyway before so it really definitely doesn’t matter. I know I don’t change the diapers, I know I don’t think I’ve ever changed a diaper my whole life and I had six years to do that. But I can be there for my kids games, I can be there to listen to her talk when she’s had a rough day, I can be there to help raise the children and to coach in to guide them and directions of right choices. Shondells asked me to be the best husband so that I can show my kids what a good father and a good husband looks like and to allow her to serve me so that my kids know what service looks like. That principal has saved our marriage. And I hoped it’ll do the same for each one of you. I hope you enjoyed this episode of hero TV today. Marriage is something that’s very important to me. I knew it’s very important to chad. I hope you gained a lot of value from this. Thanks so much Chad. I really appreciate it. You can find a lot of information down in the description below. Be sure to subscribe. And remember to live on purpose, make a difference, be the marriage hero! That’s right.