Love Salt Light

Intentionally growing in love.

Intentionally growing in love

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While we were dating, we attended a friend’s wed

While we were dating, we attended a friend’s wedding and the pastor shared how he and his wife had prayed together every day for 30 years. It really stuck out to me and I wanted that for us - to be able to honor that commitment and say the same after decades of marriage. So when we got married, we began that - praying every night together before bed.
Honestly I can say we upheld that for almost a decade but when our third child was born, cosleeping and exhaustion meant our evenings looked very different. At first of course we let the habit fall to the side with every intention of picking it back up, maybe a handful of nights here and there we did but for majority of the last 18months we have not. And I can’t even begin to tell you the challenges we have encountered since then. Some of the significant ones being my mental health declined very quickly with postpartum anxiety and one of our kids received a diagnosis that has come with many challenges and hard days.

Our previous commitment to our prayer life didn’t make us immune to issues - I’m sure the same challenges would have come up even if we were praying regularly but the difference has been, in the past we certainly had felt more equipped, more faithful and had greater peace - rather than now feeling overwhelmed or defeated by things that did come into our life.

Without intentional prayer in our marriage things were snow balling and it was hard to get ahead. It felt like we were carrying all the weight ourselves. We both still remained steadfast in our individual prayer lives but not praying together, in unity, definitely changed something for us. (Continued in comments..)

Today we got to indulge ourselves in a few hours o

Today we got to indulge ourselves in a few hours of bliss. It’s coming up to three years of living on the Gold Coast, which has meant our previous monthly dates are now sometimes six months in-between. Whilst Mark’s beautiful parents are here we’ve been lucky to cram in a few recently. We had a Redballoon voucher needing to be used and whilst we originally wanted to choose a more adventurous date like whale watching or kayaking with dolphins, we also felt we needed to honor where we are at. With three little kids whom seem to hardly sleep a wink, our bodies were in need of some TLC. Some dates call for deep conversations connecting over meals, others for play and laughs but this time called for rest and relaxation. So we literally blissed out in the infrared sauna together and then had an hour float in magnesium pods - complete sensory deprivation. This was a little daunting at first but actually just what weary parents needed to refresh our souls and nervous systems. Whilst we were separate for half the date, we connected afterwards over coffee and a long drive home and debriefed on all we each processed in our float. Definitely a unique date and one that nourished both our mental and physical health 🙏🏼🌞 #growyourlove

Do you consider love languages on birthdays and sp

Do you consider love languages on birthdays and special events? What traditions do you hold around these days in your marriage?

We believe as a husband and wife, we are called to study each other, searching for what our partner needs to make them feel loved and special.

Of course giving gifts are usually a part of these days, but there’s a real opportunity here to speak your love deeply to your spouse through your actions.
Knowing their love language/s is paramount to tailoring these moments in a way that is meaningful to them.

For example, for both of us, one of our primary love languages is words. So carefully selecting a quality card is something we both take a lot of time and care in doing and it will always be filled from front to back. We both treasure that opportunity to communicate what we love about each other. The night before a birthday you’ll always find the other person hiding somewhere in the house, penning a heartfelt card.

My other love language is quality time so when planning a birthday, as long as we’re together for the day then I usually don’t mind what we do. We’re both not ones for parties or big fusses so particularly since having kids, we try to prioritize a date to celebrate birthdays and have that one on one time doing something we don’t usually get to do.

Mark is the king of gift giving - whilst gifts is not one of my love languages to receive, since being together he has made this such a treasured part of our celebrations. There’s never a birthday without some kind of surprise element. One “rule” he’s always had in our marriage is we’re allowed to stretch the truth a bit when a present/surprise is at stake. And he does that very well. I think the key is he listens so well, observes the things I notice and remembers them all for special days. When you feel seen by your spouse, that they have taken note of the things that delight you - it can bring an indescribable joy.
If receiving gifts is something that’s not so important to you but IS important to your spouse, we’d encourage you to practise the art. Gifts usually hold high emotional value and it’s a language of love that you can easily learn (continued in comments…)

A week well spent remote camping and 4WDing throug

A week well spent remote camping and 4WDing through K’gari with special friends. Amazing memories made, some tense moments, remained in love afterwards 😅 hilarious stories to be told and cups all full after time in nature together. Camping is a passion of ours and this definitely reminded us how much we love it and secretly wish we could now live on the road 🧡 #growyourlove Do you have a joint hobby you love to do together???

The beautiful thing about prayer is God hears our

The beautiful thing about prayer is God hears our heart in a way our words can’t express.

That’s why a prayerless marriage is a powerless marriage.

I had been quite hurt by something Mark did. I was moving towards forgiveness but I also felt like I needed an actual act of love/kindness from him to help heal my heart. But I had no idea what I was wanting, I just knew I needed him to DO something.
So I prayed. And asked God to help Mark find the right action that would communicate that feeling to me.
Later I found out, he’d been praying the same thing for himself - that he’d be led to the right action to show his love for me.
And so God answered big time. Mark did something that spoke SO much more to me than words ever could have. God gave him the idea and it was exactly what I needed! I actually laughed when he said he planned this thing as my heart was like YES, that’s what I didn’t know I needed from you.
If we both hadn’t of prayed over the situation, asking for that wisdom that was not from us - we’d probably be going around in hurt circles and taking much longer to move forward from the issue. When you’re not sure what to do in your marriage, if there’s one thing we can encourage you to do - it’s pray!! #growyourlove

A simple little activity to get your week started

A simple little activity to get your week started well. Screenshot or send this to your spouse and plan to have some quality time together tonight. You both need to write a list of 10 simple things that make you feel loved, then you’ll give that list to your love and you’ll each end up with a little cheat sheet of things you can easily weave into their day. Maybe it’s things like having a coffee or breaky made for you before you wake up, a long hug/kiss on return from work, receiving a note of specific encouragement or a small gift of fresh flowers or favorite wine/beer. If you know the love language you mostly love to receive, use this as a guide to brainstorm. Having specifics communicated to each other is a sure way to meet expectations and fill their love tank in a meaningful way. #growyourlove We’d love to know if you give it a go this week and how it makes you both feel!

As I jumped in the car, the radio turned on and a

As I jumped in the car, the radio turned on and a statistic was read out -“Divorce rates are the highest they’ve been in last 2 years than in the last decade.”

As I played w my kids at a playground the other day, I couldn’t help but overhear a group of mum’s listening to their friend talk about leaving her husband.

Hearing these things break my heart. It’s right in front of us. I’m sure sadly, you know someone currently separating or going through big challenges in their marriage.
I have such a fire in my belly to make a change.
However slowly this thing grows, I know there’s a God with a plan backing us up and reaching the right people in His timing. The dreams we have for here are wild.
Publicly or privately we would love you to please share our heart with people in your circles. If they need hope, help or a hand to guide them - We are always here for discussion, chats, prayer. We have been privileged to walk alongside people in their trials who we have and have not met before - praying, sending books, checking in and being a listening ear.
If you’re not sure who to reach out to, we’d love to be there for you and your marriage.

Thanks to the beautiful brave souls who already reached out after posting this yesterday - we’re in your corner!! 🙏🏼

It’s really easy to forget the power of the Holy

It’s really easy to forget the power of the Holy Spirit dwelling within us and how much we can call on Him during mundane moments in our marriage.

A few weeks ago we’d had a tummy bug wipe through the whole family for over a week and we were exhausted.

I’d noticed before doing the night routine that Mark wasn’t in a great mood.
He did or said something (I can’t even remember now, that’s how trivial it was) but it got me annoyed and then we went our separate ways putting the kids to bed. Mentally I was already getting into the zone of “how can you be grumpy? I’m the one whose taken care of everyone this week and haven’t slept so I have the right to be in a bad mood etc etc”

Afterwards, I was walking down the stairs and heard him tinkering in the kitchen.
All I wanted to do was flop on the couch and retreat into my phone and just be alone. Ignore him. After caring for 4 sick people all week, I “deserved” to have a break.
But I quickly prayed asking what I should do w my time that evening, and before I got to the bottom of the stairs I felt the prompt to go connect.
So I did.
He was washing up so I put my phone down and just sat on the stools opposite the sink and didn’t say much.
It probably took him 30 seconds to launch into a big debrief of something that had happened at work. All he needed was for me to be available to listen. To sit and hear what had happened and witness that frustration.
His mood earlier had nothing to do with me. But I realized how easy it was to assume and then grow cold suddenly in return.

Prayer is powerful. God wants to speak to you in those little moments.
If I hadn’t of asked, I would have just done what I felt like, leaned into the narrative in my mind, ignored Mark and not engaged and most likely go to bed grumpy with each other.

If you pray, this is a little gentle reminder to engage w Him in those everyday moments of your marriage and He will always meet you with what you need to hear. #growyourlove

At the dinner table tonight Mark asked the kids to

At the dinner table tonight Mark asked the kids to say one kind thing about someone at the table. After a few comments our three year old says “mummy, I love that you hug daddy all the time and are so nice to him!” 🥺💓 then our six year old chimes in with “yeah aren’t they the perfect people to get married?!” Cue heart melt. It was such a sweet little moment and a reminder about just how much they’re observing and watching our interactions. I love that at these ages, even if they can’t remember the exact moments later - they will already have a felt sense of love, affection and security in us. They are constantly absorbing the emotional atmosphere around them. Of course we aren’t always going to get it right, but the major patterns they observe now can directly impact their own future relationships and give them a sense of stability in which they will view the world. These three precious souls are huge motivators for us to keep investing in our marriage #growyourlove

10 years From our retirement village home to comm

10 years

From our retirement village home to community housing, our family home, to renting, and now preparing for our next dream house.

From renovating, painting, gardening, landscaping, weekend projects, veggie patches, building fences, endless bunnings trips, transforming house to home.

From old second hand cars, to vans, to high performance vehicles, to the Nav and the family 4WD.

From apprentice, uni student to project manager, teacher, and stay at home mum.

From our ventures of Livewire to Charcoal and Twine to Love Salt Light.

From one puppy to two doggies and then back to one.

From camping, getaways, overseas trips, villas in Bali, to weekend sleep ins at home.

From one, two, three babies and the ones in-between we never got to meet.

From the little cents, to DINKS to living week to week.

From fine dining and bottomless brunches to $20 dates, home brewed coffee and pancakes on Sundays.

From loud board games and poker nights w mates to quiet card games and scrabble.

From gym junkies and footy fans to garage workouts, podcasts and books.

From musicals, shows and movies to no TV at all and our 9pm teas.

From concerts, festivals, live gigs to play school, hillsong lullabies, and Disney soundtracks on repeat.

From snowboarding in New Zealand, wake boarding and jet skiing on the Murray, to pushing prams and scooters.

From talking late into the night to connecting between dinner, bath and bed routines.

From kisses in the rain to hushed kisses and prayers while our babies sleep between us.

From midnight walks around Florence to find hidden bakeries to wakeful nights with our babies.

To strolling the streets and markets of Europe to the farmers markets each weekend.

From lazy winery days gone by on the Peninsula to a bottle of red shared on a Friday night.

From security and familiar, to moving interstate and navigating huge changes.

From the shores of Hawaii to the golden coast we now call home…. (Continued)

23 and 22 years young here, buying our first home.

23 and 22 years young here, buying our first home.
I remember thinking before this that it would never happen for us. All our other married friends had bought homes already. We’d searched for a year, house prices were crazy to us and we always got outbid. Mark was an apprentice when we got married and I was still in Uni.
But we saved our butts off, worked extra jobs, budgeted and worked hard some more ($10 dates started back here!) I remember thinking it was a bargain week when I scored all our veg for $7 at the markets.
When we left for our honeymoon we actually didn’t have a home to go to when we got back (makes me laugh now) but we landed in accommodation at a retirement village for a few months and then got a spot in a community housing building because our income was so low (that was a fun time w some interesting neighbours!)
This was almost nine years ago.
These days it’s even easier to compare every part of our life with someone else’s. Know that if you’re starting off your marriage in a different position to someone around you or someone you maybe admire - their story likely (actually definitely) has some challenges and hardships to get to where they’re at. It never happens as easy as it looks. The stories we could tell you of how we got to buy our first home at that age aren’t glamorous. Today we sold this home that we poured our hearts into, to help us grow as a family in this next season and looking back on all the photos has just resurfaced all those feelings of how we began. It feels like yesterday we were eating pizza on the floor with no furniture. We repurposed doors and fence palings to make tables and shelves. Mark made half the furniture we had in the house.

So if you’re a newlywed - your future is so SO bright!! Don’t be disheartened if people around you are or seem to be acquiring things (cars, pets, holidays, houses, babies) or achieving things you can’t quite do just yet. Stay firm in your goals together and it will always come together in the timing that is just right for YOU!

( Continued…) It created this intense protective

( Continued…) It created this intense protectiveness over Kai and my mind began to be plagued with irrational thoughts. The aftermath of this accident took 4 months to recover our home and yard from. So many issues and tradies in and out. Our dog constantly escaping through the broken fence. We also took our eldest son out of kinder as he showed signs of being very distressed (for a few reasons) so I had three kids at home for a number of months.

Aside from that accident, every person in our family, except me, took a trip to the emergency at some point in the last year - it honestly felt like an attack. One thing after another.
The weight of it all hit me like nothing I’ve ever felt before and my body just couldn’t handle it anymore - a huge panic attack in the middle of the night signaled loud and clear that I wasn’t ok. After that I knew I needed help. I was relieved in a way that it had shown outwardly as it gave me a reason to seek help. My nervous system was so shot and I’d been dealing with post partum anxiety without really realizing. I’d voiced my concerns to Mark here and there but he was snowed under doing crazy hours w a new role, I was falling asleep most nights with the baby and our communication was far from our normal. I remember texting him one day saying a few intense things about my mental state and that night just unraveling. He’s held me, listened, never made me feel like a burden and helped make a plan for us to find our way out.

I share all this because we have very frequently been asked about mental health and how it impacts marriages, and to be honest I never felt able to respond as we had no experience with it. We learnt a lot in 2021 and thankfully were able to walk the journey together and recover, but I do credit a lot of that to the foundations we’d set in the nine years prior.
That’s why we are so passionate about being proactive in your relationship because that’s what will hold you together when all else is crumbling. Not many people are immune to grief, struggles and trauma, it can strike at any time - but our relationship was hardly scorned, nor wavered in that season because the seeds we’d sown earlier... (comments)