I am so excited to bring you Part 2 of our HHU interview with Mrs Merari Pena Vidal.
If you haven’t read Part 1 of this interview, which is amazing, you can check it out here.
As I mentioned earlier, Merari is a wife, mother and the owner of Forever Crystals, a faith-based jewellery company which she runs with her husband with shops in Puerto Rico and other parts of the US.
In Part 2 of this interview, we spend more time delving into Merari’s life as a wife and mother.
Here is Part 2 of our interview:
Let’s backtrack to the marriage part, you said you had already started the business before you got married. What was that like – they say women do not ‘find’ their husbands but rather accept ‘offers’ from those who find them – what was that like when your husband found you? How did you know he was the one, especially as an already established businesswoman who I’m sure must have been independent?
This is a whole chapter. I met the Lord when I was 23 and I spent 5 years alone. And I think that season was a detox for me, but at the same time I was praying:
“God bring him, wherever he is, I pray over him, bless him, take care of him…”
I met my husband when I was in college, but we got married when we were 28, and we are the same age. It was about 10 years between when we met and when we started going out. But those five years were so key in my life because I was detoxing from my old life, I was detoxing from the old way of thinking, from being this empowered woman who wants to do everything by herself because she’s so powerful, and really learning that that’s not true empowerment.
True empowerment is being able to trust in God’s plan for your life and sometimes it will be to submit to a man. And it will be to follow this man and to trust what God has put in him. I remember so many times praying with my husband and seeing how God favoured him in his prayers and his way of thinking. Me saying to God, “I know you’re favouring him to teach me a lesson and I wanna learn it the good way.”
My husband started working with us. He was a cardiovascular nurse when we got married and two years after he joined the business. He runs all of our marketing; he has been our CEO for so many years and he tripled our business.
I loved the way that God intertwined our lives. If they had told me before this is how it would have played out, I would have said, “Absolutely not!”
God has a way of intertwining lives and making it work. It has required me to know when to silence my voice and let his voice. It’s not how I thought it would be, but it’s been better.
There have been seasons, seasons where I’ve had to give more and ones where he gave more. Seasons where I’ve had to sacrifice for the kids. When our kids came, it was a pivotal point for me, learning how to still be a woman in business, still be an empowered woman and be the woman of my house, and knowing what to sacrifice for the betterment of my family.
It’s been a journey and in all of it: counselling, friends, God, and the Bible were key for me to learn my place in my world, and in business.
I love that you said that you were able to work together. There’s a book I read recently titled ‘God is a Matchmaker’ the lady said she realised that God had been preparing her all along for her husband. So, all the kinds of jobs she had done and all her experiences, she realised they all culminated in her marriage to her husband. She found that these skills were useful in marriage. What would say? For you there was that 5-year period, perhaps God was preparing you and getting you ready for the new chapter of your life. How would you say that prepared you for marriage and for working with your husband?
Well, I have to say that one of the superpowers that God gave me is that I believe in people. I can see someone, and I can see the potential. I see the best in people. My husband is a pastor’s kid and he has a calling for pastoring lives, but he was a nurse but had so much creativity.
I was the first person that said to him, “You know you have all this potential in you, let’s see where this takes us.” In the beginning, he was like, “No, I don’t.” My insistence and my perseverance, telling him “You can do this, you’re amazing. I see this in you.” made him get out of his shell and grow the business.
He also comes from a background of counselling, and I came so broken into our marriage. Even as a Christian woman, I came with so many issues, so many scars and so much pain. And somehow, he saw my brokenness and wasn’t afraid. He counselled me, helped me talk through it and just pray through it.
I can see how God used him to help me heal. And now 10 years after we got married, we still see how we can bring the best out of each other. We have brought out the worst of each other sometimes too. Don’t think it has been perfect. It has been a journey.
Life has rhythms and you have to learn to play through the rhythms.
That was so good, though I now have even more questions. I loved when you talked about what you guys brought out of each other. That is the beauty of kingdom marriages because when God pairs people, he knows what they bring and what they are able to achieve together. Knowing that as a person you had some trauma you needed to get through, how was it still decided to go ahead to marry?
Being the type A personality that I am, I didn’t really think about it when I got into the marriage. But once I did, I had to ask myself “What did I do?” I’m not an overthinker. And I know many people are, my husband is an overthinker. He said, “If we get into this marriage it’s going to be hard.”
I said, “It’s not going to be. I can do anything possible. I’m such a hard worker.”
Then you get inside, and you realise. Wow! It’s not what it seems. The most work I had to do was on my expectations. My expectations had to be broken repeatedly for my marriage to work.
When you go in you realise that it’s not the princess fairy tale and that’s okay because God doesn’t want a fairy tale for you, he wants so much more. He wants someone that will contrast with you as iron sharpens iron. He wants someone who will bring out the best and worst in you. because somehow he will make it perfect.
If we take off the expectations as a woman, then everything else will fall into place.
When we create expectations, everything will fall short, and we will be frustrated in the relationship because it is not what you want it to be or what you thought it would be or what you’ve seen in pictures. If we leave our expectations out it will be better.
I had to work on the idol of marriage in my life.
I thought a husband would come in and he would be my knight in shining armour. He would be my saviour, entertainer, man of the house, my best friend, and this perfect man beside me. It doesn’t work that way. The moment I took that idol out of my heart, out of my house and out of my life my marriage got better. Because I took those expectations off him knowing that he will never fulfil all my needs or happiness. When I took that out, I really understood it and put Jesus back in his rightful place.
Jesus,
One of the things I’ve heard is that a lot of young Christian women have knowingly or unknowingly put a lot of burden on men because we expect them to be all these things – tall dark and handsome, godly, have money, speak and dress well, we have all these requirements. But then what kind of person are we (do we match up to what we want), secondly – is that what matters more? At the end of the day, we want someone we can live with.
So, what would you say to women who think – ‘I deserve this, I’m a good Christian girl, I’ve abstained…?
I used to say exactly the same thing!
There’s a story I love to tell my husband and others. Once, when I was praying for my future husband, I was at a traffic light stop, and I see a billboard with my now husband’s family church and I say –“but it can’t be this person cause I haven’t saved myself for so many years to end up marrying this person.” And I end up marrying him. This is life.
To your question, I wouldn’t tell you to make a list of what you want but rather make a list of who you want to be. Become the person that you dream of being when the man comes. Don’t have the expectation that he has to be all those things.
If you asked me, my husband does not check the box of all my expectations. I thought I was going to be married to a ‘white, blond, blue-eyed guy’ and I married an amazing Turkish-looking guy. That’s life and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
He is my best friend. He left his dreams to support mine and I can see the sacrifice of Jesus there. Life has been so much better than I imagined.
Expectations can kill any relationship. You can make a list of the things you cannot live without – I want a man that is after God’s own heart. I want a man that loves Jesus above everything and above me and that’s what I got.
That has made life easier.
Hope you enjoyed this!
For more on this, look out for Part 3 of my interview with the incredible Mrs Merari Pena Vidal. ?
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