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The lengths people go for their favorite sports team are pretty amazing. People will wear cheese-shaped hats, paint their faces and chests, and sit out in all sorts of acclimate weather in order to watch grown men throw a ball. They’re passionate about their team doing well, and seemingly try to will them to victory through their cheering and devotion. The team’s loss is their loss. The team’s victory viewed as their own.

Perhaps even  more noteworthy than a fan’s devotion is the lack of of it in other areas of our lives. Jobs, commitments and even relationships are quickly discarded when the cease to deliver what we desire.  You don’t see a devoted sports fan calling it quits after a loss, a losing season, or a lifetime of losing. Not only do they remain steadfast, they keep cheering their team on.

Ideally, this same relentless encouragement that is demonstrated in stadiums across America, would be on display most prominently in our marriages. As a wife, I view one of my primary responsibilities as being my husband’s number one fan. I want to be the person that encourages him when everyone else is discouraging, rooting for him as he takes on the world. His losses are my losses; his victories celebrated as my own. This isn’t to say that I don’t give my spouse honest feedback, simply glossing over any issues that might need to be addressed, but it does mean that at the end of the day, he knows I’m cheering him on.

It also means that when I talk about him, I talk about him like a devoted fan raves about their favorite player. I tell of the many ways that he demonstrates his love. I talk about his impressive abilities to connect with people and make strangers feel like they belong. I extol his commitment to our God and the way he leads our family in seeking Him.

Because I’m his number one fan.

And not only is it a joy to cheer for him, it’s a privilege to be on his team.

I hate noise.

That might sound like an odd thing to say, but the older I’ve become the more I realize that any type of pulsating, loud noise is like nails on a chalkboard to me. For some reason, I’m just overly sensitive to sounds. It’s so bad that sometimes I wonder what I’ll do if my husband and I ever have kids. Even the squeals of children’s toys have been known to cause me to squirm.

As you might imagine, due to this aversion, I’m not a fan of alarm clocks. So, when mine goes off, I promptly turn it off, usually within 3 seconds of it beeping. Sure, sometimes I’ll hit snooze, but that alarm barely has a chance to chirp before it’s silenced again.

My sweet hubby, however, has a different approach. He’s able to tune out noise. So when his alarm clock goes off, it can go off uninterruped for minutes, maybe longer if I let it And even after he’s turned the alarm off, he can go right back to sleep, waiting for the next alarm to get him up 5 minutes later.

And this drove me nuts.

Until one day, as I was getting ready and bitterly complaining in my spirit, I realized that in the grand scheme of things, alarms were a relatively minor issue. Rather than grumbling, being irritated that the alarm was going off…AGAIN… and yet my hubby was still sleeping,  I could make a different decision.

I could graciously wake him up.

In this realization, a larger lesson was learned.  As I wrote previously, in a relationship, it’s often easy to promise to make the grand gesture, to risk your life for the sake of your love. In practicality, we often resist doing the small things to bless our spouse. Things like picking up the socks that should have never been left on the floor, or emptying the dishwasher even though you’ve done in the last three times, or turning off the alarm for your husband, and with a smile, waking him up.

And perhaps it’s the practice of doing these small things well that prepare us to make the grand gesture if we are ever called to. And if we never are, at least we have a lifetime of small, yet significant, moments of sacrifice that demonstrate our love.