Where do you live?

I've been convicted lately of a need to improve communication/cohabitation/courtesy in my long-standing marriage. How do you do that after 34 years of marriage and 8 more of dating? That's the burden I've been wrestling with--where to grab hold. I woke as I do most mornings listening to MP3's and the one playing was Mary Pearl on using the traditions as a guide to marriage and relationships. Great ideas, and I'll listen to them awake and take notes, but she's too far advanced for me at this point. 

Hubby was up at 6:30 and fixing his breakfast. I went in and cleaned the kitchen, which he'd already straightened. I've thought hard about our conversation yesterday before I bought a new car. He asked if I knew the trade-in value of mine and I was looking it up, declared it in fair condition which I thought was being honest, and in the conversation told him I haven't been willing to trust it for two months to leave town in. We talked about what was wrong, agreeing it probably wasn't running on all the cylinders. I know there are other problems with the car I've dealt with silently for the last year and still haven't told him. The other things I haven't told him loom large, and I will do that today--after I do my part in the Income Tax preparation annual nightmare. It's really not the nightmare it used to be, but I still live in dread of the time. I digress. After I ate breakfast I went into the bedroom for meditation, not to break the day by day continuous string of, let's see... Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday--the fifth day. 

I don't know how to meditate. I've told you that here before. But I figure you don't learn until you start. So I've decided to read a random page from the Big Book, the daily For Today meditation, and a random page from As Bill Sees It. Wouldn't you know, the page I opened to today was the chart for the 4th step? And the devotional dealt with anger and the courage to express it, the tools of writing about it or discussing it with someone then forgiving myself. Bill clinched it with "Giving without Demand." He says our lives are made richer by giving without any expectation of return. Next, at the suggestion of a mentor, I take a prayer and use it for meditation. In this process I'll memorize more prayers, but I'm at the beginning. I've been using the serenity prayer, but yesterday and today I've used the Lord's Prayer. "Our Father, who art in heaven...." That was enough. I finished the prayer, but only after realizing the significance of heaven.

For years, when my husband told me to go to Hell, my automatic response was "I live there." But I don't. I live in Heaven. Heaven is with God/Jesus/the Holy Spirit and Jesus told us he's with us until the end of the world, as are the other two persons of the trinity. I live in Heaven. And if I treat the other denizens of Heaven like that's what they are, that's better than assuming that together we make up Hell! Thank GOD!

Where do you live?