A Record of Rights

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In this episode of Wedded Wednesday, Pastor Don and Lisa Smith tackle one of the sneakiest marriage killers: keeping a record of your spouse's wrongs. Drawing from 1 Corinthians 13:5 ("Love does not count up wrongs that have been done"), they explore how a mental list of past mistakes can turn your spouse into a villain and yourself into a victim—even when neither is true.

📝 The "Record of Wrongs" Trap

Don opens with a simple question for Lisa: "Do I have a record of your wrongs?" Her honest answer: early in marriage, yes—but less now, because she's learned to work on her own heart. The danger of keeping score is that negative memories accumulate, resurface during arguments, and create confirmation bias—you start seeing only what you're looking for. Phrases like "You always…" or "You never…" are dead giveaways that you're living in that bias.

💡 Flip the Script: A Record of Rights

Instead of obsessing over what your spouse does wrong, Don and Lisa challenge couples to create a "Blessing Journal" —a daily log of good things your spouse did, moments of kindness, or simple blessings from the day. (They even ask listeners to help name a "guy-friendly" version!) The goal is to rewire your brain to see the positive, which is far more abundant than the negative.

🔁 The Five-to-One Ratio

Lisa shares her practical tool: before you bring up one negative or frustration, you must first share five genuine positives about your spouse. Most of the time, after listing the five positives, you may not even feel the need to mention the negative anymore. This practice changes your heart posture, ensuring you speak out of love—not frustration or a desire to punish.

🛠️ This Week's Challenge

Get a notebook. Every day for seven days, write down five things you appreciate about your spouse before (or instead of) the one thing that's bothering you. See what God does.

🎧 Tune In

Pull up a chair, grab a cup of coffee, and join Pastor Don and Lisa for Wedded Wednesday—a weekly coffee date for your marriage. Available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and all major platforms.

Transcript

0:09

What if marriage advice didn't have to feel like a lecture or a counseling session? But welcome to a weekly coffee date for your marriage that we're calling Wedded Wednesday. I'm Pastor Don Smith along with my wife Lisa, and we are right there in the trenches with you. And this podcast takes the pressure off perfect and puts the focus on purposeful. Our desire is to give you Bible-based tools to work on your marriage, not just in it. Each week we get real, we keep it lighthearted because marriage is hard enough without being stuffy. We want to leave you with one practical challenge to actually use before the next podcast. Whether you're in a great season or barely holding on, I want you to pull up a chair, get a cup of coffee, and let's be intentional together. Good morning. Good morning. Welcome back to Wedded Wednesday. We're excited for this morning and the topic that we had to talk about here on the show today. How are you? I'm good. How are you? Good. Wednesdays are early for you, aren't they? Uh the I mean I'm up, but I just gotta get out of the house early. Wednesdays are a little early. But if for if you guys don't know, uh my wife, Lisa, is not a morning person. I'm the morning person in the relationship, and and she's the night owl in the relationship. And sometimes she'll be up at, you know, midnight, one o'clock in the morning. No. Yeah. No. And then I'm I'm up at 5 a.m. or whatever, and which even if I went to bed earlier, I'm still not getting up at 5 a.m. No? Why? No. I like getting up at 5. I don't care for it as much. Excuse me. I'm more like seven. Seven? No, I'm a morning person. I like to get up, get the day started. I got I feel like I can be a little more productive when I have those uninterrupted moments. You know? True. From five to seven thirty-ish or whatever. It's kind of interrupted. I'm doing you a favor. Oh, that's what it is. That's doing me a favor by not being a morning person. I am blessing you by allowing you to have that time to yourself. I see. And then when you leave, I have my time for myself. Oh, so when I leave the house at like, I don't know, whatever time I leave, then that's kind of your quiet time. You're kind of like, okay, he's out of here. I was just waiting for him to go. I mean, I can get up if I have to. You know that. Yeah. It's just not that's not who you are. It's never no 35 years together. That's never been who you are. But now there are moments you're like, why are you up so early? I have an appointment, or I have this, I have to be at. I if I have an agenda for the morning, I can do it. Like, you know, hey, let's go watch the sunrise. I have no problem doing that. But I am not about having a full-blown conversation, though, about anything. It's not going to happen. Full-blown conversations are not going to happen at 5:30 in the morning. No, thank you. Speaking of that, I have uh welcome to Wedded Wednesday, everybody. We're glad that you're here. Uh, and uh, you know, if you're listening on the podcast, hey, we do this as a Facebook Live as well. So uh a lot of times we just kind of doing the introduction and uh we're just greeting everybody who's come on. We see all you, Carrie and Kayleeen, and uh we we see you guys popping up there. But if you just listen on audio on the on the podcast, so we're getting started here, and uh I've got a scripture for us today. Okay. Okay, you ready? Usually do. Now, again, if you're a first-time listener or a first-time watcher on the podcast, um, and uh what we do here is we just have this little wedded Wednesday moment where I kind of bring a topic and Lisa has no idea. She just kind of like it's it's just raw, it's right out there, and I kind of like that. No, but I think you do so well at it. So I don't feel I do very well. Right, here we go. You ready? So 1 Corinthians chapter 13. Now that's the love chapter. Oh boy. It's wedding season here uh at the time of recording the podcast, you know, Michigan. It's you know, it's like June, July, August, wedding season. So we every time you go to a wedding, you're gonna hear it. 1 Corinthians chapter 13, you know, the love chapter. Oh, just about every time, yeah. Just about every time. But anyway, I want I want to read this particular one, verse five, for us today because I want to title this podcast today, A Record of Rights. Okay. Now watch this and you'll you'll understand in just a minute. So love is not rude, love is not selfish, and does not get upset with others. Love does not count up wrongs that have been done. Let me ask you a question, Lisa. Yes. Are you ready? Okay. Here we go. Do I have a record of your wrongs? How did you know what I was gonna ask? Do you ever find yourself as the perfect spouse that you are keeping a record of my wrongdoings? To be honest? Yeah. Yes. Probably more so in the beginning of our marriage, but less now? Uh I think I try harder now. Oh, you try harder. It's not that I mess up less. Dang, I hope I was thinking I was thinking I was getting better. No, no, you're the one getting better. Not me. I didn't mean it that way. I didn't quite mean it that way, but that's the way it came out. All I mean is I try real hard not to keep a record anymore. I think the the more we grew in the Lord and our relationship with him as individuals, the more the Lord would try to work on my heart. How much of a struggle do you think that this really causes in marriages? That this this record, this list of wrongdoings? Oh, I think it causes a lot of issues because again, I think earlier on in our marriage we could argue almost every other day about things, and I would bring up things from the past, you know, things that were done before, instead of actually really forgiving you and letting it go. You know what? Here's the danger that I really think about this idea of a record of wrongdoings. Uh, and I and I get it. No one, no one wants to be done wrong, no one should be mistreated. Right. Miss you know, mist uh bad behavior isn't ever to be tolerated, uh, that kind of thing. Uh, but what I do think that uh uh keeping a record of wrongdoings does to the heart of the person who's keeping it is it causes you to turn your spouse into a villain. It does. It really does. Even when in moments when they're not. You you just want to do this to hurt me. You just you did that on purpose. I can't remember you being very angry at me one day. And because one day? I mean, it was just a moment. I don't even remember what it was about, but I do remember what was this last week? No, it was not last week. Um uh it was I didn't do it on purpose. Something happened and it really upset you, or you weren't happy about it, and probably rightly so. Uh, but I remember you looking at me and going, You did that on purpose. And I was thinking, why would I do that on purpose? Why would I on purpose try to upset you? I can probably see where someone would feel that way, especially if it was a repeated request. I get it. You know, like please don't do this. Or I don't like it when you do that. Uh could something simple that everybody can relate. Could you please put your shoes here and not there? I'm just saying it because I think it's it's easy. For sure. Okay. Uh, and like you, please don't move my stuff six inches from where they were. Well, I get you a little basket so you could put it in there, and they still don't go in the basket. So that's where I could see maybe someone saying, You did that on purpose because somehow they feel they're not being heard. You know, and I think that that aggravation, again, that like you said uh at the beginning, like you're working on you more. Uh and but it can mount over the years, right? Like it can get heavier and heavier or add up. That's like the it can if you're not really releasing your spouse to the Lord. That's where I want to go, right? So early on in our dating days, what we do, I think, as married couples, is you know, we look at that gorgeous person across the table from us. Aww. And and we imagine a lifetime of romantic days. Yeah. You know, all lived in slow motion, on the beach, maybe more like laughing, having fun and filled with sweetness and love, and and you know what? We I think in those moments we innocently kind of dwell on the fact that we a marriage is between two imperfect people. Yeah. And that's not the thing I think we think about in those moments. Uh people who at times can be rude, uh, selfish, uh, people who at times can be upset at the slightest little thing. Sometimes I I can think, why would you be upset about that? Was it really that big of a deal? Maybe it is to that person. That's what I'm saying. Like, you know, it can be it can be those type of things. Flawed individuals, I think, Matt, even start key keeping the tabs, the list of their spouses' wrongdoings. And that causes you to begin to live in a negative thinking mindset. Yes. And that is always a pitfall that is difficult to climb out of. Well, it literally is a pit because then you're you're there. And then everything that not necessarily that they do wrong, but anything that might irritate you just a tad becomes very big. Yeah. Because it keeps falling into that pit and it keeps on piling up. Right. Because I haven't taken care of it. That's great. Uh, I think that's the truth too. Uh, and we need to think about how much time do we dwell on our list of wrongs that we have of our spouse versus our list of blessings that we have because of our spouse. More more than we share. Sure. And I why does the negative always outweigh the positive? I really don't know because I think there's more positives than there is negatives for sure, right? 100%. Uh, but it's it it's the negative thing that jumps out of us because we start to live in that that world of negative thinking. And and we actually jar perspective. Yeah. It's the one thing and it stands out above everything else. We we actually begin to look for the negative. Like a bias, then it is called just that confirmation bias. It's kind of like nobody has the that color car uh that you bought until you buy it. Like that Chrysler. I'd never seen that before. Never seen that color of a car before. And then we drove off the parking lot, and there's like three different cars the same color. It's like all of a sudden, it's so what your bias is confirmed. And let me let me explain to you very simply today, here on Wedded Wednesday. Uh, I almost said talk about it. Uh, because that's the other podcast. You you should listen on that one as well. But um, a little shameless plug for talk about it. Wow. Anyway, uh, it's confirmation bias does just that, though, right? And let me tell you as a spouse how I believe that you can test yourself to see if you're living in confirmation bias. Okay. Statements like this to your spouse. You always are you never. Which are absolutely 100% not true. Right. Because you know, there's the one time that you didn't. But you notice every time you do. Right. So you you always, for instance, you you brought up a shoe, you always leave your shoes in the floor. Or you never take the garbage out, right? Or uh those are those are what you're stating there in that moment is that you're focused on a list of wrongdoings. Here's the truth: you're married to an imperfect person, they're flawed, they're always going to have something wrong. Right. Correct. But I titled this message or this this topic today on Wedded Wednesday. Uh, what about a record of rights? What are the things that you you guys are are can create and focus on when it's like a record of rights? Because what happens is that negative memories have a tendency to accumulate and resurface if they haven't been washed um away through forgiveness and forgetfulness. And so you say, well, Pastor Don, how do we do that? Lisa, how do we how do we wash away that record of wrongs through forgiveness and forgetfulness? Um what if you put more effort into keeping a record of good things that your spouse does? Well, I think I've suggested to women before, I say women because I'm I talk with women. Yeah. Um that there's nothing wrong and probably a really good idea to have like a blessing journal. Ooh. Like at the end of every Hey, I've never heard this. At the end of every because you're not a girl. Wow. Okay. But at the end of each day before before you go to bed, write the blessings from the day. All the good things from the day. Especially if you especially if you had a very bad day for some reason, and that's all you can think about is everything negative that happened that day, then you purposefully have to sit there and think. Lord, what was good about today? Is this like a journal you can go and buy? No. Or is it or is it like something we can create and like offer? I mean, it's just a journal. It was just paper and a pen. But it doesn't have to be, man, we I got all kind of ideas right now. Okay. That was great. But anyhow, you write those blessings down. I mean, first of all, you woke up and you took your breath. Even if it was like 10 a.m. or 11 a.m., not 5 a.m., you woke up? Wow. Wow. Seven is not that late, y'all. But anyhow. Now you made me lose my tremendous thought. Welcome to our world. Uh Wedded Wednesday. No, the blessing journal. I've I'm very interested in that. That's basically it. Why does it only have to be for what could we call it for dudes? I get it, because like blessing journal sounds a little feminine. Yeah. What can we call it for dudes? I don't know. Hmm. I think we're on to something. I don't want to say positive. Hey, leave in the comments right there if you'd like for us to kind of think up uh and create this thing. Blessing journal. But and and what we should call it if it's for dudes. Yeah. Perfect. It could be something for both of them. But yeah, that that's it. It's just like you have to take the time. Just like when you wake up in the morning and you pray for your day, that every encounter you have is one that is um designed specifically by God for that day. You know what I mean? And you're praying for every step that you take that day that it be a good thing. At the end of each day, you should write down the good things that happened during that day. You could have a good thing. And if you have a specific problem in your marriage or with your spouse, then you need to focus more on something positive your spouse. So I was just about to say that. So that that you could actually incorporate in written form your five to one ratio. In case you guys don't know, uh, you know, Lisa's always talked about this five to one ratio, like before, especially inside of marriage, before you're allowed to share the one negative that you And you need to share it. We're not saying you can't share it, but before you do that, but there's a way to share it. There's a way to share it. And what Lisa kind of invented and and and put into uh practice was that okay, before I get to share that one negative, I must share five positives. And so, like in your blessing journal, that could see that could be a selection the five to one section. It could uh for the day. I'm telling you, this is gonna be great. This is gonna be great. And the five to one is I think impacts me more than it. 100%. I mean it it helps you out a lot because then I need all the help I can get. Because then I am I am sharing it out of love and out of something genuine instead of out of frustration or anger. For sure. Because the five to one works on my heart. Yes, it changes your perspective about it does. Uh it keeps you from focusing on the record of wrong and makes you focus on the record. No, I'm not always perfect at doing that, and I realize that, but I do majority of the time try to sit back and go, all right, Lord, is this me? Yeah. Is this why does this bother me? What is this a genuine thing that I need to share this concern about? Or are you working something in my own heart? What's the ratio, would you say? Just it's a guess. There's no way of knowing. That once you work through the five to one, that you that you actually even share the one negative thing. Majority of the time I don't share. The majority, over 50%. Yeah. Wow. Okay. See, this is what I'm saying right now. I'm just saying. I'm just saying the blessing journal. Okay, you you could, and at the bottom of it, there could be a section that says the five to one ratio, which means you get to share the negative. We're not telling you to ignore it, avoid it. This, but we're what we're trying to tell you. But we're trying to get you to remember that your heart posture needs to be right, and that you can't share you shouldn't share um out of frustration or anger. Because usually we say wrong things and we can't think of the proper words and things get twisted. When we share out of frustration and anger, all we're interested in is punishment. Ooh. I don't that's not my note. I don't that was good. And so then all we want is our spouse punished. And I'll admit, sometimes I do. I think it's the truth for everybody, though, right? Like, sometimes I need to pay for that. You need to be punished for what you did. But the truth of the matter is God never put me in a position to punish you. He only put me in a position to love you. Aw. And uh when I when I focus on that record of wrongs, then I I make you a villain, and I make myself a victim, right? And then all I want is retribution. Too many people live like a victim. And so too many married people. Yeah. Too many married couples, and now they're both victims, and they're both villains, and there's no hero. Yeah. There's no win in the situation. Um here's the deal, you know, as we talk about this today, because I think this is great. This is I really, I mean, this thing of a blessing journal is it's popping in my mind right now. Uh, we got some creatives around here in the ministry. I may pitch this idea to them. Okay. And we'll see what happens here. But, you know, is is there a list that needs to be eradicated by forgiveness in your marriage? That's a great question. It's a great way to end the show today, I think. Is is there a list of wrongs that need to be eradicated in your marriage by forgiveness? And I th and I think that if you can be honest about that, I'm not saying you gotta know how to do it, but you can it it the beginning is to the beginning of change and transformation is always honesty. Yes, it is. Okay, which is I say this all the time. No one and and I heard it, I heard the statement even again this morning over in a devotional thing that I was listening to. Uh no one falls into sin before they first fall into deception. And that list of wrongdoings can deceive you into believing that your marriage uh can't be what you want it to be or what God has called it to be. Uh I'm not again. Bad behavior and those type of things need to be addressed. Willful sin for sure. Yes. But there's a process to that. And if that's if that's in your marriage, we encourage you to find professionals, find help, put the effort in, uh, and the healing power will be amazing. So wow, this is great. Awesome. This is really great. Uh again. Uh I think that I hope that you'll listen to this over and over again. If you listen to it, uh, hey, spring is on there. Uh what's up, spring? Hey, we're gonna be in uh Malone uh like on the We don't 12 exactly something like that. Anyway, um Spring and then live over in Bascom. I think I think they still live in Bascom. I don't know. Anyway, so uh we want you to just kind of like sit down with your spouse, listen to this together, uh, enjoy the conversation, maybe find yourself uh some paper. Mm-hmm. A notebook a notebook. And and start your own kind of little specifically for you. Blessing journal, and then at the bottom, don't put other things in. Yeah, the bottom third, the bottom third, just put like the five to one ratio. Five, that what is that? A colon, semicolon? I I don't know what it is. I don't know. I'm not I'm sorry. It's just five to one. Marty Coley, I'm sorry, I didn't pay attention in English. Um, anyway, at five to one, so that means you gotta list five amazing things about your spouse that you're thankful for before you can list the one thing that you're really struggling about. And do that on a daily basis for seven days. That's our challenge. There you go. And uh let's see what God will do. I think God's wonderful things. Man, thanks for joining us today. We're gonna pray for you guys. Is that alright? Here we go. Let's pray. Lord, I pray you quicken our memories to retain the good things and forgive and forget the wrong things. Yes. Father God, I just thank you for each couple that listens, Lord, that you continue to move in their hearts and move in their lives and in their marriage, Father God. Let their marriage be a reflection of who you are and how you love this world and how you love each individual. And I thank you, Lord, right now that you're gonna transform hearts and minds, Father God, to see the good in one another and to be able to record those things so that they will be able to look back on them in days when they feel that they are struggling, Father God. I just thank you right now for what you're doing in Jesus' name. In Jesus' name. Hey, we love you guys. Do us a favor, okay? Uh share this on your social media. Like when as soon as we post it here, just like share it on your page, Facebook, all those things, because I know that people can be blessed by it. And you know, we're just a couple of imperfect people who've been married for uh over 34 years. Spring. Can you believe that spring Richardson knew me and Lisa before we were married? Yeah. We all worked together. Uh that's crazy. That was way back. Can you believe what the Lord has done, Spring? It's been incredible. Who'd I ever thought? Yeah. Uh anyway, so uh also, uh, as soon as I get a chance today, every Wedded Wednesday, I will also upload it on the podcast. So here's what I like to do go to Spotify, go to Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your podcast at. It's on all the major podcasting platforms. Find Wedded Wednesday with Pastor Don and Lisa. Okay, there's a lot of Wedded Wednesday podcasts out there. It's crazy. But find ours, and these episodes will be on there. And we would just appreciate it that I got there's show notes. You can click on there, support the show. You can do all the things, but the most thing you can do is subscribe and rate the show, and that's gonna help the algorithm a whole lot. Okay. Is that good? Sounds good. Yeah, well, we love you guys. We thank you for being here each and every Wednesday. And until next week, here is a Love All. Bye. Have a great for ya. God bless. See you next week.