Real Marriage_ The Truth About Sex, Friendship, and Life Together - Mark Driscoll [111]
I did not want to boss Grace around and tell her how our new life together would be. But I needed to help her by drawing out her thoughts, dreams, fears, and needs—or what Peter means when commanding husbands to be “understanding” with their wives.
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After packing the kids and our stuff into the Suburban, everyone settled in for the roughly eight-hour drive home. Then I handed Grace the yellow legal pad of questions and kindly asked her to spend the time answering the questions and discussing with me anything she wanted to as she worked though them. I knew this would likely be my only chance to get my Martha-esque wife to sit down for eight hours doing planning. As her name would suggest, she was gracious and obliged.
One pastor said there are only four ways to live your life, and by choosing the last one on his list, we hoped to reverse-engineer our marriage.2
1. Reaction—passively dominated by urgencies and pushy people. This results in a life that is a frazzled mess, disorganized, without a sense of priorities, half-finished tasks, running late, and a frantic lifestyle.
2. Conformity—succumbing to the fear of man and just being and doing what everyone else wants, which is not necessarily following God’s will for you and your family. This results in a boring life where everyone but God is pleased, and the person who is easily pushed around keeps busy and productive but is not passionate or free.
3. Independence—nonconforming rebellion in the name of freedom marked by doing only what you want and ignoring godly authority over you. This results in a life of defiance, independence, immaturity, self-reliance, and foolishness.
4. Intentionality—reverse-engineering your life and living it prayerfully and purposefully, journaling your thoughts throughout the day, and using silence and solitude to hear from God and organize your life. This results in a life that is purposeful and passionate to God’s glory, people’s good, and your joy.
I had been prone to living a life vacillating between reaction and independence. Grace was prone toward reaction and conformity. As always, we were opposites. In short, we were a mess. There was always a plan for the church, along with goals, timelines, and staff meetings to keep us on task. But we had no such guiding wisdom for our marriage and family. My hope was to use the Reverse-Engineering wisdom to help us construct a framework document from which to guide our decision making. An edited version of what Grace filled out and what has guided our marriage, family, and ministry ever since is below. We have reworked portions of it over the years and found it to be an incredible benefit. We hope you and your spouse use it and do the following:
1. Honestly look back on the big moments of frustration, anger, disappointment, grief, and failure in your marriage. How much of what you experienced was the result of not preparing for the future and working toward it together? How many holidays, vacations, and other times that could have been wonderful ended up awful because you were both expecting the other person to take care of things the way you were hoping and felt disappointed when things did not come together? Rather than repeating your failures and frustrations, seek to put the trials and opportunities before you as something to work on together rather than between you to fight over. How could a wise plan that is acted upon help improve your future together? Turn your pains into plans.
2. Answer the questions prayerfully and carefully on your own. Accept that this will take time and work. But it is less costly to make a plan and work on it than it is to fail and be frustrated over and over.
3. Schedule an entire day together to share your answers and work through what the priorities and plans will