Real Marriage_ The Truth About Sex, Friendship, and Life Together - Mark Driscoll [112]
4. Redo the Reverse-Engineering questions as life changes, things happen, and adjustments need to be made.
5. Grow old together, stay married, remain one, be fruitful, and refuse to settle for distant parallel lives in a functional but cold, lonely marriage.
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Reverse-Engineering
Reverse-Engineering Principles
Marriage affects and is affected by the rest of your life. One frequent problem with marriage books is that they focus solely on the marriage without considering the rest of life. This chapter is intended to help you work on your life—not just in it—by getting both your shoulder-to-shoulder and face-to-face time regularly. For this to happen, the following principles are helpful:
• You need a wise plan to do your work.
“The plans of the diligent lead surely to plenty, but those of everyone who is hasty, surely to poverty” (Prov. 21:5).
• Your plan needs to include outside counsel.
“Without counsel, plans go awry, but in the multitude of counselors they are established” (Prov. 15:22).
• Your plan must be biblical and prayerful.
“Commit your works to the Lord, and your thoughts [plans] will be established” (Prov. 16:3).
• Your plan will change as God leads you.
“A man’s heart plans his way, but the Lord directs his steps” (Prov. 16:9).
Reverse-Engineering Plans
1. Your plan must be written down or typed up.
2. Consider the downside in all your planning. Be realistic, not unduly idealistic. What could go wrong? How could it fail? Where are the liabilities?
3. Include fun and margin for error. Any plan that does not have some intentional fun will lead to a boring life. Any plan that does not leave a margin for error in such things as time, money, and energy is destined to fail.
4. Account for your priorities. Work from conviction according to your priorities and not from guilt piled on you by Satan, other people, or your own faulty thinking.
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5. Accept the size of your plate and fill it—some people have big plates; others have small plates. Be honest about what you can do and how much you can handle.
6. Take something off your plate whenever something is put on. Don’t stack your plate until things fall off and your life is a mess.
7. Sync your plan with your family. The weekly sync meeting with your spouse is key. Imagine a company never meeting as a staff and how miserably they would fail.
8. Use simple systems and write everything in one place, like a notebook. Most systems are too complex. The key is to keep everything in one simple place together—prayer requests, grocery lists, to-do lists, and things God is teaching you.
9. Every night spend a few minutes organizing your priorities for the next day in your notebook. Do not simply have a long to-do list. Have a priority list and do the highest priority items first. You will never finish everything on your list, so don’t worry about it. Do what is most important first and the rest as you are able.
10. Seek planning principles from wise people. Everyone has something to teach you if you are humble enough to learn. Learn from both the successes and failures of other people. Keep notes in your notebook of what you learn. As you meet people who are particularly skilled in such things as budgeting, investing, organizing their homes, and training their kids, ask if they would be willing to meet with you for a short meeting. If they agree, do not waste their time, but instead show up with a list of questions, thank them for meeting with you, ask your questions respectfully, listen carefully, don’t talk too much, and take copious notes.
11. Cultivate personal mindfulness. Keep notes on what works and does not work in everything from holidays to vacations as well as in your weekly routine. This allows