• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

3. How will you include or not include your extended family in vacations and holidays?

4. What has changed with your extended family?

5. Other?

Friends

1. How will you be better friends to each other?

2. Who are your closest friends?

3. Which people have you dropped as friends?

4. What things do you do with your friends?

5. Who no longer has your direct phone number or e-mail address?

6. Other?

Learning

1. What areas have you studied deeply?

2. How many books have you read by that date? What are some of the titles?

3. What other learning experiences have shaped you (such as, conferences, mentors, spiritual disciplines)?

4. How many minutes do you read each day?

5. Other?

Daily Habits

1. How will you pray alone and together each day?

2. How will you ensure that you eat at least one meal together nearly every day?

3. What will be your daily Bible reading?

Weekly Routine

1. What will your ideal week look like?

2. What will your weekly Sabbath day look like? What will you do to relax as a family and have fun together?

219

3. What weekly routines will provide anchors to your schedule (family movie night, family breakfast before school, etc.)?

4. What small group or class will you be in together at your church to grow and serve?

Weekly Date Night

1. What will your weekly date night look like? Where will you go? What will you do? How will you connect?

2. If you have kids, how will you get child care for date night (for example, co-op with other families where you rotate who takes the kids each week, finding a single woman in the church who wants to learn about marriage and kids who will volunteer, pay a babysitter, ask relatives)?

Quarterly Getaway

1. Will you go away together roughly once a quarter for at least one night? What will you do together?

2. What and where sounds fun and romantic to connect?

Step 3: Identify and Make Changes

Many people only change when crisis demands it. We go on a diet after our doctors say we are in danger, make a budget after we are in significant debt, and go to marriage counselors or pastors after the possibility of divorce has been put on the table. It is far wiser and more hopeful to make changes before crisis demands it.

Changes

1. What three things do you hope have changed with your spouse? Yourself? Your ministry? Your family? Your job?

2. What top three emotion-, time-, and energy-wasters do you need to drop immediately?

3. What three changes in your life would make the biggest difference?

4. What three things do you need the most (such as, different car, gym membership, computer, home office, cell phone, high-speed wi-fi at home)?

220

5. What obstacles are keeping you from living by your convictions (for example, a cluttered house, no budget, lack of prayer time)?

People

1. List the people who take but don’t give toward a friendship, and determine if you are to continue serving them, back off your involvement in their lives, or simply make them take care of themselves.

2. Who do you need to distance yourself from because they are taking time, money, or energy away from your first priorities?

Handing Off

1. List all the things you can hand off to someone else (for example, ordering groceries online and having them delivered, mowing your lawn, doing your taxes, household projects, watching kids, running errands, outsourcing dry cleaning and ironing, scheduling appointments, answering your phone).

In closing, the rest of your marriage is really up to you and your spouse. Our hope is that you will take the principles and tools in this book to set in motion a great life together by God’s grace and the Holy Spirit’s power. We are praying that this book will be not merely information, but something God will use for your marital transformation. Jesus loves you, and so do we. The goal is progress, not perfection.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We want to thank Jesus Christ for rising from death to give us the forgiveness of sins and