Being Intentional

This past summer, a dear friend and I were going for a walk with our wee ones, and she told me that she and her husband had not been on a date alone since her daughter had been born several months earlier. Looking back, I clearly remember giving her my "you-need-to-not-neglect-your-relationship-and-you-need-to-make-sure-that-you-keep-investing-in-your-marriage" lecture as we strolled around the block.

Well, dear friend, to my sheepish chagrin - I was looking back over the almost eight months since Jesse's been born and realized that Kev and I have not been on a date alone since his arrival either! Wow - it's amazing how quickly time can slip away. I couldn't believe that it had been eight months since we had done something alone - just the two of us. We've done a ton of fun things together as a family since Jesse's been born - day trips many Saturdays, lots of trips to parks, meals out, and even a few overnights at various hotels. But, it's always been with the boys - never alone.

I feel like we've done a pretty good job at staying connected with each other - always checking in to make sure we're both doing well, having fun family days, making sure that we don't get too busy in the craziness of grad school, having good conversation over meals or after the boys are in bed - but STILL. I am a huge proponent of people investing time into their marriages - quality, uninterrupted, intentional time. You will hear me harp on this until the day I die. We have seen too many marriages merely surviving and existing. We have heard too many couples say that the craziness they are in is "just a season" and as soon as the season is over they will get back on track and back to nurturing each other. I can not tell you how many marriages that I know of - right now - that are on the edge of something tragic happening. Just this past week we got news of some dear friends of ours who have three little kids where the wife - my friend - walked away and said she was through.

This sort of thing does not just happen overnight. The Bible says to "beware of the little foxes....." We need to beware of the little things in our relationships that can so easily become big things. No one is immune. It is SO sad and it is SO scary that we can not afford to NOT be spending quality, intentional time investing in our relationships. And this time that we spend together doesn't have to be any big "to-do." It just has to be simply that - TIME! It is SO easy to make everything else in life have priority over our marriage. Life pulls us in so many directions that sometimes we barely have time to even breathe! But the key thing is to be constantly checking in with each other to make sure we're still on the same track and to carve out segments of time for each other - whether it's talking instead of watching t.v. after the kids go to bed, or asking someone to watch the kids while we go out for a cup of coffee - or even for a walk if we're broke!

Anyway, after the shocker news flash that we got from our friends, Kev and I looked at each other, called some friends with the promise to return the favor, and hit the road just the two of us for a couple of hours. It was a sobering reminder to us that even though we're busy, poor, and whatever other excuses that we can so easily come up with, the effort and the investment is oh so necessary, and we need to make sure that we stay strong no matter WHAT season of life we are in.

Stress is inevitable, busyness will never go away, kids will always have needs, money will always be tight, housework will never get done, tests will always need to be studied for, and to top it all off - we'll probably even return home more exhausted than when we left because of all the planning that went into just getting out the door and because of all of the things that we left unfinished by going......but the investment is worth it and it's necessary.

Okay. My rant is over.