The Beginning - January 2015

Late in 2014 Pastor Bob poked his head in my office. He looked concerned and even a bit discouraged. He opened with, “we’re going to have to talk some time soon.” Over the years we have worked together I have learned that this is Bob’s way of saying we have a problem—a problem to which there is no easy or obvious answer. He had just received news from someone struggling with their marriage and it was getting to be an all-too-often occurrence. “We have to do something to encourage Gateway’s married couples, he said.”

For both of us, the need to do so was obvious. The means of doing so was difficult to see. We have no one on staff who is responsible for such things. It’s hard to imagine taking someone away from what they are doing to take on something new. We have no budget and no measurable resources. This means that new programs, guest speakers, big events and all of the other obvious approaches to marriage enrichment were not an option.

I can’t speak for the reliability of the story, but I once read that the White House has a person who washes windows. And when he finishes navigating the outside of our president’s home he does a very surprising thing—he starts over. It reminds me that there is more than one way to approach a problem. One is to say, “hey, our windows are dirty, we need to figure out a way to get them all clean.” The other approach is to just go wash a window. To regularly wash a window. And to keep washing a window every day. So, when you can’t do something big, maybe you can do something little—over and over again. Once we realized this, it became obvious that such an approach is not only manageable, it’s also much more appropriate for relationships too. We live in relationships hour to hour, day to day, not in big week-long, seminar-like chunks. And so here we are with the 2015 Marriage Initiative.

You shouldn’t expect magic bullets and miracle cures. What we do hope is to provide you with a steady diet of diverse ideas—reminders that a good marriage is actually built out of small deposits and positive habits built over time. And when we have navigated around the core principles of healthy marriage relationship—we’re going to start over.
We hope you will join us. Take the initiative for the health of your marriage.

Pastor Bill
Associate Pastor
Gateway Church