What Went Wrong?

Consider these scenarios:

~ A husband plans a special weekend away. He takes care of every detail including a variety of surprises that he hopes will please his wife. But the memories they make are more disappointing than special.

~ A wife secretly saves the funds necessary to purchase a birthday present for her husband that they normally wouldn’t be able to afford. She’s hoping he will be excited. But when he opens her gift his reaction looks more like shock and anger. 

~ A husband casually prepares to head off for his work day. The physical intimacy he and his wife shared the night before has him feeling confident things are well in his marriage. When his wife looks distant and responds coldly to his goodbye, he is left confused.

So what did go wrong? Of course, the stories are fictional and in real life, situations like these are complex. But one of the things that leads to these situations like is mistakenly thinking that one big positive experience can make up for lot of little negatives.

In this month’s challenge (April 2015) you were asked to think about a relationship dynamic we called “Invitations.” These are the opportunities we offer to others to connect with us. We drew a distinction between the Big Invitations and Little Invitations. In the stories above, one or both spouses have been missing the Little Invitations to connect with each other. Then, when they attempt to make up for it with a Big Invitation, it’s treated with hesitation, suspicion, or even rejection. The result is confusion and pain.

Comparing the workings of a marriage relationship to a bank account is popular among marriage experts. The point is typically something along the lines of—you must make regular deposits in the love bank of your marriage. We don’t disagree. In fact, the April challenge is really making a very similar point. It’s the financial metaphor that is seriously flawed. For example, if I think of all my interactions with my spouse as being similar to a cash deposit, I might conclude that choosing not to invest on a particular day is only one less dollar in my marriage love bank. At the end of the week, when I am not so busy, I will make a big $100 kind of deposit. I reason that will certainly have a much bigger impact. And if it were really about dollars it would be true. But were talking about relationship not money.

Here’s where the banking metaphor completely breaks down. When your spouse reaches out, inviting you to connect relationally, and you turn away, it’s a little taste of rejection. You don’t merely miss an opportunity to make an investment, you create a painful debt. 

When the normal pattern in your relationship is to accept those offers, being too busy to accept a Little Invitation now and again really is not a big deal—it happens to everyone. But when you pass them up frequently it stings. And when turning down Invitations is a pattern it’s destructive and painful.

This is why we have stressed the point that a Big Invitation can not make up for a pattern of missing the Little Invitations. In fact, it can make things worse. When we fall into a pattern of declining the Little Invitations we create a painful expectation that we are not that interested in relationship. It’s not hard to understand then why our Big (make-up) Invitations would be met with skepticism. So, the key is to focus on the Little Invitations. Develop a pattern of embracing them. Then you’ll have the substance of a good relationship that can be celebrated through those Big Invitations.

Simple Things Are Powerful

More than 30 years ago we simply stumbled onto it. We can’t really take credit for being smart enough to have gone about it the right way, it’s just the way it happened. We built a friendship before a romantic love. Even when we began talking about getting engaged, our conversations focused on getting to know as much about each other as possible. At one point, it even became a bit of a contest—who could think of a subject we had not discussed or a question we had not already asked each other? The result was a remarkably strong confidence in our friendship. 

All these years later, we look back and see that we were blessed. We had unknowingly gotten off to a great start. We understand now that love and romance flow out of friendship, not the other way around. So, working on the foundation and core of marriage always includes enriching your friendship.

In the Marriage Initiative challenges we want to provide a steady diet of ideas and activities that are meant simply to build friendship—to create a context for knowing and enjoying each other as best friends. 

I know that some of you use that term to refer to someone other than your spouse—someone who perhaps shares your love of a hobby or special interest. And that’s probably fine. You should have close friends other than your spouse. But when I talk about friendship I mean it as a measure of how intimately you know someone, how much you support his or her aspirations, how much you express your admiration of them each day. These are the basics of friendship. And in marriage, these things are meant to run deep—very deep. Deeper in marriage than any other human relationship.

If, as you read this, you realize that you have that kind of friendship, congratulations. You have the foundation of a great marriage. And if, as I describe this, you should happen to question how much friendship you actually share with your spouse, don’t despair. Yes, there is sadness in realizing that things are less than they should be. But the secret to marriage is really not that mysterious—it’s basic. It’s friendship. And you can pursue it. You can build it. And in time, it will transform your marriage.

Blessings!

Pastor Bill

What's To Come

As you all go to work on the Challenge for February we thought you might also be interested to know that the March Challenge is almost done too. No, you won't see it until March, but we are working ahead on quite a few ideas.

We’re guessing that some you are curious about what shape the Marriage Initiative will take over the course of the year. There may end up being quite a few months that have somewhat the feel of the January and February Challenges--couple discussions and study projects. But there will be plenty that take a decidedly different approach as well. By the time Christmas rolls around again you will have seen a wide spectrum of ideas. 

I wanted to mention this because the point of what we are doing lies in the Marriage Initiative title, not the individual Challenges. Our real goal is to remind and inspire you to take the initiative to regularly invest in your marriage. If the ideas we throw your way on a given month are intriguing and helpful—wonderful. But if something comes along that doesn’t fit your situation it’s ok to skip it. There are a thousand other ways you can invest in each other as a couple and that’s the point. Just as long as you take the initiative.

~Pastor Bill

How Melanie Got involved

You might have noticed that in January, Gateway's Marriage Initiative was signed "from Gateway Church", but this month, it is signed "from Pastor Bill and Melanie". Why the change?

After Pastor Bob and Pastor Bill first talked about how they could encourage marriages at Gateway, Pastor Bill began working on ideas and a strategy that Gateway would begin to pursue in 2015. But then Pastor Bob's wife, Kristi (wisely) asked, "Is there a woman working on this?"

Pastor Bill and Melanie 30th Anniversary

Bill and I have always enjoyed working in ministry together. Throughout the first 10 of our almost 20 years at Gateway, we spent many hours meeting with engaged couples preparing them for marriage, teaching marriage classes and partnering together to help couples in crisis.

But in the last 10 years, due to my (Melanie) health situation, those have become more and more difficult. In the last several years, not only have I not been able to join Bill in these activities, I am rarely able to even come to church due to my illness.

This has been a very sad thing for both of us. I keep connected as best I can through Facebook and by listening to the sermons online each week. But working together in ministry is something we both miss very much.

As Pastor Bill was working on the January challenge, we spent an evening talking through his ideas. It's not an unusual thing for him to share with me what he's been doing and how things are going at Gateway, but this time, we began brainstorming together. By the end of the evening we had narrowed the focus and put together a great group of discussions for the first month of the Marriage Initiative.

Suddenly, we had a ministry we could work on together again! And Pastor Bill could reassure Pastor Bob who could reassure Kristi that a woman was working on it too!

Pastor Bill and I are passionate about not only helping people not have problems in marriage, but to have really great relationships. We know that's possible because we have an amazing friendship and marriage. But it hasn't just been "luck". It's taken a lot of hard work.

We're relying on 31 years of working on our own marriage as well as the experience we have in helping others to develop these monthly challenges. We have a clear purpose and plan for 2015 and we are both excited to have an opportunity to encourage all of you!

We are so glad you have decided to join in and we hope and pray that you and your spouse will experience great things in your relationship this year!

Joyfully and sincerely,
Melanie

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