| Slow but steady progress
Best intentions aside, we soon discovered that establishing consistency for our new approach wouldn’t be easy. We stumbled often, we missed scheduled times together, we messed up sometimes by starting off with an out-of-sorts tone that colored the entire morning – causing frustration, anger, or hurt. But overall, we did one thing right. We never gave up. Overall, the progress in our lives and our relationship remained constant, steady, and encouraging.
Every so often we experienced mornings when communicating was difficult at best. Psychiatrists and psychologists advise that painful experiences must be shared verbally before a person can find complete healing, but achieving that goal means you must feel worse before getting better. We know that advice to be absolutely true. It is incredibly painful to share hurt feelings – and to hear them from each other. But ultimately, like cleaning infection from a wound, this is indeed a necessary step in our ongoing pursuit of marital intimacy.
The reward of such deep sharing is that core issues are exposed and hopefully, better understood – which should enable you to discover a “work in process” type of agreement. Some core issues will never be resolved in this world because we are flawed partners; however, you can agree to work towards a more livable solution. And that can make a huge difference in the connection between the two of you.
Once, in our situation, Craig had been angry with me for making us late to an event. He lashed out with cutting words that hurt deeply. That evening, there was a barrier between us that felt tangible, physically and emotionally. When we talked it out on Saturday morning, Craig realized he had an obsession with not only being on time to events, but being early. Further conversation brought up a childhood memory: At age ten, Craig had made the baseball team, and his coach had warned, “Be there for practice, or you don’t play.” On game day, neither of Craig’s parents could take him to the field, so he caught a bus – and arrived late. The coach chewed him out in front of the whole team, and sure enough, he sat the bench. The pain of that moment made Craig resolve never to be late again.
That’s just one example of how our Saturday mornings have enabled us to learn so much more about each other – one of the main reasons we look forward to our connection every week. Another major reason is that we’ve gotten into the habit of “tucking away” highlights from the week before – humorous stories; insights from prayer times or bible study and what we’re learning about God; stresses at work; whatever. Then we use our Saturday mornings to put it all on the table, wading through all our feelings when we’re both better able to deal with them. We often find that some issue during the week – at home, at the office, wherever – may have angered or hurt us, but we were so busy at the time that we repressed or temporarily ignored those emotions. Saturday mornings give us an opportunity to release those pent-up feelings, to let them surface, be processed, and shared with each other. Once that hard work is done, then we can move on to fixing problems/issues in need of repair.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Growing Closer to God
Possibly the greatest benefit of our Saturday mornings (and one we didn’t even recognize for years due to pre-conceived ideas about what “devotions” look like) was that as we grew better at sharing our feelings and thoughts with each other, we were also learning how to be more intimate with God. Obviously God knows all our innermost thoughts and feelings, but revealing them to him grants us the opportunity to see ourselves as we truly are – invaluable insight for emotional intelligence. Growing closer to God was also reflected in our times together, creating this endless circle of one fueling and feeding the other. We were growing in our individual lives with God because of our Saturday mornings, and our growth as a couple from our weekly intentional communication was also providing incredible spiritual growth for us as individuals. After all those years of feeling guilty about “not doing couple devotions,” we’d stumbled onto a process that truly encouraged and enhanced our spiritual growth.
It’s been more than 20 years (as I update this – nearly 40 years!), and we’re still at it. As we look back, we both agree that those weekly times of intentional connection have been the single most important investment in our marriage. Never did we envision the depth that would result from merely talking week after week, year after year. Never would we have guessed how tenaciously we’d cling to this tradition. And never would we have imagined that both of us would honestly say that the two greatest influences upon our spiritual growth and intimacy with God have been our individual devotional lives and the depths of our sharing with each other. On all those Saturday mornings.
Set aside some undistracted free time this weekend, or next Tuesday afternoon, or whatever works best for you. You may discover that once you start, you won’t want to stop! |
