Marriage Mediocrity: Your spouse isn’t the enemy…
Maintenance isn’t perfect… you change the oil 500 miles early every time it is almost due, you rotate the tires much more frequently than the manufacture recommends, and yet something can break, and your tires eventually are going to need to be replaced. Maintenance is a great tool to help minimize the risk of catastrophe. But problems are still going to find you, struggles are going to surface, because there is an enemy that is always plotting against you and wants to destroy your marriage. Satan and his demons hate your marriage and will do anything possible to wreck you’re your lives. Accept that as absolute fact and always know that no matter how good or how bad life seems God is ALWAYS for your marriage. There will be seasons of life where it seems like satan has the upper hand in your marriage and that God is taking a nap. Our God never sleeps, he is never busy, absent, distracted, early or late, He is always with you, and this is why the holy spirit whispers to you because He is always close to you. If your marriage is struggling find quiet time and listen for the whisper. The enemy is really good at keeping us busy and always stimulated in some form or fashion so that it is a lot more difficult for us to listen for the holy spirit. Busyness in this day and age has become one of the biggest fiery darts the enemy can throw at us. He knows keeping you on the “hustle and grind” is an acceptable way to keep us distracted, because according to the world if we are hustling then we are chasing the successful American dream and that couldn’t be more celebrated and encouraged in our society. I’m not discouraging you from working hard, chasing goals, and supporting your family, but I am however reminding you to keep those things in their place, if that pursuit consumes you to the point, you are losing your quiet devotional time, sacrificing date night and conversations with your spouse then those two things need to be red flags to stop and REST.
If Kobe Bryant never practiced basketball, then he never would have been one of the greatest players of all time. Everyone knows and understands that to be true, so why would we think we can have an amazing marriage relationship with our spouse if we never commit to setting aside time each day to be present with our spouse, communicate, and listen to them and what is going on in their life. Losing that little bit of time each day that should be set aside for no one and nothing else than our spouse is the next wedge the enemy uses after he consumes you with busyness. Kobe was one of the greatest because he was committed to working on himself and always improving his skills. If we aren’t working on ourselves and improving ourselves for our spouse, the relationship is going to begin to suffer. Being the spouse that God has called you to should be our second highest priority behind serving Christ. There is no greater purpose or calling on our lives than loving and serving our spouse as Christ has called us to do. Yet so many times we place an unending amount of crap ahead of them and then wonder why you don’t feel close to them. As a husband my priority should be to be the greatest husband of all time to my wife and anything less than that I am failing her, and I am failing my marriage. Greatness in our society is celebrated in so many different aspects, successful CEO, world champion athlete, grammy winning artist, the list goes on and on, but when do we as Christians begin to apply that same pursuit and passion for loving and serving our spouse. If we are content with mediocrity, then we will having nothing more than a mediocre marriage and it will be evident. A marriage of mediocrity is a target for the enemy to wreck our marriage. We should have such a relentless pursuit of improving ourselves for our spouse and family that the enemy takes a step back and says “ummm I’m going on to the next couple because these two are anchored together and I am wasting my time attacking them.” Marriage mediocrity should never be an option for our relationship.
The last 6 months of our marriage has been a season of tension, testing, uncertainty, pain, confusion, and frustration. It’s hard to believe that the XO Marriage conference in February was less than six months ago. We have had so many distractions in our marriage the last two months. We acquired a building for our business that we had to renovate prior to opening, spent countless hours and money investing in improving this location so that it will best benefit our community to be a great resource for everyone. In that process the last two months busyness and lack of time has crashed into us like a hurricane. Along with all of that school is out so our kids are home, and we are busy with them in the middle of everything else so finding any time at some point during the day to just sit and be present together and talk without any distractions has been like a needle in a haystack. It’s been routine now getting into bed after midnight and having to be up at 3:30 in the morning to get to work so the enemy has a open door to use multiple avenues to attack our marriage. We haven’t been great at it and at times we have drifted and allowed the excuses to set in for why we aren’t spending the time together that we should. But regardless of all of the excuses I can pull from whether they are justified or not we as husbands are called to FIGHT for our wife and to protect them, we have to stop sitting by idling next to her “going with the flow”. We must be dedicated and disciplined to pursuing our spouses regardless of what is going on in our lives. Having the greatest marriage of all times is going to require us to put the remote down and turn off the tv an hour early at night, put your phone away stop scrolling through endless garbage on social media even if you can justify it in some way. If your spouse died tomorrow and you spent the last three days on this earth with them staring at your phone 90% of the time how would you feel at the funeral telling them goodbye knowing that you wasted the most precious opportunities with your spouse because you put a cell phone or tv screen above them in your priorities list. There is not an opportunity to apologize to our spouses for not keeping them the priority that they should be once they are gone so why would we ever let that be a possibility of happening. I cant fathom the amount of grief and regret that would be felt knowing I squandered the most important time I had on this earth to spend with them. I pray that is something no one will ever experience but the reality is we all have a clock of time that is running out and when our time is up how will our spouse and family remember us as….. Will we be the MVP husband or wife, mother or father that was the greatest that they could have ever been or will we look back on our life and wish “I would have done things different.” Priorities whether we are consciously aware of them or not expose us to what we value in any given moment of time. Make it a priority every single day to be the absolute best spouse that you can be and fight to prevent worldly distractions and noise from getting your priorities out of order. We should never allow our spouses to ever wish they felt seen or heard. Contentment is the foundation of mediocrity, if we are content with our marriage then mediocrity is right around the corner, being the best at something means that you are never satisfied with your performance and as husbands we should fight each day so that our wives never feel the disappointment that mediocrity brings with it. Fight for your spouse in whatever season you might be in, regardless of what it is give your all to them and for them, find the quiet place to spend time together, plan the date night, stop making excuses, surprise her, make her laugh, pursue her in ways she’s never experienced, serve her better, love her better, show her every single day that regardless of what you have going on that day she is above it all and is your priority, help her, listen to her, support her, lead her, laugh with her, cry with her, dream with her, work with her, and most importantly pray with her and pursue Christ with her. Mediocrity is the enemy, fight to avoid it every single day regardless of what it takes because whatever the cost may be, it is worth the price.