Looking at your marriage, what would you consider where you are failing the most? The way you talk to your spouse? The way you treat your spouse? The time you spend with your spouse? We all have area’s we aren’t perfect in, we all have area’s where we fail.

What is the hardest parts of your day-to-day life with your spouse?  For us, it is when we are rushed.  For some reason both our brains combust simultaneously and neither of us can function properly and it ends in an arguments every.single.time. That really caught my eye a while back and made me realize if I am able to pin point a scenario than am I able to prevent it from happening in the first place? Can I be more intentional, more aware, more preventative and more prepared in order to stop what will happen if I don’t?

My husband likes preventative maintenance; on our home, on our car’s, appliances etc.  He likes to maintain these things so they don’t break, so he gets the problems fixed before they happen.  So my question to myself was: Why am I allowing my marriage to fail in these area’s where if I performed routine preventative maintenance strategies it could thrive? Are there area’s in your marriage you could perform preventative maintenance on to make sure that your marriage can handle the leaks, breaks and stress that life throws your way? Because trust me, life happens whether you ‘think’ your marriage can handle it or not, and even more so there’s an enemy who is personalizing attacks for your specific marriage. Preventative Maintenance in your marriage would literally prevent problems, not only are you not wasting your time arguing and stressing, your freeing up your time to LIVE with your spouse!

For example I know that my addiction to my phone is a problem in many area’s but especially in my marriage. (referenceto my ‘phubbing’ post in the archives if you want to see how this can be detrimental to your marriage) If I know this will cause separation and distance in my marriage, I should instead change my thinking and STOP allowing it to tear apart quality time with my spouse.  Preventative Maintenance I should be doing here is : Putting the phone down (if it was that easy… for some it is, for me it isn’t) and intentionally spending time with my husband.  I am even considering going as far as getting a new phone that ISNT an i-phone (gasp) and that solely functions as a ‘phone’ so that I can help myself (I’m bad that’s why I’m considering this extreme.) But I value my marriage more than I like scanning Facebook on my phone after my kids are in bed, so that really shouldnt be been that extreme.

If you were to look at a basic Preventative Maintenance plan you would see

• Daily Tasks
• Weekly Tasks
• Monthly Tasks
• Yearly Tasks

I ask you this now, what are you doing for your marriage Daily? Weekly? Monthly? Yearly?

Are you prioritizing quality time daily with your spouse, weekly or monthly date nights? Even just talking above and beyond work, kids and logistics?  It’s not easy , the busyness of life keeps us as distracted as ever; but its important.  It’s important to be pouring into our marriages, doing what ever we can to prevent arguments or problems that would hurt our spouse or our marriage. It is a terrifying thought to look beside you when the kids move out and not even know the person beside you, let alone like them. I heard a great piece of advice that you should go to a marriage conference every year for the rest of your marriage. Now I know thats not entirely feasbile for each couple, but I think the idea behind it is; keep growing together, keep learning more, keep learning more about your spouse as the situations of life change you. I can easily say I am not the same wife I was when we first got married, before we had kids, before life through situations at us that changed us. If we dont keep up with knowing our spouse through these changes, we truly wont know them in 20 years.

So I leave you with thi;, keep connecting, keep prioritizing your marriage over everything else other than God but even more than your kids, and keep growing together. If we can comprehend the ‘Preventative Maintenance’ idea for our vehicles but can’t for our marriage then there is a much bigger problem in the world.

Always remember #thestruggleisreal