State of the Family

A few days ago I wrote about my husband and I having a "State of the Family" meeting and today I am going to post the intro to my State of the Family book I am writing.

If you picked this book up in hopes that it will tell you a magic formula to get rid of all your problems, then I am sorry to disappoint you. There is no magic formula, just, hard work. I am going to give you the tools needed to make your work a little easier. In this book you will find some things that you may already know but I’ve tried to put something in here that will benefit everyone. Many of these things I had to discover the hard way. Like I mentioned earlier this is not a magic formula, but it is a formula. One that I hope will make life a little easier for you to navigate the ups and downs of marriage.
When many couples get married all they are thinking about is the love that they are feeling, they aren’t thinking about finances, they aren’t thinking about communication, they just know that they are never going to have any of the problems other couples have. The problems don’t come until they are a few years into their marriage, sometimes it’s after they start having children, or just when they notice money is getting tight, but eventually all couples go through hard times (even if you use this formula) but if you follow this formula it will help you navigate the rough spots a little easier.
How do I know this? Because this is my story, my husband and I got married during his last year of college and money was pretty tight, but we figured things would get better when he got a real job after college. However, as life has a way of happening, things happened that changed our plans.
I am a planner, and my husband is more of a happy go lucky fly by the seat of my pants kind of guy. He doesn’t like to plan ahead, he just take things one day at a time. In some aspects this is great, but I craved regulation and order. I wanted to sit down and talk about everything and plan everything out and that just wasn’t happening. When we had the money to go on a date, which wasn’t very often, we usually chose to do something fun, like going to the movies or playing mini golf. It wasn’t that I didn’t enjoy those kind of dates, I loved it and I had a wonderful time; but I came away from them craving a deeper connection with my husband. One day during my personal devotion time I was pondering what to do about this situation, I didn’t want to give up our fun date nights for talking, one I knew my Hubby would never go for it and two I enjoyed the fun things we did. So after throwing out several bad solutions, I had this idea, a monthly family business meeting and couples Bible Study. I had been watching TV earlier and the President had been giving his State of the Union Address and that gave me the name for my plan – A State of the Family Meeting. I could hardly wait for my husband to come home and spent the rest of the day perfecting my plan and how I would pitch it to my husband. When he came home I could not contain my excitement and jumped right in, he liked the idea and we planned our first meeting for the following week. With only a couple of exceptions we have managed to keep it up every month. It has not only brought us closer together as a couple, but has helped us manage our finances, and our time more efficiently. That is not to say that things magically got better for us and we never had any hardships again. What it really does is helps us keep the doors of communication open and gives us a chance to air anything that is on our mind without it ruining our fun dates, and yes we definitely still have those.
As I saw how much benefit our family received from this approach I thought of all the young couples that were just starting out and wondered how much better their relationships would be if they could benefit from us telling what we learned the hard way! But whether you are a young couple just starting out on this journey of life or if you’re an older couple floundering in the mistakes you’ve already made I hope this book will be a blessing to you and your family, and that you will find something in it that will make life a little easier!
Lydia J. Paasch