The most important day of your marriage isn’t the first day, it’s the last day.
It’s not how you start, it’s how you finish.
If you know how you want to finish, you can reverse engineer your marriage so that you live and love in a way that causes you to finish strong and finish together.
When it comes to your marriage, relationships or life in general, you may have stumbled out of the starting gate. You may have failed and blown it…BIG TIME. In fact, maybe your spouse feels more like a roommate than your best friend or closest ally. Maybe your marriage has felt more like a war, than a relationship. Perhaps it has been marked by pain, conflict, betrayal, broken trust, heartbreak, infidelity, sin and any number of challenges.
This principle is so critical and absolutely essential that it’s worth repeating.
It’s not how you START; it’s how you FINISH that really matters.
What has happened up until this point in your marriage, relationships or life doesn’t have to determine what will happen! Your HISTORY doesn’t dictate your DESTINY. Your PAST doesn’t determine or define your FUTURE. You and your spouse can make a NEW START today.
You can REVERSE ENGINEER your marriage, relationships and life!
I ran across that principle several years ago. Reverse-engineering is about anticipating life forward and then living it backward. In other words, reverse engineering is about envisioning the kind of person you want to become, the kind of marriage you want to experience, or the kind of life you want to live and then putting into place the beliefs, behaviors, actions, systems and values that will take you in that direction.
Today is a great day to take a moment and ask yourself this question:
What will the last day of our marriage look like?
Think carefully about your answer. It may be helpful to divide that single question into three questions.
- Will the last day come prematurely? Due to neglect, inattentiveness or actions that eventually lead to separation or ultimately to divorce?
This question isn’t meant to evoke shame or regret about the divorce in your past. The truth is our marriage almost ended prematurely. Janet had already met with a lawyer. A petition for the “dissolution of our marriage” had already been filed with the state of Alabama. Even after more than 3 decades of life together my marriage to Janet came close to the edge of oblivion.
Dr. Gabor Maté once wrote:
“The road to hell isn’t paved with good intentions.
It’s paved with lack of intention.” —Dr. Gabor Maté
I’ve written before, our marriage didn’t almost end due to any single, catastrophic issue. The “death” of our marriage was “death by a thousand paper cuts.”
It was the slow, painful, cumulative damage and devastation brought on by one too many seemingly insignificant problems, magnified by years of busyness, work-a-holism, devotion to ministry to the neglect of attentive devotion to our marriage, my personal addiction to ministry performance and perfectionism, and the failure to be an emotionally healthy person who intentionally created an emotionally attractive environment for my wife.
Janet and I failed to be intentional about building our marriage, not by doing bad things, but being so distracted by a variety of “good” or meaningless things that we failed to focus on one of the MOST IMPORTANT THINGS — God’s gift of “US.”
I wish we had taken time to ask ourselves this question when the drift began to occur in our relationship. Will the last day of our marriage come prematurely?
Here’s another important question to ask.
- Will the last day be marked by regret and shame about what could have been and should have been if we had simply taken action?
Some marriages don’t come to a premature end. They last — 30, 40, 50 or 60 years. But the people in those marriages aren’t thriving, they’re simply surviving. Spouses in these marriages often feel lonely, afraid, ashamed and even hopeless.
Will that be you?
Will you near the end of this life only to realize that you wasted one of the most precious gifts God ever gave you — the gift of your spouse?
Will you regret:
—the romance you neglected to cultivate,
—the hand you didn’t hold,
—the kisses you didn’t plant,
—the love you didn’t make,
—the laughter you never allowed yourself to experience,
—the adventures you failed to go on,
—the prayers you never prayed, or,
—the encouragement you forgot to provide?
Today is a great day to evaluate your marriage and ask yourself, Will the last day of our marriage be marked by regret or shame about what could have and should have been?
Here’s the third question.
- Or, will the last day be filled with joy and celebration because you lived and loved to the max? Because you created the marriage you always wanted with the spouse you already had?
Remember the question that started this post: What will the last day of our marriage look like?
One of my favorite marriage quotes comes from Tim Keller’s excellent book, The Meaning of Marriage. In this section, Keller is describing what marriage can look like. He describes a marriage that is not fixated on the first day, but focused on the last day.
I read these words for the first time probably a decade ago. I’ve went back to them dozens of times since. They still move and inspire me today.
“Within this Christian vision for marriage, here’s what it means to fall in love. It is to look at another person and get a glimpse of the person God is creating, and to say, ‘I see who God is making you, and it excites me! I want to be part of that. I want to partner with you and God in the journey you are taking to his throne. And when we get there, I will look at your magnificence and say, ‘I always knew you could be like this. I got glimpses of it on earth, but now look at you!’’ Each spouse should see the great thing that Jesus is doing in the life of their mate through the Word, the gospel. Each spouse then should give him or herself to be a vehicle for that work and envision the day that you will stand together before God, seeing each other presented in spotless beauty and glory.”
—Tim Keller, The Meaning of Marriage, p 113.
Wow! Wow! Wow!
I want Janet and I to finish like that!
I want to grow old with the woman I married when we were both kids. Literally. She was 16 and I was 18. (The pic to the left was taken on our “honeymoon.” That’s another story…)
I want to hold her hand, even as both of our hands are marked by spots and wrinkles revealing our age.
I want to kiss her lips, even if we both have to pause for a second to put our teeth in first.
I want us to be surrounded by our children, grand-children, great-grand-children and friends. People who loved us, corrected us, cheered us, challenged us, prayed for us and refused to give up on us.
I want us to continue growing in faith, hope and love.
I want the fruit of the Spirit to flourish in our lives — “love in all its varied dimensions: joy that overflows, peace that subdues, patience that endures, kindness in action, goodness or moral beauty, faithfulness and loyalty, gentleness and self-control”(Gal 5:22-23 TPT Paraphrased).
I want us to finish strong and finish together.
It’s not how you start.
It’s not even if you stumbled midway through life.
It’s how you FINISH that really matters.
With that in mind, the most important day of marriage isn’t the first day.
It may not even be the last day.
The most important day is TODAY.
I’ll leave you with one final question:
Will you and your spouse do things TODAY
that get you to your envisioned SOMEDAY?