Creating a Gospel-Centered Marriage: Decision Making - Part 1
Trying to learn how to make decisions, as an individual or as a couple, can feel a bit like trying to learn how to breathe. It seems like something that has to be natural in order to be effective. If we had to think about breathing, then we’d fear getting distracted and suffocating. When we think about being intentional in our decision making it can quickly feel like such an effort would take over our lives.
There is good deal of merit to this concern. If we tried to bring overt thought and prescribe processes to every individual or marital decision in order to ensure that we arrived at the will of God, then our lives would be paralyzed. We would live in fear or fail to complete a large number of tasks that life requires.
But we’ve all been burned by the alternative. After a bad decision we put on our “20/20 Hindsight Glasses” and see how greater intentionality could have alleviated the unpleasant outcome. We begin to think it would be “worth it” to run our decisions through some kind of process. But it’s hard to determine what level of decision warrants this process (where’s “the line”?) and what kind of process to use for each decision.
These challenges emerge before we introduce the difficulty of two-party decision making required in marriage. It is hard enough to answer these questions as an individual, but they are multiplied when married couples must both agree (mental consent) and cooperate (logistical follow through) on decisions.
These are the challenges we are tackling in this seminar. In order to address these challenges, we will divide decision making into three arenas. Too often, couples try to force all decision making to fit into one or two of these arenas. They may do this for convenience (but simple becomes simplistic) or conviction (emphasizing some part of what Scripture teaches to the neglect of other parts). Either way, their life lacks balance and begins to show the corresponding wear-and-tear.
Before we take this journey, take a moment to reflect. Knowing where you want to go is only helpful if you know where you are. The three points above tell us where we want to get with this seminar, but use the remainder of this chapter to assess where you and your spouse are beginning this journey.
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