Marriage Material: Deferred Maintenance | Part 4

Welcome to the Awakening Church podcast.

We pray this message encourages you and provides the hope and light of Jesus Christ.

Thanks for tuning in.

We're concluding our series marriage material today.

And we've been having a conversation.

I've been, well, not we, I've been having a conversation with my wife.

I wanted you to hear not just from me, but also from my wife.

And so I thought to kick off our time today, here's the final installment of a conversation with my wife.

Alright, you ready, Glenn?

We're rolling.

Just the natural tendency in life is for the urgent to take over the important.

What does that look like over the course of our marriage?

I think I'm thinking of like several things.

One is about 10 years ago we did go to marriage counseling, and we've kept that up somewhat inconsistently at times, but maybe like what was it that brought us to that point?

And then what have been some of the benefits or our experience through that?

Yeah, I think we just felt super stuck.

Yeah.

And I think stuck in some communication things.

And I remember going the first time, and I was so excited because she was gonna tell you everything you did wrong.

And it didn't happen.

She was so amazing at really helping us both feel heard and understood, and helping the other one hear and understand the other person.

Yeah, I think counseling is hard work.

Yeah.

It's not like, oh, we went to a counselor who's great, you know, she made everything better.

Like it's hard.

Yeah.

But you're committed to the hard because you know that there will be, you know, fruit in the end.

But it's work.

Yeah, it's hard, good work.

And nobody thinks about the you know uh pianist who spent thousands of hours to play a beautiful piece.

Like that took a lot of hard work, but out of it came a masterpiece in beauty, and it's like that's the same thing that's true with marriage.

It's like there is the hard piece that we don't talk often enough, but it's not a bad piece.

Yeah, and it doesn't mean you married the wrong person, right?

We all think that at some point.

What?

Everyone has thought that at some point, and so it's just that marriage is it is hard work and beautiful and rich and rewarding.

It is very much attention, um, but very worth it.

Absolutely.

Well, as we're in the season of launching our kids, you said something that you know it feels like the rest of life is just losing and dying.

Releasing, yeah, dying.

Yeah.

Uh and I think one of your words is I've really needed fresh vision.

Uh and I think that's important in every season of our lives, of our marriage, uh, of God, what is that vision?

And there's like so how did you kind of get fresh vision?

I really actually was very desperate for a vision because I know that if I have vision of what God has called me to, I can get after it a hundred percent.

But it you know, it is an interesting season when for 18, 19 years you've been really focused on your kids and getting them ready to launch, and then you realize it's not that long till they're all gone.

Yeah, and so I don't know, identity crisis, whatever you want to call it, I definitely needed um that fresh, fresh vision from God, and and actually, I think for me it's been so wonderful to see Ella away at school and growing in ways that she couldn't have here at home.

And I'm just so excited for her.

I feel like my I had to grieve a bit, but it's actually really shifted to we get to be just their biggest fans and just cheer them on and come along and support and bless when we can, and um and that we are gonna actually learn to connect in new ways because we're gonna have more time together than we ever have.

I mean, we had a year without kids, but it's been a minute.

So us learning new hobbies and things to do together, we'll have yeah, more time with friends and uh more day trips or whatever, like to start to be excited that it's not it will be the end of an era, but it's the beginning of a new one, right?

You know, and so just starting to get excited for for some of those things.

Can you thank my wife for even being willing to do that over this thing?

This not easy, and um so grateful.

We just want to give you a window into at least our conversations and our lives.

Uh, we in this series have just really been asking and trying to answer one very fundamental question.

How do you experience a strong, vibrant marriage that lasts a lifetime?

And the big idea of the entire series is simply this a strong, vibrant marriage doesn't just happen, it is built.

There's not some magic secret formula, you don't just somehow trip into it.

It's built.

It takes effort, intentionality, and time.

It takes like we're just talking about work.

Because everything worthwhile takes work.

Um, and we've been using this illustration, and Glenn, I had the pictures.

I don't know if those are still around anymore.

That's the one part that I totally forgot, and no worries if we don't, we'll get it next service.

Uh but uh surfs uh side Florida, uh Surfside Florida is this uh oasis for the rich and famous.

Uh back in the day, it was you know the place where Frank Sinatra and Elizabeth Taylor would frequent.

Yeah, there you go.

Thank you so much.

You're on it.

Thanks, Glenn.

Uh and it's just right outside of the hustle and bustle of Miami.

In 2021, it became famous, not for the rich and famous anymore, but because of a collapse of a condominium that happened suddenly and overnight and tragically killed 89 people.

Now, the National Institute for Standards and Technology spent$30 million to investigate what happened.

So we make sure it doesn't happen again.

And they came away with four key findings.

These four key findings have really been the outline for our series in week one was finding number one, uh, was simply this that uh it's the foundation.

It had incredible, significant foundation issues.

There was design flaws in the foundation, and we know this.

The foundation, in large part, determines the overall success, stability, and sustainability of a structure.

The most important part of your marriage, by the way, is your foundation.

And so, what are you building your marriage upon?

And we said this one of the best ways to strengthen your marriage is actually to deepen your relationship with Jesus.

So often we build our marriages upon happiness, we build our marriages upon our kids, and all these self-fulfillment, and he says, no, no, no.

Just begin to build your marriage upon Jesus.

And week two, uh, they the observation was that there was uh in uh poor quality materials.

They took shortcuts using lower quality materials weaker than required by the uh building codes and industry standards, and we know this.

The quality of materials directly impacts the beauty and longevity of what you're building.

And we say this, we know this because we look back on history and the way that people used to build things, and they don't build them like they used to.

And universally, I think we would acknowledge that the greatest and the best building material for a marriage that lasts a lifetime is love.

And yet what we mean by that varies, and God invites us into a deeper, more profound definition of love.

And we said this building a strong, vibrant marriage is less about falling in love.

We can all do that.

And more about growing in love.

Well, week three, then uh the third observation for the National Institute of Standards Technology was there was added stress to the structure.

At the base of this complex was a uh swimming pool.

Underneath the swimming pool was the parking garage, and over time they added planters and different landscaping things that actually added tons and tons and tons of added weight that was not planned for.

Now, if a structure uh bears uh stress greater than it was designed to handle, reinforcement's necessary to preserve the structural integrity.

If you don't put reinforcement, eventually it will cave and crumble, and all marriages experience stress to the structure.

And here's what we said every new season of life almost always requires a new rhythm for life.

And we get into ruts when we bring our old rhythms into our new seasons, right?

We bring our old rhythms of singlehood into our new season of marriage.

We bring our old ways of communication into this new relationship, we bring our old ways of operating as a married couple when we have kids, and so forth.

Today, uh the fourth and final observation from NIST, that's actually their National Institute Standards and Technology.

Know you're excited about that now that you know that.

Was that there was deferred maintenance.

That's the sermon titled today.

Would you go ahead and say it to your neighbor, deferred maintenance?

I'm not sure if you were inferring that they were deferred maintenance.

That seems, anyways.

Um, deferred maintenance.

Now, here's one of their findings.

They found that the HOA commissioned uh two years prior a report and approved$15 million in critical repairs.

And yet, there just never seemed the right time.

No one really wanted to spend all of that money, and so they just kept putting it off.

And here's what we know: neglecting small repairs today guarantees insignificant problems tomorrow.

Neglecting small repairs today guarantees significant problems tomorrow.

Let me give you a couple examples.

When we were newly married in our first couple years, we moved to Atlanta, Georgia, and in Atlanta, Georgia, this is going to be mind-blowing.

You can buy a house, or at least then.

We bought a house, 2,500 square feet on a quarter acre for$160,000.

You can't even put a down payment on a house here for that.

We bought a house for$160,000 and brand new first-time home owners, and we're like, okay, here we go.

I remember one day, I don't even know why I did this, but our our water heater is what had a little closet, and it was right by the garage door, and I opened the water heater and I noticed that there was a little bit of water uh next to the water heater.

I'm like, oh, that's odd.

It's just a little bit.

And so I grabbed a towel, I wiped it off, and I'm like, there must be a tiny, tiny leak.

It wasn't that much.

I closed the door and just went away.

Because out of sight, out of mind, I don't really see.

It's not that big of a deal.

It's really small.

What harm could a little water do?

And I ignored it.

I put it off.

Every once in a while, I'm like, God, you know, I should really do something about that.

But I'm like, ah, it's not that big of a deal.

It wasn't a big of a deal until uh our water heater closet on the other side was our our pantry, and you opened the door uh to our pantry and you looked inside that closet, and I noticed that there was black spots all over the wall in our pantry.

I'm like, that doesn't seem right.

That doesn't seem good.

Uh and so then we called somebody in, and all of a sudden it recognized that now that little leak that would have cost, you know, let's just be generous, a hundred dollars to fix.

Instead, it began to spread black mold into the doors and into the pantry.

All of our food had to be thrown away, all of the sheetrock had to be ripped out, and we had to do major repairs as a result.

Why?

Because neglecting small repairs today guarantees significant problems tomorrow.

Do you want another example?

These are painful.

Back in Georgia as well, we bought a car and I was driving it around and it had this little squeak.

I'm like, huh.

That doesn't sound right.

But it was a small squeak.

That small squeak kept getting bigger and louder.

Eventually, I became so embarrassed driving through our neighborhood because it was that loud.

It was like, you know, just through the entire neighborhood.

And yet I didn't want to spend the money to take it into the mechanic.

I didn't want to know what the real problem was.

And that's kind of part of it.

Some of us are like, we just don't really want to know.

If we don't know, it won't hurt us, right?

Uh the engine seized up and froze, and I needed a new engine.

Why?

Because neglecting small repairs today guarantees significant problems tomorrow.

The proverb uh says it this way: one who is slack in his work is brother to one who destroys.

One who's slack.

This comparison almost seems so extreme that it couldn't be true.

Slack means to put things off, neglect, a carelessness, a slowness in performing one's duty, letting things fall into decline.

One who's slack that just lets things fall into decline, who is putting things off, is a brother.

They're related, they're connected to one who destroys, destroys the termination of something by causing so much damage to it that it cannot be repaired or no longer exists.

And the same is true in our marriages, friends.

Ignoring small things tends to grow into bigger things.

Ignoring small things tends to grow into bigger things, harder things.

In fact, uh the Gottman Institute leading research on marriage, uh marital stability identifies that couples who wait too long to seek help for their problems often face entrenched issues that are difficult to resolve.

Now, his research shows, listen to this, because it can't hear, okay, I'm gonna give it to you in a second, but I want to keep you cliff-hanged right there.

Um how many of you, when you heard me tell those two stories, thought, Brian, you're so dumb.

Like, come on.

What were you thinking?

I have another one too.

I just was too embarrassed to share it.

Like, come on.

And some of you type, a perfectionist, you would never do that.

I get it.

And you've, anyways, uh we'll talk about your judging us another day.

Um the average couple.

The average couple waits six years of being unhelp unhappy before getting help.

Six years, six years of slack, six years of water under the bridge, six years of ah, it's not that big of a deal, six years of ignoring it, six years of buildup, of build-up.

And what we know is if you address it when it's little, the cost is relatively small.

But six years of build-up, gosh, the cost.

Some of us just need to do reconstruction.

We need to do some demolition.

We need to get outside help.

And here's the reason why.

This is actually just a restatement of our big idea.

But no one ever drifts into a better marriage.

No one ever drifts into a better marriage.

Because what if if if this is, I think this is what we kind of do.

I think it will just work itself out.

You know, our communication issues, you know that character problem, you know the way we resolve conflict that seems to be rather dysfunctional.

You know my past wounds, my that emotional drift, our parenting differences, that loneliness that I feel, the addiction I'm facing, our financial stress and hardship, that work life balance.

I just you know what, it it'll just figure itself out.

The problem is nobody ever drifts into a better marriage.

And and hoping things get better is not a strategy.

And that's what we do in our marriage.

Hoping things get better.

I really hope she changes.

I really hope he figures it out.

Hoping is not a strategy.

And so let's, with the remainder of our time, I just want to give you three strategies.

In fact, these are the three uh primary strategies for maintenance.

If you look it up on the internet, if you look up, you know, maintenance for buildings, maintenance for cars, these and maintenance for marriage.

Because deferred maintenance is costing us too much and causing pain and heartache in our relationships that could be and should be avoided.

So let me give you the three types of maintenance strategies.

The first one we're most familiar with, and this is probably the only maintenance strategy that many of us have in our marriages.

And it is simply this it's reactive maintenance.

Reactive maintenance.

It's run to failure, breakdown maintenance, which is the way I ran my car, by the way, involves addressing issues only after a breakdown occurs.

It's just this reactive, something uh wrong has happened, broke down, and we desperately need help.

Um it's interesting.

How do you know, like, okay, when we should kind of react to something?

Dr.

Gottman, again, in his uh research talks about the four horsemen of the apocalypse.

He identifies negative behaviors that predict divorce with high accuracy.

He gives us four areas criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling.

You begin to have a critical spirit in your marriage, you begin to notice that.

That's when you need some reactive maintenance.

We need to address this.

You begin to experience contempt in your heart, a sense of bitterness, a sense of, um I have this you can't do anything right.

You always you ought to.

Why don't you?

It's one of those signs.

Hey, there there is issues and we need to react to this.

Uh defensiveness or stonewalling.

And this is most often the time that we do this.

And here's here's the thing we tend to do, though, by the way, when we are reactive, um, is we tend to react to our spouse's shortcomings and not our own.

Most of the time, maybe it's just me, but I've talked to enough couples, I know it's not just.

Me, but if only my spouse would change X, then our marriage would be right.

If only she could change, or if only he could change that attitude, if only he could do this, if only she would change this.

They're the problem.

See, we see their shortcomings and we judge them, and it's mainly the problem, and we look at our own and go, like I have good reasons for those.

I give myself the generous explanation, right?

And here's what I want to suggest: your marriage can only be as healthy as you are.

If we're gonna take some reactive here, one of the most practical applications is not reacting to your spouse or even the conflict, but reacting going inside.

I can't change you, but I can address me.

I can't fix or make you do anything, but I can deal with what's going on inside of me.

You know, the old adage, maybe you don't, this is more of a Texan saying no matter how flat a pancake, there's two sides.

Even if you're just owning 10% of it, you can still deal with your 10% of it.

Uh we had our young professionals over to our house.

It was a fun gathering on Thursday night, and we ended up with a conversation all around dating, and we just were, it was fantastic.

One of the things that came up was this idea of maturity.

And there was a little bit of uh conversation around, you know what, what we need to see, and it was pointed a little bit more towards men, and I tend to agree, that we need to have some more maturity, some more spiritual maturity, some more character.

You know, after the Apostle Paul wrote that great love uh paragraph, love is patient, love is kind, he said something really fascinating.

He said this, and as a part of the maturing process, and I would say for many marriages, this is one of the reactive maintenances that we need to do, the maturation process for marriages that often we get stuck in, and it doesn't even matter how old we are.

He said this when I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child.

When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me.

How often do we bring our childish ways into the marriage?

And we're frustrated at our spouse's childish ways, but we need to address our childish ways.

The difference between a child and an adult, by the way, a child thinks about time as infinite.

I have all the time in the world.

An adult understands that time is finite, it's valuable, it's precious, I have limited time.

A child thinks about, you know, they value the tangibles, what you can touch, taste, feel, see.

Isn't that what our culture elevates the tangibles?

An adult values the intangibles.

Because what matters at the end of life is not how many toys you have in the garage, how big of a house, all that you own.

What matters at the end of life is the intangibles, the relationships you have, the quality, the impact that you made with resources.

A child, every resource is mine.

It's all about mine.

Or adult, resources steward.

There's people that owned all this stuff before me.

I have it now.

Eventually I'm gonna pass it on to somebody else.

My state of being here is I am a steward of what God has entrusted to me, so how do I steward it?

Well, it's a radical shift in how we think that I think many of us need to grow and develop in.

The first is this reactive style of maintenance.

We uh, and that's the most common for us.

The second is predictive maintenance.

This focuses on identifying potential issues before they become critical.

Uh, this is why we do at awakening premarital counseling.

Right?

So if you're gonna get married at awakening, we want you to go through premarital counseling.

We have marriage mentors we set you up with, there's a whole uh test that we take you through.

And I remember when Jenny and I went through premarital counseling, it was great and all of that, but we didn't understand half of it.

Because we weren't married.

But then the minute we got married, we're like, oh, that makes sense why he said that.

And after we got married, we're like, oh, we really need postmarital counseling too.

Right?

That's why so many parents read baby books because there's this predictive maintenance, there's identifying issues before they become problems.

Uh and here's what's fascinating, though.

There's something known as the Dunning-Kruger effect.

The Dunning-Kruger effect in 1999, psychologist researchers David Dunning and Justin Kruger published a study titled, listen to this, Unskilled and Unaware.

How difficulties in recognizing one's own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessment, in which they described our tendency to hold overly overly favorable views of our abilities.

The researchers presented the participants with four tests assessing humor, logical reasoning, and grammar.

Then they asked participants to evaluate their own performance, how well or poorly they thought they did on the test.

Now notice not only did most participants overestimate their performance, but the least competent participants, the ones who scored in the bottom quarter, were more likely to overestimate their performance.

The less they knew, the more they thought they knew.

Here's the problem we tend to be more confident or overconfident.

I think that's one of the reasons we don't ask for help.

And I think there's a couple reasons, you know, we we fall into neglect or deferred maintenance.

One is willful neglect.

Willful neglect is I just don't want to deal with it.

I can't deal with it.

Then there's ignorant neglect.

I don't even know there is a problem.

And so, you don't know what you don't know, so prioritize time with those who know.

You don't know what you don't know, but prioritize so prioritize time with those who know.

I love the I'm gonna quote a Proverb, Glenn, and then get to this next one.

Uh Proverbs 22, 13 says, uh the prudent see danger and take refuge.

The prudent is one who sees and understands that all of life is connected.

They see danger, they see ahead and they take refuge, where the simple, or the fool, uh just keeps going and suffers for it.

We desperately need to be have this predictive maintenance of looking ahead.

Proverbs 13, 20 says, the wise walk with the wise and become wise, for a companion of fool suffers harm.

I actually find today that I don't know that uh people are searching out wise people as so much as they're searching out comfortable people.

The reason is wise people will tend to challenge your thinking, which is uncomfortable.

And we lean into TikTok and influencers that have no relationship with us, don't know us, and we just grab a hold of advice and pieces that we really like.

We said in the uh video we started marriage counseling.

In fact, we saw Sue this last week ten years ago.

We ended up in marriage counseling through reactive maintenance.

We were in crisis.

And the way I like to picture marriage counseling, especially the first six months, maybe even a year, it's like cleaning out the garage if you've never done it.

Maybe you type a perfectionist, this illustration will fall flat.

I get it.

Um pretend you're at my garage.

And when you clean out your garage and it's a whole mess, the first thing you kind of have to do is you have to get it all out of the garage.

And so now the mess that's in the garage is now outside of the garage and strewn all over your um your yard or your driveway.

And what happens is this looks worse than it did before.

For some, you're gonna start counseling, thinking it's the silver bullet, and it's gonna get harder before it gets better.

I want you to know that ahead of time.

It's important, it's necessary, you need to do it because all that junk's hiding in the garage, anyways, and it's building up and it's only going to collapse the structure.

But you gotta get it all out there and you start cleaning and you start working through it.

Here's what we found over 10 years of counseling.

It moved from reactive to predictive.

Now, as we have counseling, we're talking about some issues that are coming up with our kids, some issues that are coming up, you know, with extended family.

Of like, hey, we're gonna go on this, you know, family gathering, and we know that some of these conversations, we're not sure how to navigate it.

Let's talk through this.

Or as we're right now working through that whole launching and empty nester phase.

Three types of maintenance strategies: reactive maintenance.

Your marriage can only be as healthy as you are.

Would you address what's going on inside of you?

Predictive maintenance.

You don't know what you don't know, so prioritize times with those who know.

Would you get outside help?

Don't be the average six years.

And then finally, prevent uh preventive maintenance.

Regularly scheduled upkeep to strengthen the marriage and help avoid unexpected breakdowns.

It's just the regular upkeep.

It's what we do with our cars.

You change the oil.

Can you not change the oil every three months or every 3,000 miles?

And I think it's now to 5,000 if you're using, you know, synthetic?

Maybe it's 10,000?

I don't know.

I'm not a car guy.

Can you not do that and your car run for a long time?

Yes.

And you cannot do that, and your car can run for a long time, and there's things happening under the surface that you're unaware of, and it's corroding the inner engine, or somebody's gonna tell me what it actually is doing.

Uh and then eventually, this happens to marriages all the time.

Eventually, things just break down.

And at least one spouse saw says, I never saw it coming.

Preventative maintenance, regular, scheduled upkeep to strengthen the marriage, help avoid unexpected breakdowns.

Here's the idea.

You have to do intentionally what once came naturally.

You have to do intentionally what once came naturally.

Uh, Jesus says this in Revelation 2, 4 for 5.

Definitely not a marriage verse in any way.

It's so true in our relationship with Jesus, and then it's very much true in our marriages.

He says, I hold this against you.

He's talking to the church in Ephesus.

For you have forsaken the love you had at first, drifted.

Consider how far you've fallen, repent, which means a change of mind that in turn has a change of action, and do the things you did at first.

One of the best ways to understand your relationship with Jesus is it is a relationship.

And if you're stagnant in your relationship with him, go back and do the things you did at first.

Just start doing the things you did at first.

Remember when you first came to know Jesus and you couldn't help but share Jesus with everyone around you?

When you first came to know Jesus, you couldn't help but get into God's word, and you're just like, I just want more of that.

You just start to do intentionally what once came naturally.

And remember when you first started dating?

And the things that you did so naturally, those notes you used to write, those dates you used to go on.

Oh, he used to be so romantic.

He used to have these good ideas.

Sorry, I'm just I'm talking about myself.

Um you have to begin doing intentionally what once came naturally.

Very, very practically.

Where you're at, one of the pieces of advice that we got early on in our marriage was never stop dating your spouse.

Go on a date night weekly.

Now, when we had no kids, this didn't seem to make any sense.

Because, like, like every night we're just hanging out together, we have these sort of things, and it's easier or whatnot.

And then all of a sudden we had kids, and we're like, how in the world do you do that?

And it changed.

Like last week we talked about how it changed.

When our kids were really little, we did date nights at home.

We didn't have any babysitting.

You know, and so we would make a little fire if it was a cold night, or we'd try to make a little something that was special and light some candles and just talk.

We'd literally sit on the floor, you know, because that I don't know why that felt special.

But um, when our kids were asleep, as they got older, we started having babysitters.

We'd do some day things when the kids were in school when we were able to.

But that weekly date, uh researcher again, Gottman, emphasizes the importance of this small things often.

Not big things and extravagant things.

Those things are wonderful, but he says, small things often, indicating that regular positive interactions and expressions of love and appreciation are key to a healthy marriage.

His research shows that couples who engage in consistent preventative practices have higher relationship satisfaction and stability.

Nobody ever drifts into a better marriage.

Neglecting small repairs today guarantees significant problems tomorrow.

Where are you at?

What's your next step?

How do you move from just hearing something and going like, oh, there's a good idea, to doing something?

Chances are most of us would walk away, you know, there's some reactive maintenance we need to do.

Let's have a conversation about that.

That's important because something's breaking down.

Chances are you need some predictive maintenance.

Find a mentor.

Maybe start counseling.

Go to our prayer station after service and just ask somebody to pray over you.

Because you see, you know what?

We got some reactive maintenance and I need some prayer on how to do this well.

But I would encourage us.

Most of our problems, we can do these preventive maintenance things.

Just those daily connections.

Where do you need to apply this?

What do you need to do for your marriage?

And by the way, if you have kids, one of the best gifts you can ever give your kids is a healthy, vibrant, good marriage.

Let's pray.

Jesus, we thank you.

We love you.

And we invite you into the middle of our marriages, our relationships, our own heartache and pain.

The things that we've put off because they just feel overwhelming or beyond us or too heavy to deal with.

And I pray for the marriages in our church.

That you would breathe life into them.

You'd allow them to have good conversation that wouldn't spark a fight, but that would begin to spark intimacy.

That you would bring healing and wholeness.

Surround them with supports and strengths.

Every step of the way.

In Jesus' name.

Amen.

We hope you are blessed by this message.

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