Buzzard Date Your Wife

1. Auflage 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4335-3138-5
Verlag: Crossway
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 160 Seiten

An Intensely Practical Guide for Husbands Looking to Strengthen, Save, or Spice up Their Marriage Most men don't know how to date their wives. They did it before, but they've forgotten how, or they're trying but it just doesn't seem to be working. Justin Buzzard helps men re-learn this all-important skill from a position of security in the gospel of grace. As a father of three boys and husband, Justin offers guys a helping hand, good news, and wise counsel, along with: - 100 practical ideas for how to date your wife - Action steps at the end of each chapter - Personal stories and real-life examples All types of marriages-good ones, mediocre ones, and bad ones-will experience a jumpstart as a result of hearing, believing, and living the message of Date Your Wife.

Justin Buzzard (MDiv, Fuller Theological Seminary) is the founder and lead pastor of Garden City Church in Silicon Valley. Justin writes regularly at JustinBuzzard.net, speaks widely at conferences nationwide, and is part of the Acts 29 Church Planting Network. He is the author of many books, including Why Cities Matter. He lives in Silicon Valley with his wife, Taylor, and their three sons.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Buzzard, Justin

Leseproben

PART ONE

THE GOOD

1

HOW YOUR MARRIAGE STARTED

From as far back as I can remember I’ve thought about marriage. My daydreams and prayers have always been full of thoughts about “her.”

Beginning at the age of four or five, my mom tucked me in at night with prayers that made mention of my future wife. We prayed for her protection and well-being. We didn’t know who this little girl was or where she lived, but we asked God to arrange all the details for us to someday meet, marry, and build a family of our own.

Twenty years after these prayers started, I met “her,” the woman of my dreams, at a party in Palo Alto, California. Seven months later I proposed. Three months after that we were married. Last week my bride of seven years gave birth to our third son, giving us three boys under age four. We’ve been busy.

My story is rare. Most men don’t grow up with a mom who tucked them in at night breathing out sentences and prayers about the grand adventure of being a husband. But the rest of my story is not rare. Every man’s marriage begins just like mine—with a date and a dream.

A DATE

Your marriage didn’t start on your wedding day. Husband, your marriage started on your first date. During that first date with your bride, you began laying the foundation for the day you would say, “I do.” You began laying the foundation your marriage stands upon today.

How long have you been married? How long ago was that first date? Think back to that day. Replay the memories in your mind. Most men don’t realize that the concept of dating their wife is something they’ve already built into the foundation of their marriage.

My wife’s name is Taylor. We met in a kitchen (I’ll tell you that story later). Our first date happened six weeks later in a redwood forest.

I called Taylor on a Friday at 9:00 a.m. It was raining outside. I cleared my throat just before she answered the phone. I told her I wanted to take her out on a date. She asked, “When?” I said, “Now.” I told Taylor I wanted to take her for a hike in the rain. She paused, stuttered, then asked if she could call me back in ten minutes.

Ten minutes later, Taylor called back and said yes. She lived in San Francisco and I lived in San Jose, so I had us meet halfway, in Palo Alto, the same city where we’d first met six weeks earlier. The image is burned into my mind of blonde Taylor in her blue jeans and pink button-down standing under the neon lights of the Stanford Theater on University Avenue waiting for me to arrive. I had never been so excited to be with a girl.

Taylor stepped into my Jeep and our first date began. I drove us up a winding road to a redwood forest in the Santa Cruz Mountains. We spent the next two hours strolling along a trail in the forest getting to know each other while a soft drizzle fell on our rain jackets. Eventually we found ourselves next to a fallen tree trunk covered in moss. We sat on the mossy log and kept talking. I didn’t know it then, but six months later I would get down on one knee and propose to Taylor at this mossy log.

After the hike we stopped for soup and coffee. We discovered that five years earlier we had both vacationed with our families at the same hotel in Idaho during the last week of December, but our paths never crossed. I couldn’t tell what Taylor was thinking about me. When I dropped Taylor off at her car, I handed her a book I had purposely brought along, Desiring God by John Piper. I pretended that the book just happened to be sitting on my backseat. I casually glanced back at the book, then handed it to Taylor, telling her I thought she’d like it because of how it related to many of the things we talked about during our walk in the woods. I told her that the book meant a lot to me. The real reason I gave her the book was so that, even if she didn’t like me, she’d at least be obligated to see me one more time to give me back my book. It wasn’t until after we were married that I learned Taylor drove home that day and told her roommate she believed I was the man she would marry.

That was our first date. I remember it like it happened yesterday.

What was your first date with your wife like? Think about it. Where were you? What did you do? What did you talk about? What did you learn? What were you feeling? What was she wearing? How did your date happen in the first place?

No first date is exactly alike. Each of us has a different first date story. But we all have a story.

My dad’s story is that he took my mom out for pizza in downtown Sacramento, then he took her out dancing. It was a blind date. They had never met before. The date worked.

My friend Campbell’s story is that after months of friendship and hanging out, he finally got over his nerves, took his “friend” to a park on a moonlit night, gave her a rose, and told her he felt something more than friendship and wanted to start pursuing her.

What’s your story?

My assumption is that all of our first date stories have one thing in common: we acted like men. We pursued our wives-to-be. We made the move. We initiated. We took a risk. We took the lead.

Husbands, this is important for us to remember. Throughout this book I’m calling you to do one thing. The action I want you to take is summed up in just three words: date your wife. This three-word action isn’t something foreign, intimidating, or new—I’m asking us to do something we’ve already done, something we’ve already built into the foundation of our marriages—to date our wives.

Even if you haven’t been on a bike in years, you still know how to ride one. It’s the same with dating your wife. My aim is to get men back on the bike and to get us there in the best shape of our lives, exercising the best possible form.

A DREAM

Can you remember when you first began thinking about marriage? Most women can. Most men can’t.

I’ve met women who had the flavor of their wedding cakes picked out when they were in preschool. My wife’s not one of them. A child of divorce, she thought little of marriage—she was scared of marriage. She planned to pursue a career and put marriage off until her late thirties. That plan didn’t work. Taylor was twenty-three on our wedding day.

I’ve met men who think a lot about women but seem to never think about “the woman,” about marriage. That’s not my story. I grew up looking at girls with one question in the front of my mind, “Could I marry her?” One girl passed the test.

Whether your story is more like my wife’s or more like mine, the point is that you didn’t approach your first date or your wedding day with a blank slate. You had thought about marriage before. Whether highly conscious or unconscious of it, you had ideas, feelings, and beliefs about marriage. You had a dream.

A dream is a collection of ideas, feelings, and beliefs about a particular topic. A dream is what drives a man. As a boy grows up, he gradually forms a dream for his future marriage. Some men are aware of this, some men are not. Some men form a healthy dream for marriage, some men do not. But every man approaches his first date and his wedding day driven by a dream.

What was your dream?

Some men dream about marrying a woman who will satisfy their every desire, preference, and need.

Some men form an antidream; they simply dream of a marriage that is not like their parents’ marriage (or lack of marriage). Early on, they decide they want a wife who is not like Mom. They decide they want to be a man who is not like Dad.

Some men dream of a marriage that is conflict-free or not a lot of work.

Some men dream of a marriage that honors God and that is a lot of fun.

The dream that drove you to that first date, that drove you to the altar, is likely still driving your marriage today. That dream set the course, and is probably still setting the course, of your marriage. What was, what is, that dream?

If we are going to be men who date our wives, we must uncover the dream that drives us. The way to uncover something is to ask more questions.

Take a few minutes to think through these questions:

What is the earliest memory of marriage that you can think of? How has that memory influenced you?

Who taught you about marriage? Who taught you about what it means to be a man and how that’s different from what it means to be a woman? What did these teachers teach you?

What is the healthiest, happiest marriage you’ve ever seen? What made that marriage so attractive?

What is the most dysfunctional marriage you’ve ever seen? What made that marriage so unattractive?

What kind of a man was your dad? What kind of a relationship did you/do you have with him? If we were having coffee together, what would you tell me about what it was like growing up as his son?

What is your greatest fear for your marriage?

What is your greatest frustration with yourself, with your wife, and with your marriage?

What is your wife’s greatest complaint about being married to you? What does she appreciate most about being married to you?

What is your greatest hope for your marriage? What do you really want to see happen in you, in your marriage, and in your life before you die? How’s it going to happen?

You just deconstructed the dream that’s been driving your marriage. Each answer to the questions above represents one piece of the dream that drives how you operate as a husband. All the pieces...