That is a good looking group right there....a good looking group with a ton of purpose.
Friday night, we were invited to attend a fundraiser for a pair of ministries that were introduced to us roughly a year ago. What you see here is a group of individuals who are involved in one or both of those ministries on some level.
Our relationship with The Significant Marriage began when the Chapmans (second from the right) gifted us with an opportunity to attend a weekend workshop that changed the way we approach our marriage.
For the first time in our 20 years of marriage, we walked away from a marriage seminar that not only provided good teaching but also gave us a toolkit of resources that we have been able to revisit over and over again.
It is because of that seminar that you are reading this blog today.
Dave and Mary Gothi's (the man with the awesome red shoes on the left and the blonde with the braid on the right) vision for this seminar is to provide couples with the resources they need to align themselves together and discover their God-given purpose as a couple and thereby strengthen their marriages and families.
This "keep your eye on the prize" approach takes couples from being reactive in their lives and marriages to being proactive.
In that one short weekend together, J and I had conversations that we have not had in our 20 plus years as a couple. We learned to ask questions we have never asked and put words to our hopes and dreams in a way that we have not done before. As the weekend concluded, we were given the opportunity to take all of those conversations and answers and formulate them into a workable plan with goals and action steps.
This plan and approach have completely redefined the way we interact and tackle challenges in our marriage.
And...it has given birth to some pretty amazing changes in our lives.
Married Twice and Living Life was not on our radar at all a year ago, but a dream to travel was.
Having a blog, Instagram account, and Facebook page for this thing we are doing was not something we ever dreamed about, but boosting my writing skills was.
Sharing our story in such a public manner was not something we really ever considered, but helping others avoid divorce and find hope after devastation has been near to our hearts for years.
Through identifying our dreams and attaching them to goals, we have seen the evolution of an idea that has helped us identify our purpose as a couple:
To show that there is hope for broken marriages and that no matter what your past is or where you are in life, you can still dream and live a life full of joy and purpose.
Our heart is to use our story to put the goodness and faithfulness of God on display, to show that forgiveness and healing are possible, and to show that it is never too late to start really living life.
And...we might not know any of this had it not been for what The Significant Marriage offered.
So, almost a year later, we spent a couple hours in a coffee shop on Saturday and took the first steps in booking and planning our very first real vacation together in almost 21 years of marriage.
TSM taught us how to put feet to our dreams and we will celebrate our anniversary together this year kayaking, canoeing, or whitewater rafting in Colorado (we're still debating, I mean discussing those options).
But even better than the trip, we learned how to identify our purpose as a couple.
We now know that we have so much more to do in life than work, pay the bills, raise our kids and grow old. We have a responsibility to use our story and our dreams to bring hope to those who wonder if it is even possible and living out this purpose has brought more joy and direction and unity into our lives than we have had in years.
The best advice we can give to you is to find your purpose as a couple no matter what stage of life you are in. Doing so unites you in a way that is unmatched and changes the way you approach every other facet of marriage.
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