Helping families live with greater intention so that they can succeed in what matters most in life.
I believe that every family ends up somewhere, but few families end up somewhere on purpose.
Like most couples, it would probably be safe to say that when you first fell in love with your spouse or when you started your family, the dream was to live “happily ever after,” right? You wanted to experience all the good things that life has to offer. That’s the goal, right? We all want to be happy, successful and thrive in our most important relationships.
Unfortunately, even with the best of intentions, the demands of life and the unexpected twists and turns can cause us to drift or even feel pulled away from the most important people in our lives. The busyness, stress and pressures we all face can negatively impact our marriage and family relationships.
Like a car that has alignment issues, when you take your hands off the steering wheel, the car will naturally drift. Sometimes there is even a pull that you feel that forces you to hold the steering wheel even tighter so that you don’t lose control.
Perhaps you can relate. Maybe you are experiencing that drift in your marriage or with one of your children right now. Instead of being pulled closer together, you feel like you’re being pulled further apart. You’re in survival mode. You’re co-existing, but there is no intimacy, connection, fulfillment or joy in your home. You might not even know how it happened, you just know things aren’t where they could be or should be. I call it the danger of D.R.I.F.T.
Perhaps there is a pull that you feel from the outside:
- Work demands
- Peer pressure
- Negative influences
- Too many extracurricular activities
- Distractions
- Etc.
All of these challenges are causing conflict and problems on the inside:
- Disappointment
- Regret
- Isolation
- Frustration
- Tension
- Etc.
These negative emotions can have you feeling overwhelmed, defeated and emotionally exhausted from trying to keep your marriage and family from falling apart. The question is, what do you do? How can you keep from drifting further apart as a family?
It starts by asking yourself the questions, “What do I really want in life? What do I want for my marriage? What do I want for my family?” The biggest challenge we face as individuals and as families is distinguishing the difference between what we naturally want versus what we ultimately want.
What we naturally want is instant gratification. We live in a culture that is driven by upgrades and experiences. We want bigger, better, faster and we want to go to more places and experience all the good things life has to offer. There is nothing wrong with any of those things as long as they don’t rob you of what you ultimately want. What we ultimately want can’t be marketed, packaged, bought or sold. Again, the question is what do we really want and how do we get it?
What if we changed the question to WHO do I want to become? Who do I want to be as a husband? Who do I want to be as a wife? Who do I want to be as a mother? Who do I want to be as a father? While you’re asking these questions on a personal level, let me encourage you to take it a step further and ask the following questions to each other as a couple or over a family meal.
6 Questions That Will Shift the Direction of Your Family Relationships
- On a scale of 1-10, how would I/we rate the health of our family’s relationships?
- What is the vision for our family?
- What values are most important to us as a family?
- What distractions/activities are competing with our family’s vision and values?
- What unmet needs are being neglected in our home?
- What are three things we can do in the next 31 days that would shift the atmosphere of our home and improve the health of our relationships?
Remember, your family is not an important thing. It’s everything.
Rodney Gage is an author, speaker and family coach. He is also the founding pastor of ReThink Life Church. His passion is to help families live with greater intention. To learn more, check out rodneygage.com.
