A4 - MC

EDCO 811

Case Study Analysis: Paul and Diane

Paul and Diane have been married for five years. It is the first marriage for both spouses. Currently, Paul is a successful CPA with a prestigious accounting firm in Manassas. He has been with the company for nearly 10 years and is next in line for a senior management position that will be opening soon due to a retiring colleague. Diane teaches English at a local high school. She has been teaching for the past eight years since completing her master’s degree.

They closed on their first home two years ago, taking a 30-year mortgage. However, Paul would like to pay off the mortgage in the next 15 years due to the uncertain real estate market and sluggish economy. Both of them really enjoy being on and around the water and recently purchased a small boat to use whenever they could. After meeting at a Christmas party, their relationship seemed like a whirlwind romance. They immediately started dating and married six months later and both of them were content with their careers and life in general. They started attending a new church about three years ago and looked for ways to be more involved. Diane volunteers with children’s ministries and Paul has started helping out with youth related activities and meetings.

As the school year is coming to an end, Diane has begun to think more about having children and starting a family. She turns 33 this year and did not want to wait too much longer. Her family is “dropping hints” about grandkids and she knows her biological clock is ticking. When she mentioned her thoughts and that she was considering not teaching during the next school year, according to her, Paul “went ballistic.” He said that they had already committed to paying off the mortgage and the new boat. When Diane suggested that they sell the boat and could manage with a lower budget, Paul just became more frustrated and angrier. Last week, he made the comment that he was not even sure if he still wanted to have any children. Besides, he reasoned, their involvement with children and the youth group gave them both plenty of meaningful time with children.

Diane believes that Paul has become too accustomed to their two-income lifestyle and that his parent’s messy divorce when he was nine still “scares” him about raising their own family. The negative reaction from Paul has devastated Diane and has led to several very heated arguments, which have now spilled over to other parts of the relationship. Every time Paul wants to discuss the matter, he says that she just, “cries and gets emotional and angry,” while Diane claims that Paul, “leaves the house to be with his buddies or sulks in front of the television all night.” Their love life has been almost non-existent for several months now. Last week, Diane confessed her questioning the fact that they got married too soon and did not really know each other well enough. Church leadership has asked them both to take a time-out and work on the marriage. Although somewhat reluctant and defensive, they have both agreed to talk with a counselor.

We welcome, and I'm excited to be unpacking some information with you and some thoughts with you about what goes into creating vibrant, healthy, whole balanced marriages. I want to start by asking you, have you ever seen a great athlete? I love the Olympics. Have you ever seen great performers, great musicians, great speakers, singers, artists, leaders? We see people like that. And again, I'll go back to the Olympics. We see people who are great. And we look at the performance and we're amazed by their performance. And that's what we see, that's what's in front of us. But what is it that you and I often don't see after we watch the great performance? And many of you right now would probably answer that question, Well, we don't see everything that went into producing the performance. Correct. After working with couples for literally three decades now, you begin to see what some couples put into their marriage that make for healthy marriages and what other couples do that maybe aren't very good, aren't very healthy or balanced for their marriages. We're going to take three parts and I want to unpack for you seven factors that I feel are helpful in creating world class gold medal wonderful marriages. It's probably not the only seven things, or exclusively the best seven. But these are the things that have resonated with me over my career of working with literally hundreds, if not maybe several thousand couples. So let me just kind of lock into this and give you the seven factors in this part. One, we'll cover the first two factors. The first factor I would refer to or I would call capacity, Some might call it inaateability, talent, skill set. But the great ones seem to have this capacity for greatness to do something. Well, I know that some couples that you and I might see, or the spouses that we might see, they might look at themselves and say, I don't think I have the capacity for greatness. I'm not sure that I have the capacity to have a great marriage or to be a great husband or a great wife. Gee, you should see the family I came up from, we were pretty messed up. So I want to challenge that because I believe from a Christian context, from a faith based context, we all have the capacity for greatness. It is Christ in us. Loss 127 says, the hope of glory. Thank God. It's not me or you or our clients, but it's who's in us that makes a difference in John 39. John says that we are born of his seed, meaning God's seed. That word, seed in the Greek is sperma. P E R MA guess which word we get in English for that. Now, I want you to think about that for a minute. John is saying that we are born of sperma, his seed. Think about it this way, when someone is in Christ, when they are a Christ follower, if they have a relationship with God, literally, I think I can from this scripture say we have the DNA of Heaven. Have you ever stopped to think about that? You and I have the same DNA that spoke the world into being, that raised Lazarus from the dead. That open blind eyes and healed the leper and unstopped ears. You and I have that same DNA, Just like if you have a son or a daughter, then your son or daughter has your genetic DNA. You and I have our parents genetic DNA. If we are born again, if we are born into Christ, we genetically, in a spiritual sense, the DNA of Heaven. The encouraging part of this is that means anyone has a capacity for a great marriage. And so I don't let couples or husbands or wives necessarily get away with saying, well, you know, a great marriage might be reserved for them or them, but not me. I'm stuck to the grade B movie here. I don't believe that. And I think it's important we communicate to our couples that H one, each spouse and each couple that represents the marriage have the capacity for greatness. And I say this, listen, if great is available, I encourage husbands and wives, don't settle for good. Don't be a good husband or a good wife. If you can be a great husband or a great wife, don't be a good dad or a good mom. If you can be a great dad or a great mom, it's important not to settle for mediocrity or good when great is available. For those who say to me, Eric, if you could just understand my life story, you'd see why I struggle with the thought that I can have a great marriage or where I've come from. I often use the metaphor of rewriting the script, so to speak. I couldn't do what I do, and I'm not sure you could effectively work with a client or a couple if you didn't believe that God could make a difference, if you didn't believe that we're not stuck with the hand that we are dealt with in life. Let's say for a moment that you are the Christian version of Steven Spielberg. You're just this amazing movie producer, director, and you're reading a book. And as you're reading the book, you are saying to yourself, boy, I'd love to make a movie out of that book. What's the first thing that you would have to do if you wanted to make a movie out of the book you were reading? Well, you would have to go to the author, secure the rights to make the movie. Why? Because it's not your story, it's not your book. When Peter Jackson and New Line Cinema wanted to make the Lord of the Rings movies, they had to go to the Tolkien Society, have conversation, negotiate the rights, pay for the rights to make those movies. I'm sure they paid a pretty penny, but I think in the end they did. All right. But once you own the rights to the story, then you're free within some latitude to change the story a little bit. I can bring a character into the movie that wasn't in the book or take a character out of the movie that was in the book, or change the order of things or the lines a little bit. That's why what? Movies never quite like the book. When we come to Christ, when he brings salvation in essence, what does it mean to be redeemed? What does the word redeem literally mean? It means to buy back to purchase. When a person comes to Christ, it's in essence that God negotiated the rights to that person's story. That's why in Hebrews 12, the writer of Hebrews can say, now God is the author and the finisher of our stories, and he writes pretty good stories. I've literally talked with couples sometimes as I'm hearing them unpack their story, I've literally looked at him and said, what script are you reading off of right now? Is it the one that was thrust into your hands when you were a little kid and someone said, this is your role, this is your identity, these are your lines, memorize it, do life like this. I'm like, let's throw away that script. Let's get out a clean sheet of paper and let's see what God wants to write. Because all the chapters of your life, all the chapters of your story are not yet written. Some of the clients we work with might need a bucket of white out and a roller, but that doesn't matter. The good news is that we are free to see God rewrite the script. And that tells me that we all have capacity. The second factor that I want to look at, that often what makes people great is what I would call goal oriented, or the ability to focus people who are great at what they do, know what they're aiming at, don't they? You've probably heard this before, but I'll say it anyway. If we aim at nothing, what are we going to hit? Nothing. So one of the things you and I have to do when we're working with couples to say, hey, what are we aiming at? What are you aiming at? As a couple and as individuals, we have to give them something to aim at. We can give them a compass, We can give them a map. These are tools, We can show them how to use these things. But ultimately, you and I can't force them to get in the car, go in a particular direction, and we can't do the driving for them. But we have to help them get focused and to aim at something goal oriented. The literal definition means to have a purpose, a type of strategy that affects how a person approaches, plans for and achieves a certain task or desire. That's what we want. I often ask people, and I'll just challenge you, this as a little bit of an aside. Do you have purpose? And are you goal oriented in your life? Could you give me your mission statement in five or fewer words? I often ask this, I'll ask a couple. Give me your mission statement as a couple in your marriage in five words or less. That becomes a very focused orientation, often to what I need to do with them in counseling. When I lived in the Hampton Roads area some years ago, there's a cruise ship that goes out of the harbor, Norfolk, Virginia, and heads out to Bermuda, the island just off of North Carolina. And here's what I found out, if the ship is, of course, one half of one degree. Now, I want you to think about that for a minute. I said a half of one degree. What is that? That's 90 degrees, right? I'm not calling you a loser on camera, but anyway, 90 degrees, 45.5 22 and a quarter, 11.8 What is one half of one degree? If the ship is off course half of one degree, it will miss the island by 50 miles if a couple is off. Just a little bit on what they're aiming at in their marriage. By time they walk it out, live it out as a couple. Boy, they can miss the mark significantly. And we have to help them be goal oriented, focused in what God wants to do. I think that's a critically important thing. These first two are just what we're going to focus on. There are seven factors. Capacity and goal orientation are the first two. Part two, we'll talk about the next three.