Prioritizing Quality Time

I referenced Pat Geslinger's book, The Juggling Act. Here's a link. It's terrific. 

If someone told you they were feeling distant from Christ, what would you tell them to do? That's not a particularly tough questions is it? We would tell them they need quality time with Jesus. They need to set aside time to read, to think and to pray. They need to talk about Him and discuss Him well with others. There are no shortcuts, but it also isn't some Mt. Everest event either. It is daily, intentional time invested in building love for the Lord and realizing His love for you.

Okay, what about the same question with regard to marriage? A couple comes to you and says they feel distant and strained. How would you recommend they work on that? The point of today's podcast is that the formula is the same! Daily, purposeful, optimistic time for sharing and making the other person feel important. 

In both cases, we sometimes falter. We get busy or burdened or distracted. Cell phones tend to be a common culprit. So let's work through some of that today and start Prioritizing Quality Time. 

- What is quality time?

- Why does it fade so often with the Lord when life gets busy?

- How was quality time a huge part of the early years with the Lord?

- How was quality time a huge part of the early years with your mate?

- Why does it fade so often with your mate when life gets busy?

- Are you ready to call in some help, toss the phone, and fall back in love again?

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:04

Welcome to the Excel Still More Podcast. I am your host, Chris Emerson. I'm here to encourage you in your walk with God. Thank you for joining in. Today's podcast is sponsored by Cunningham Financial Group. John Cunningham is a friend of mine and a brother in Christ, and he can help you with financial decisions and future planning. He's been a big help to me and my family, and I commend him to you. You can reach him at 205-913-1720. I am so thankful you're here, so let's get started. I want to talk to you about your family. We are ultimately looking at some practical things you can do to grow closer together, improve communication, and have the kind of love that brings about a lot more joy than frustration. We want to look at this in an inclusive way. In other words, all relationships pertaining to the family, whether it be parents growing closer to their kids, or maybe siblings to one another. However, as we get to the end of the episode today, I would like to put particular emphasis on married couples and even more specifically than that, married couples who are still raising children. If you are not a married couple still raising children, can I invite you to listen to the end of the episode anyway? Because whether you're a grandma and grandpa who've raised your kids, or an aunt or an uncle, or maybe you are one of the teenagers in that household, building a strong and flourishing marriage is a great challenge in our time, and honestly, we could use your help. But before we get down to those family elements, I first need to talk to you about your relationship with Jesus. There are a couple of reasons why that's the place to start. Firstly, referencing back to the last couple of weeks' worth of episodes, I feel confident arguing that it is impossible to love people well unless you know the love of God and you love Him. There is a peace that you can provide in your family that is only possible when sourced in the peace that you are drawing from the Lordship of Jesus. We won't spend a ton of time on this today, but it goes back to the idea of grace to faith to life. God loves you. He yearns for a relationship with you. That relationship is to be healthy and thriving and real. It is reciprocal in the sense that first God loves you and graciously provides for you and you grow in your love for Him. It is because of that love and how it changes your heart that you are then able to go out and love your neighbor, any neighbor, all neighbors, or for some today, more challengingly, your spouse or parent. Instead of focusing in on that sequence, today I'm more interested in the how. Let's say you came to grips with a sobering reality this week. I am not in a strong and healthy relationship with Jesus. I am not praying through him or thinking about him or talking about him or honoring him like I should. He loves me and I love him, but it's starting to feel very distant. My question to you before we look at anyone under the roof of your home is simply this. How would you go about making that relationship better? What are the things you know to do that you've been too busy to do that will most absolutely reconnect you to Christ? So Summer and I talked about this for quite a while. She knew what I was intending to do in this episode, which is take what works with you and Jesus and apply it to your spouse and everyone else in your home. So we started making a list of four or five things that every Christian would do if they desperately knew they needed to be closer to the Lord. But very quickly, one thing moved to the top of the list and ultimately kind of opened the door for all of the rest of it. Quite simply and somewhat obviously, you would need to make quality time to spend with your Savior. In his case, it would be on you to make that decision because he is always available to spend time with you. I love this term, quality time. We use it in premarriage counseling, and it is usually the number one beginning to solutions in assisting with post-marriage issues. The word time suggests that this is actually going to take more than just a passing thought or a quick reference. Time is that commodity that is always in demand, and there are many elements of your life vying for it. But we are openly confessing that I must carve out enough of it each day to feel the love of Jesus in my life, fill my heart with gratitude, and then set about the rest of the day or the week using the light and the warmth that I draw from him. The word quality is also very important because it says that time can be wasted. I can say that I set aside 30 minutes every morning for the Lord, but if I'm perusing my phone endlessly or catching up with the news, it is not quality time. At least not if the intended purpose is to build this sense of closeness to carry me through the day. So I think you could help answer this for me very simply. If we believe that quality time with our Lord is the best way to draw closer to Him, what does that look like? We've already stated a couple of things. You have to set aside actual intervals, and you have to make those intervals unobstructed or invaded by things that draw your attention away from him. Also, quite obviously, communication is really important. The Bible talks about this at tremendous length. You and I know that when it comes to the Lord, it breaks down to two super simple things. The first is reading the Word of God. That is simply the act of listening to the Lord. Maybe he has the same things to tell you that he's told you before. Maybe he's trying to explain things on a level you're just now prepared to get. He plans to use his words to better explain his love for you, to deepen your love for him, and to create more unity and strength between you. Listening to God for the purpose of understanding is important, and the other side of it, of course, is prayer. My favorite time to pray is after reading scriptures. The Lord is showing me something, and now I get to talk to him about it. Whatever the sequence, it is important every day that I am honest with God. I am honest about what he has asked of me or taught me, and I am also honest about the way that I need him through whatever I'll be facing that day or in some greater trial of life. There are other elements to this like sitting quietly and just thinking about the implications of that communication. There are some great other things you can do like talking about the Lord in a positive and wonderful way with other people in your life, not negatively or gossipy or in an unbelieving way, that would undermine everything you're trying to do. You might wonder why I even suggested that, but in a moment we're going to take all of these great ideas and turn it towards our family. And maybe it'll be a little more clear then. But before we talk about the family, let me ask you this. If you know everything that you can do and need to do in order to be closer to Christ, and you understand how beneficial and really needful that it is, why are there stretches in your life when you don't do it? And maybe that's not you, maybe it's someone else, maybe someone is in that stretch right now, but there very likely might be someone who says, I have not been spending quality time with Jesus. I have not set aside the time or silenced the distractions, I'm not reading and listening, and I haven't been sharing open and honestly. Positive expression about him to other people has not come very naturally to me. If you are a believer in the Lord and you know all of that is important, and I asked you why, you probably wouldn't say because he's unimportant or because I don't really love him. Instead, you might say he is incredibly important, and I do really love him. It's just that life has been really busy lately. I have so much going on, I can't even take two minutes for myself, much less 20 minutes to engage with God. You might say, Life is stressful, I just have a lot on my mind at the moment. Or you might just come out and say, I don't have a lot of free time, but the truth is I'm addicted to my phone or reruns of ER or something. And I've kind of always wondered why Christians, myself included, would be okay with that for periods of time. And I think it's probably because we take the Lord for granted. Jesus is always going to love us. I know where he is, he knows where I am, we're fine, just in this particular time of life, we're not spending a lot of quality time together. But when it matters the most, we'll figure it out, we always do. Do you know how many people have said things like that as they slowly but absolutely drifted away from the Lord? And instead of realizing that they needed him every day, they waited until they truly hit some point of crisis and they simply couldn't find him again. They had neglected the relationship to such an extent that while he still loves them with all of the passion that he always has, somehow they had lost their passion for him. Look, we're ten minutes in, so it sounds like an entire episode on the need to get close to the Lord. Don't let another day pass without reprioritizing quality time. And while I'm tempted to just keep going because there is nothing as rich and amazing as feeling the closeness of Jesus, instead, and I hope you've been picking up on this all along, I want you to see that everything we just said about how to restore great love with Christ is just as viable and necessary with your family. There is no substitute on earth for quality time. It is the most valuable thing you can contribute to closeness with your kids, with your spouse, or really with anyone. But it is also in high demand. Everyone and everything is demanding your time, including a lot of businesses and advertisers and apps that don't even care about you. And we very often use the same language when we're feeling distanced from the ones that we love. I love them, they love me, in the end it will all work out. I'm just really busy right now. There's a ton going on at work. I have a lot on my mind. Or maybe you're willing to say, I just have a few addictions that are eating up most of my free time, and I'll work through that eventually. Meanwhile, of course, your kids keep growing another year older every three hundred and sixty five days. You and your spouse who you think will certainly always be there, and you'll always fix things at some other point in time, you just keep your ING marriage going, which by the way is every day, every marriage is in verb ING movement mode, but instead of growing and flourishing, it's fading and distancing. And while your family loves you, your siblings love you, your parents love you, their love is not as perfect as Jesus. And so sometimes while you're drifting away, not prioritizing quality time, they also are drifting away. And so it quite simply cannot be understated or overstated. I'm not sure which word to use. I was homeschooled. But there is simply no substitute right now for prioritizing quality time with your family. That means carving out time from your busy schedule for the people who we say at least matter more to us than anyone else in the world. And not some casual, distracted time where you're in the same house together, but time that is infused with quality, which I would describe for you today as making that other person feel special, feel heard and loved and important. I have not been as good at this in the new year and I've found some other ways to kind of work it, but I remember Pat Gesslinger's book that I read last year and did an episode on called The Juggling Act, where he said that once a month he would take each child out to breakfast. I did that with each of my four kids over a period of several months. And I'll tell you now, I learned some things, and we still cherish those moments. Since then, we've modified it some, now it's just shooting hoops out in the street, or our rather intense Emerson pickleball competitions. But nobody, no parent ever watches their kids get married or gets to the end of your life and wishes you'd made less time for them. What does that quality time look like? Well, whether we're talking about parents to kids or I'd like to specifically start looking at marriage, quality time is not different than it is with Jesus. It is a created opportunity for constructive conversation. Not for arguing and fighting where we run off into our own corner or half listen. But for actual intensive listening, for asking open questions, for finding out how one another feels about a particular thing. If you struggle with that in your marriage, maybe go back to year one. I did an episode called Zipping the Jacket. You can go back and start with things you agree on and get some yes yes going for a while until it starts to feel like a safe and loving space for sharing how you feel. Let me turn the attention to marriage for just a minute. I have the opportunity to do some counseling premarriage and certainly post where there are issues. And I have made quality time the centerpiece, along with communication and how the two work together in all premarriage counseling. We put together both ideas, the need for quality time with the Lord and with your spouse. Because you're not going to believe the number one problem in almost every troubled marriage that walks into my office. It is always this distance that wasn't there before and they don't know what happened. Sometimes they feel God is really far away. Sometimes they feel like their spouse who may still sleep in the bed right next to them has become just a roommate, someone who occasionally fills their variety of needs, but their relationship has become more about occasional transactions than the heartening continuity of a joyful and loving marriage. Let me say this about counseling couples who don't understand why they're drifting apart. This isn't always the case, but oftentimes when I look at them and say, All you need is more quality time, they look at me like I just spoke in a foreign language. It's kind of like in Christmas movies where all kids believe in Santa and as they grow older they just forget and then all of a sudden the concept of him sounds ridiculous. When couples are young and they're dating and they're engaged and they're newlyweds, quality time is the center of all of that. They spent a lot of time together. They wanted to be together. They loved to be together. Do you remember those days? Just walking in the park and holding hands was special. Because this person is special, and for some reason you can't explain, you feel like life is better when you're with them. So you married them, which is a great plan. And then, of course, as I said earlier, life gets busy and trials get heavy and things get in the way. Not all of those things are sinful, like kids. Kids are great, but they change the dynamic pretty drastically if we aren't careful. And the time to give attention to each other's strengths or it loses quality and things start to happen. I want to give you two practical pieces of advice that have helped Summer and me a great deal over the years, but first let me finish up the counseling section in this way. I have lost count of how many times that I finished the first hour of marriage counseling with a couple, and I sent them out with two tasks for the week. I tell the husband, I want you to plan at least a 30-minute quality time event with your wife and for you two to enjoy it together, and then I tell the wife to do exactly the same thing. So that'll give you two opportunities for just the two of you to kind of re find your love for each other. They both nod and say it's a wonderful idea. And usually we have a second study about a week later, and I don't have the raw numbers on this, but I think I can confidently say that over half the time they come back and they just weren't able to do it. Not even two walks, two quiet breakfasts together, two conversations with agreement and not arguing. What I'm saying is it's simple, but it's not necessarily easy. But I'm also telling you that if you're interested in greater love in your home, it is crucial and non-negotiable. And look, if you're just struggling to find that time, can I start by suggesting that you rob it from your cell phone and social media? Just today a friend of mine shared a sermon clip by a guy who I don't know, but I really liked what he said. So let me read it to you. What do you think today is the greatest fox in the vineyard for marriage? It's your phone. Because your phone just demands to be the center of your life. The average person touches their phone a lot more than their spouse. They look at their phone more than their spouse. They listen to their phone more than their spouse. They talk to their phone more than their spouse. And if you don't manage the technology, what I'm telling you is this it's just a fox that gnaws away at the vine of your family. How come you never listen? How come we never talk? Why are you always so distracted when we sit together on the couch? He says, practice the art of turning your phone off or destroying it. Personally, I wish we could just go with that second idea or get like an Agent Gibbs NCIS flip phone to eliminate a lot of the addiction. But the point is you can find the time. You just need to allocate it more intentionally into your inner circle. And then once you find the time, don't let its quality get polluted by staring at your phone while you're on a date with your wife. And then lastly, and I'll take a couple of extra minutes to share this because I think it's so crucial. If you are married with kids still in your home, you need to find a way to keep dating. Leverage grandma and grandpa. If you've got some neighbors or friends or teenagers that won't burn the place down, you need time to walk together alone, to go out to dinner, to enjoy one another's company. I know this is tough when the kids are smaller. I oftentimes give advice via email to some family somewhere, and I get home and tell Summer what I told them, and she asks me how old their kids are, and I say, Well, they're one and two, and she says, email them back. In other words, we know it's really tough when kids are young. But mom and dad, I promise you that maintaining closeness and love for one another is in the end the second greatest gift you can give to your kids behind showing them what it means to be close to Christ. Build your love and closeness with your kids on and after the strength of your marriage. Back in the early days after Hannah was born, we didn't have much money or anything, but we saved up twenty dollars a week, and we would get either Nana or Mama to watch Hannah, and later it was Hannah and Luke for two hours so we could go to Papacito's in Humble, Texas for lunch. She would get Diet Coke, I would drink water, we would share fajita for one for $19.50. That was our Thursday afternoon. But consistently doing that and keeping it in place even as life began to change, kept the two of us where we needed to be, prioritizing one another. That's grown over the years. Now a couple of times a year we actually get on a plane for two or three nights. Life changed some, the kids got a little older, Nana moved to Lyndale. But while it started small, it stayed purposeful and consistent. That's why I said in the beginning, grandma and grandpa, aunt and uncle, even teenagers, married couples need quality time. And if you can help them get it or support them in it, you'd be doing them a great service. Working our way back out, any relationship that you seek to cherish, that you want to thrive with your Lord, your spouse, or anyone that God has put into your life will begin with and consistently require prioritizing quality time. Thank you so much for joining in today. If you enjoyed this program, consider sharing it with your family and your friends. And if you're just in search of deeper Bible study or you want to share the message of Jesus with the children in your life, remember to go to creation to revelation.com. This wonderful company, run by Christians, provides beautiful illustrations of scripture from beginning to end, putting the spotlight on Jesus. And remember this whatever you choose to do today in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, excel still more.