Almost no one was raised in a perfect home with perfect parents who modeled a perfect marriage. It takes intentionality and a lifelong commitment to learn, adapt, and bear with one another… if you want to stay married!
This week on the Lifeschool Podcast, Caesar, and his wife Tina, share 7 “secrets” that have helped them stay on the same page and maintain unity throughout 36 years of marriage. You’ll want to take notes, for sure!
I started dating Tina when we were both 16 years old and in high school. That was like, uh, 15 years ago? No actually, we have been together for well over half of our lifetime. And this month we celebrate 32 years of marriage. I can barely remember a “me” without Tina in my life. I love you honey!
We started out dating and became best friends. Throughout our marriage we’ve discovered that it is super-important to actively, intentionally work on staying friends. Having a regular, scheduled “date night” has been crucial to keeping the fires burning. We’ve found that if we don’t, we can end up only being in problem solving mode all the time and move from task to task and mini crisis to crisis and start to feel more like business partners than two people in love and marriage.
Missional community life includes a lot of eating together. Your meals should be a reflection of your life as a family. When we invite people to experience dinner with the Family—God’s family—loving them well is far more important than what you serve or how perfect it all looks.
This week on the Lifeschool Podcast, we talk with Caesar’s wife Tina, a professional chef and hospitality expert. She gives us her best tips for hosting missional summer meals that are easy to do and won’t leave you frazzled.
Families can be tricky things and we live in a world and time where many are redefining what a family is. So who are we supposed to treat as “family” – or another way of asking this question is:
Who’s Your Daddy?
Imagine that you’ve been living in your house for a few years, going about your busy life: working, raising a family, going to school—all the normal stuff of life that keeps us focused on…well, ourselves. What would you do if all of a sudden you realized your own father, sister, or brother was alone–in terrible need–and had been living right next door?
Maybe they are, and you never noticed.
Who does the Bible say is in “our family”? If we consider ourselves Christians, is it just Christians, or if we are Jewish is it just other Jewish people? Can we get by with only treating people who are just like us and believe the exact same things we believe as family?
Or are we really called to treat everyone like they’re part of the family?
I guess the answer to the question of who you will treat like they’re your family is best answered by asking, would you treat Jesus like a member of your own family? Jesus told his closest friends a story one day to help them grasp the reality of how he sees everyone, and how he would hope we would see and treat others.
“When I was hungry you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, when I needed clothes you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, when I was in prison you came to visit me…. And his friends were like, “…We did…?”
He goes on and says, “I’m telling you the truth: Whenever you did one of these things for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, to someone overlooked or ignored, that was me–you did it to me.”
I see it like this: We have some brothers and sisters out there that are estranged from Dad, from God. They don’t trust him and stopped coming to holiday meals and family functions long ago. They are having a hard time believing that he really loves them. But he does, enough that he sent a Son–Jesus– our own brother, to rescue and save them. It cost him his life, but that’s how much he loves them and wants them restored to a full and wonderful life in his family.
So let’s stop worrying about who’s in or who’s out, saved or unsaved. Let’s treat everyone like family…the way God does.[clickToTweet tweet=”Let’s stop worrying about who’s in or who’s out. Let’s treat everyone like family…the way God does. ” quote=”Let’s stop worrying about who’s in or who’s out, saved or unsaved. Let’s treat everyone like family…the way God does. “]
God is in the adoption business. He wants you and everyone else in his family. He says, I’ve got some pretty weird kids, but you’ll grow to love them!
The next best time to start treating people as part of the family is now.
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Everyone I know seems busier than ever. Work, car pools, school and life in general all seem to be at odds with living a lifestyle of discipleship and mission. In a very real way these things are all competing for the same hours and minutes each day.
One of my readers, Dale, wrote asking, “I’m trying to learn how to integrate my missional life with my family life – balancing family time with discipling in community; how do I do that without killing my family or never really living on mission in community with others?” (more…)
Gossip is poison! And I’ve noticed gossip is one of those things these days that is so common in relationships, in our conversations and in our cultural experience, that we hardly even notice it anymore. Let me show you how to stop gossip.
