A New Way To Spend Our Evenings

It can happen so easily. The boys are put to bed. Doug and I sigh, "Ahhhh, the boys are contained." We allow ourselves a couple minutes to catch our breath and then we are off to work on our to-do lists.

For me, the list includes catching up on emails and blogs, planning meals, cooking, phone calls, folding laundry, decluttering, etc. In my dream life, I try to do these things during the day so that Doug and I have our evenings to spend together... but all to often they seem to spill over into "overtime."

Doug's list includes planning the next home improvement project, doing a home improvement project, working through receipts and bills, making a trip to Lowe's, decluttering, etc.

These tasks aren't bad tasks, and obviously there are times when they must happen during the evening. But all to often, these tasks keep us from resting and prevent us from spending real time together, even as we're actually only a few feet from one another.

Thankfully, last night, the Lord gave us a birds' eye view of what has become all to "normal" in our home in the evening. We decided to work on directing our home improvement efforts to ourselves.

The new gift we give to each other is reading together. We are finally reading a book we have heard to be the "be all end all" marriage book from way too many people we respect, The Mystery of Marriage, by Mike Mason. Last night we read the prologue aloud to each other. The book's beautiful writing coming from my husband's lips made me become one with the couch. It was so relaxing and refreshing!

There is something really dear about reading aloud. I'm attracted to this method as it's very inefficient. It'll take us longer to finish this book; we'll get much less "done" this way. But for us, who are way too focused on efficiency and output, reading orally will be one more gift.

We loved getting Mason's thoughts on marriage and thinking of them together. On page 21 of the prologue Mason says,

"Marriage stands at the very hub of this exciting spiritual dialectic, for it is, as Paul points out, a cameo dramatization of the relationship of the whole church with its Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. This is the territory which this book seeks to explore, this dynamic correspondence between marriage and the great invisible realities of the Christian faith. It is not a "how-to" book so much as a "how-come" book, a meditative inquiry into the spiritual foundations upon which marriage is built."

And so my beloved and I get to kill many birds with one stone... we gain a break from our household tasks, time with one another, the chance to experience life a bit more fully and "inefficiently," and the chance to grow in our most precious earthly relationship.