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REVERSE-ENGINEERING YOUR LIFE AND MARRIAGE

The end of a thing is better than its beginning.

—ECCLESIASTES 7:8

The most important day of your marriage is the last day.

Too many couples put their best energies into the first day. The cake, flowers, clothing, and photos have to be perfect. But while a wonderful first day of marriage is important, it’s the last day that really counts.

Will the last day of your marriage come prematurely through divorce? Will the last day of your marriage be filled with regrets as you stand over the coffin of your spouse? Or by God’s grace will the last day be a day to rejoice in a life lived together and remember the gift your spouse was to you while on earth?

To finish well on the last day of your marriage, it is not enough to simply have passion and principles. You also need a plan. Marriages start with passion and over the years accrue principles, but apart from a plan, the passion and principles are powerless. You must choose whether you will spend your time making plans or excuses.

This chapter will be a thorough homework assignment of sorts to make that plan. It comes out of the most painful season of our life and marriage. I (Mark) had been pushing myself hard for more than a decade since Mars Hill Church opened up, and I had overextended myself so much that I had worn out my adrenal glands and gotten an ulcer.

Some Sundays were brutal. I would sneak in a back door, avoiding any human contact because I simply did not have the emotional wherewithal to spend an entire day hearing of trauma in people’s lives and arguing with religious types. At times I actually found myself nodding off on the side of the stage before one of the five services I preached live. So I foolishly started drinking energy drinks all day to power through Sundays. After preaching I would go home to sit in the dark and watch television, obviously depressed. Before long I was stressed each night at bedtime as the anxiety over whether or not I could sleep became constant. I felt like a car that could not turn off. I had multiple stress-related symptoms—heartburn, headaches, nervous eye twitch, aggressive driving, constant low-level anger, high blood pressure, and self-medicating with foods and drinks packed with fat, sugar, and simple carbohydrates, along with caffeine.

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Perhaps a few months after things had reached this level, a godly friend in the church, named Jon, scheduled a meeting with me. God had laid it on his heart to speak some wisdom into my life. He did so with great humility, and in that meeting he gave me some insights that were life changing.

Jon had been taking notes on how he organized his life, things he had learned, and what he felt the Holy Spirit had asked him to tell me. His wisdom was a priceless gift. He called it “Reverse Engineering.” The big idea is to anticipate life forward and live it backward.

In the ensuing months I sought to add to his wisdom as much insight as I could. For the church, I met with some of the pastors of the largest churches in America to see what I could learn about how we needed to reorganize. For my health, I found a doctor named John who was a naturopath and ordained pastor and started doing what he told me to do, which has changed my life. For my awareness, I started reading and studying material written by doctors and counselors on stress and adrenaline.¹ For my marriage, I started spending more energy than ever to connect with Grace and get our time together. I also met with a Bible-based counselor a few times to inquire what I needed to learn and how I could best serve Grace as her friend. I limped along through the winter and spring making adjustments along the way.

That summer we took a family vacation in central Oregon with Grace’s family. During the vacation, I kept a legal-size yellow pad handy and started writing out a lengthy homework assignment for Grace. I laid out the big ideas I had learned from Jon and others. And I listed pages of questions for her, leaving room for her to write out her answers.

I did not want to boss Grace around and tell her how our new life together would be. But I needed to help her by drawing out her thoughts, dreams, fears, and needs—or what Peter means when commanding husbands to be “understanding” with their wives.

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After packing the kids and our stuff into the Suburban, everyone settled in for the roughly eight-hour drive home. Then I handed Grace the yellow legal pad of questions and kindly asked her to spend the time answering the questions and discussing with me anything she wanted to as she worked though them. I knew this would likely be my only chance to get my Martha-esque wife to sit down for eight hours doing planning. As her name would suggest, she was gracious and obliged.

One pastor said there are only four ways to live your life, and by choosing the last one on his list, we hoped to reverse-engineer our marriage.²

1. Reaction—passively dominated by urgencies and pushy people. This results in a life that is a frazzled mess, disorganized, without a sense of priorities, half-finished tasks, running late, and a frantic lifestyle.

2. Conformity—succumbing to the fear of man and just being and doing what everyone else wants, which is not necessarily following God’s will for you and your family. This results in a boring life where everyone but God is pleased, and the person who is easily pushed around keeps busy and productive but is not passionate or free.

3. Independence—nonconforming rebellion in the name of freedom marked by doing only what you want and ignoring godly authority over you. This results in a life of defiance, independence, immaturity, self-reliance, and foolishness.

4. Intentionality—reverse-engineering your life and living it prayerfully and purposefully, journaling your thoughts throughout the day, and using silence and solitude to hear from God and organize your life. This results in a life that is purposeful and passionate to God’s glory, people’s good, and your joy.

I had been prone to living a life vacillating between reaction and independence. Grace was prone toward reaction and conformity. As always, we were opposites. In short, we were a mess. There was always a plan for the church, along with goals, timelines, and staff meetings to keep us on task. But we had no such guiding wisdom for our marriage and family. My hope was to use the Reverse-Engineering wisdom to help us construct a framework document from which to guide our decision making. An edited version of what Grace filled out and what has guided our marriage, family, and ministry ever since is below. We have reworked portions of it over the years and found it to be an incredible benefit. We hope you and your spouse use it and do the following:

1. Honestly look back on the big moments of frustration, anger, disappointment, grief, and failure in your marriage. How much of what you experienced was the result of not preparing for the future and working toward it together? How many holidays, vacations, and other times that could have been wonderful ended up awful because you were both expecting the other person to take care of things the way you were hoping and felt disappointed when things did not come together? Rather than repeating your failures and frustrations, seek to put the trials and opportunities before you as something to work on together rather than between you to fight over. How could a wise plan that is acted upon help improve your future together? Turn your pains into plans.

2. Answer the questions prayerfully and carefully on your own. Accept that this will take time and work. But it is less costly to make a plan and work on it than it is to fail and be frustrated over and over.

3. Schedule an entire day together to share your answers and work through what the priorities and plans will look like for your family. Do not meet in a public place where you can be interrupted. Do not have your phones on or check the Internet, as you want to be fully present and not distracted. Ideally, this would be an overnight somewhere romantic and a nice place to dream of your future together and plan for it.

4. Redo the Reverse-Engineering questions as life changes, things happen, and adjustments need to be made.

5. Grow old together, stay married, remain one, be fruitful, and refuse to settle for distant parallel lives in a functional but cold, lonely marriage.

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Reverse-Engineering

Reverse-Engineering Principles

Marriage affects and is affected by the rest of your life. One frequent problem with marriage books is that they focus solely on the marriage without considering the rest of life. This chapter is intended to help you work on your life—not just in it—by getting both your shoulder-to-shoulder and face-to-face time regularly. For this to happen, the following principles are helpful:

• You need a wise plan to do your work.
“The plans of the diligent lead surely to plenty, but those of everyone who is hasty, surely to poverty” (Prov. 21:5).

• Your plan needs to include outside counsel.
“Without counsel, plans go awry, but in the multitude of counselors they are established” (Prov. 15:22).

• Your plan must be biblical and prayerful.
“Commit your works to the Lord, and your thoughts [plans] will be established” (Prov. 16:3).

• Your plan will change as God leads you.
“A man’s heart plans his way, but the Lord directs his steps” (Prov. 16:9).

Reverse-Engineering Plans

1. Your plan must be written down or typed up.

2. Consider the downside in all your planning. Be realistic, not unduly idealistic. What could go wrong? How could it fail? Where are the liabilities?

3. Include fun and margin for error. Any plan that does not have some intentional fun will lead to a boring life. Any plan that does not leave a margin for error in such things as time, money, and energy is destined to fail.

4. Account for your priorities. Work from conviction according to your priorities and not from guilt piled on you by Satan, other people, or your own faulty thinking.

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5. Accept the size of your plate and fill it—some people have big plates; others have small plates. Be honest about what you can do and how much you can handle.

6. Take something off your plate whenever something is put on. Don’t stack your plate until things fall off and your life is a mess.

7. Sync your plan with your family. The weekly sync meeting with your spouse is key. Imagine a company never meeting as a staff and how miserably they would fail.

8. Use simple systems and write everything in one place, like a notebook. Most systems are too complex. The key is to keep everything in one simple place together—prayer requests, grocery lists, to-do lists, and things God is teaching you.

9. Every night spend a few minutes organizing your priorities for the next day in your notebook. Do not simply have a long to-do list. Have a priority list and do the highest priority items first. You will never finish everything on your list, so don’t worry about it. Do what is most important first and the rest as you are able.

10. Seek planning principles from wise people. Everyone has something to teach you if you are humble enough to learn. Learn from both the successes and failures of other people. Keep notes in your notebook of what you learn. As you meet people who are particularly skilled in such things as budgeting, investing, organizing their homes, and training their kids, ask if they would be willing to meet with you for a short meeting. If they agree, do not waste their time, but instead show up with a list of questions, thank them for meeting with you, ask your questions respectfully, listen carefully, don’t talk too much, and take copious notes.

11. Cultivate personal mindfulness. Keep notes on what works and does not work in everything from holidays to vacations as well as in your weekly routine. This allows you to make changes and learn from your mistakes.

12. Get a life coach if you can. If you can afford a professional Christian life coach to help you get organized, that might be a great investment. I spent a few years being coached professionally, and Grace has also been coached for a year.

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13. Work on your life, not just in it. Most people waste their whole lives working in them. If you take the time to work on your life, you will save time and increase your odds of living passionately, fruitfully, and joyfully. Life is to be more than just feeling overwhelmed every day with more work than can be done, which results in being exhausted and overwhelmed.

Reverse-Engineering Rhythms

• Daily—pray with and for each other, read the Bible and other good books; eat at least one meal together without the television on or other distractions, such as the phone; visit for at least twenty minutes each day getting your face-to-face time, checking in to see how each other is doing; and go to bed together.

• Weekly—have a date night, attend church together, attend a Christian small group or class together, and sabbath together with a purposeful and restful day off. To make all of this happen, schedule and keep a weekly sync meeting. This is a weekly calendar meeting on a time other than date night. This meeting is solely for you as a couple to go through your calendar and budget, getting and keeping your life unified as one. At this meeting you decide how to juggle your responsibilities, how to serve and pray for each other, who and what to say no to, how to get ready for the holidays, and how to plan out vacations and other events, well in advance.

• Quarterly—go for a romantic and fun overnight getaway together. Before you go, talk about your fears and expectations, and work together to make fun memories and connect.

• Annually—if finances allow, take a planned vacation that you are both excited about. Work together to get ready for the vacation, and while on vacation, do not allow other people and technology to rob you of time together. Guard this time and enjoy it. If you cannot afford it, consider inexpensive ways to take a vacation, including house swapping for a week or two with someone you know and trust.

Reverse-Engineering Questions

The following questions are ones we have used. You are free to add to them and delete them as needed.

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Step 1: Write Out Priorities

Write out no more than seven priorities and place them in order of importance (for example, physical health, spiritual health, marital intimacy, parenting success). We have given you the first four that we always recommend be in this order. The truth is most people will have full plates doing these four, and even people with big plates cannot usually do more than seven things well. For you, this means that anything not on the list has to be cut, because it is prohibiting you from doing your God-given priorities. And by Christian, we mean reading your Bible, praying, attending church, being in a group or class, and so forth. Anything beyond that, such as church leadership in an unpaid position, should be in category 5 or lower.

1. Christian

2. Spouse

3. Parent

4. Worker (both paid and unpaid, such as being a stay-at-home mom)

5. Ministry volunteer?

6.

7.

Step 2: Envision the Future

Pick a day for yourself, your family, and your ministry, sometime in the future (two years, five years, ten years), and envision that day. Pick a day that is far enough down the road that you have to work to get there, but is not so distant that you cannot see it. This has to be a reasonable look into a future date you can see. To do this, answer as many pertinent, specific questions about life on that day as you can reasonably generate. Following are some examples:

Spiritual

1. What church will you attend? Will it be a church with strong men leading so that the husband is motivated, engaged, and committed?

2. What criteria will determine what church you choose?

3. How will you serve in that church and be a blessing?

4. How many weeks of the year will you attend services?

5. What group or class will you be involved in to serve and grow?

6. How will you regularly teach your children about Jesus from the Bible?

7. How can you be vitally connected relationally in community with other people in the church, including older people you learn from, peers you walk with, and younger people you are mentoring?

8. What will evangelism and mission look like to your neighbors and community?

9. What will your spouse and children think about Jesus because of you?

10. Who in your spheres of family, friends, coworkers, and neighbors will you have shared the gospel with, seeking their salvation?

11. Husbands, how will you “wash her in the Word”?

Health

1. How much will you weigh?

2. How much will you exercise weekly?

3. What will have changed about your appearance?

4. How many hours of sleep will you average a night?

5. How many times a week will you nap?

6. On which day will you sabbath?

7. What will your diet be?

8. Other?

Employment

1. What will your job be?

2. How will your work be an act of worship unto God?

3. What can you do to become the best employee possible?

4. How will you need to guard your job from consuming your life and overtaking your other higher priorities?

Financial

1. What is your job? Will the wife be working?

2. Where do you work?

3. How much money do you make?

4. How is your money spent?

5. How is your money saved?

6. How is your money invested?

7. How is your money tithed?

8. What is your insurance, medical, and dental package?

9. Other?

Marriage

1. How often do you pray together?

2. When is your date night?

3. How do you take better care of each other?

4. Why has your love grown?

5. How has your home become a place for unplanned connecting?

6. What brings you together?

7. Other?

Sex

1. What have you and your spouse experimented with?

2. How often are you intimate?

3. What things are different?

4. How have you and your spouse changed physically and sexually?

5. What is different about your bedroom?

6. Other?

Family

1. How many children will you have?

2. How old will your children be?

3. How will they be educated at that time?

4. What special attention will each child need regarding his or her maturation up to that day?

5. Which family and friends are you closest with as a family?

6. What activities will you allow your children to participate in, and how will you manage all the time required for them?

7. Who will be the primary caregiver of your child(ren)?

8. Other?

Housing and Living

1. Where will you live?

2. How will the home be laid out (square feet, yard, deck, hot tub, bedrooms, bathrooms, garage, family room, dining space, kitchen, parking for guests, etc.)?

3. How will you use your home for your family, hospitality, and ministry?

4. How long is your commute?

5. How can you redeem your commute by making calls, listening to Bible teaching, etc.?

6. What vehicle will you drive?

7. What are the features of your home (parking for guests, square footage, size of yard, number of bedrooms, home study, hardwood floors, air conditioning)?

8. What furniture and appliances will you have gotten rid of or acquired?

9. Other?

Bedroom

1. What will your bedroom be like?

2. How will your bedroom be romantic and a private oasis to connect?

3. Will you have a TV in your bedroom? If you have a TV, keep it separate and not at the foot of your bed.

4. Will you have a private master bath?

5. Will you have a lock on your bedroom door for privacy if you have children?

6. Will you keep all your work (computers, projects, desk, etc.) out of your bedroom?

Technology

1. How will you use technology but not allow it to rule your life?

2. When will you agree to have the phone and computer off (dinnertime, while in your bedroom, on date night)?

Extended Family

1. Which close relatives are not living?

2. What is your relationship like with each close family member (for example, mom, dad, brother, sister, grandparent)?

3. How will you include or not include your extended family in vacations and holidays?

4. What has changed with your extended family?

5. Other?

Friends

1. How will you be better friends to each other?

2. Who are your closest friends?

3. Which people have you dropped as friends?

4. What things do you do with your friends?

5. Who no longer has your direct phone number or e-mail address?

6. Other?

Learning

1. What areas have you studied deeply?

2. How many books have you read by that date? What are some of the titles?

3. What other learning experiences have shaped you (such as, conferences, mentors, spiritual disciplines)?

4. How many minutes do you read each day?

5. Other?

Daily Habits

1. How will you pray alone and together each day?

2. How will you ensure that you eat at least one meal together nearly every day?

3. What will be your daily Bible reading?

Weekly Routine

1. What will your ideal week look like?

2. What will your weekly Sabbath day look like? What will you do to relax as a family and have fun together?

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3. What weekly routines will provide anchors to your schedule (family movie night, family breakfast before school, etc.)?

4. What small group or class will you be in together at your church to grow and serve?

Weekly Date Night

1. What will your weekly date night look like? Where will you go? What will you do? How will you connect?

2. If you have kids, how will you get child care for date night (for example, co-op with other families where you rotate who takes the kids each week, finding a single woman in the church who wants to learn about marriage and kids who will volunteer, pay a babysitter, ask relatives)?

Quarterly Getaway

1. Will you go away together roughly once a quarter for at least one night? What will you do together?

2. What and where sounds fun and romantic to connect?

Step 3: Identify and Make Changes

Many people only change when crisis demands it. We go on a diet after our doctors say we are in danger, make a budget after we are in significant debt, and go to marriage counselors or pastors after the possibility of divorce has been put on the table. It is far wiser and more hopeful to make changes before crisis demands it.

Changes

1. What three things do you hope have changed with your spouse? Yourself? Your ministry? Your family? Your job?

2. What top three emotion-, time-, and energy-wasters do you need to drop immediately?

3. What three changes in your life would make the biggest difference?

4. What three things do you need the most (such as, different car, gym membership, computer, home office, cell phone, high-speed wi-fi at home)?

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5. What obstacles are keeping you from living by your convictions (for example, a cluttered house, no budget, lack of prayer time)?

People

1. List the people who take but don’t give toward a friendship, and determine if you are to continue serving them, back off your involvement in their lives, or simply make them take care of themselves.

2. Who do you need to distance yourself from because they are taking time, money, or energy away from your first priorities?

Handing Off

1. List all the things you can hand off to someone else (for example, ordering groceries online and having them delivered, mowing your lawn, doing your taxes, household projects, watching kids, running errands, outsourcing dry cleaning and ironing, scheduling appointments, answering your phone).

In closing, the rest of your marriage is really up to you and your spouse. Our hope is that you will take the principles and tools in this book to set in motion a great life together by God’s grace and the Holy Spirit’s power. We are praying that this book will be not merely information, but something God will use for your marital transformation. Jesus loves you, and so do we. The goal is progress, not perfection.