Wind Down and Wine: How Gospel Centered Life Design has cultivated fresh intimacy in our marriage.
How do you continue to cultivate growing intimacy in the second, third and fourth decades of your marriage? This is something my bride of over twenty years and I ask each other from time to time. While we have not found the silver bullet, we did find some gold in an unexpected place.
Heather and I both worked through Life Younique a couple years ago in search of personal clarity as we both hit the normal midlife fog. The Gospel-centered life design process found in Life Younique provided incredible personal breakthrough, just as we had hoped. But, unexpectedly, it also took us to some new places of intimacy in our marriage.
It’s given us a fresh window into one another’s values, hopes and dreams. It’s provided a common language and some fresh common rhythms. One of the keystone habits that Life Younique challenges you to embrace is a weekly, fifteen minute check-in with yourself to access the things that matter most in life as well as your progress in walking out your Life Plan.
I would have never guessed that Gospel-Centered life design would have not only helped me understand myself better but also my spouse.
We knew that there would be a greater chance of establishing this new habit in our lives if we had some accountability. Who better to provide that kind of support than the very person we had committed to walk the journey of life with? The question for us was, “How do we make this commitment a blessing and not a burden?”
We decided to make it feel like a date rather than a duty. We found an evening once a week on a consistent day that worked well for both of us, which happens to be Sunday evenings. We pour a glass of wine and kick up our feet. We each personally take fifteen minutes to reflect back on the prior week. Then we each take a few minutes to share the wins and challenges. It lasts all of about 20 or 30 minutes. We affectionately titled it “Wind Down and Wine”
We have found this simple practice help us to slow down and listen to one another. It has provided a space for us to mutually celebrate one another’s wins, carry each other’s burdens, encourage each other to live out our values and champion one another in the pursuit of our dreams. It also has given us fresh ways to pray with and for one another.
I would have never guessed that Gospel-Centered life design would have not only helped me understand myself better but also my spouse. More than ever, I want to see Heather be who God created her to be and accomplish the dreams He has placed in her heart.
I have greater confidence that we’ll not only thrive in this third decade of marriage but also come out of it with even greater depths of intimacy than we entered into it. We want every decade of marriage to feel that way. Don’t you?
If you’ve been through Life Younique, but your spouse has not, challenge them to step into the process. If neither of you have been through it, then why not jump into a cohort or accelerator together?
