By Tara Payne, A Beautiful Adventure Marriage
On March 31st, my husband, Alex, and I celebrated 8 years of marriage! We had planned on going out to celebrate our anniversary, but because of the current situation we all find ourselves in, we celebrated at home with a candlelight dinner instead. A few days before our anniversary I was finishing the book, “Praying Circles around Your Marriage” by Joel and Nina Schmidgall. It’s final chapter was on creating a marriage legacy. The main point of the chapter was to emphasize that if we want to leave a legacy for future generations we have to start creating it now. They gave an exercise to do to start creating your marriage legacy. I thought it would be something fun to do on our anniversary so I went right to Google to find out what a legacy really was.
Legacy-a thing handed down by a predecessor
Basically a legacy is something left behind for the generations to come like an inheritance. It is a gift which will bring joy or benefit to another. When we think of inheritance we tend to only thing of material items like money or jewelry, etc, but what if we could leave the next generations something much more valuable than money or things? What if we left them with a model of what a happy, godly marriage looks like? What if we gave them the tools to have a beautiful adventure marriage, one they could, in turn, pass on to the generation after them?
What if we could have a marriage that would outlive us and benefit countless others?
As I was going through all these questions in my head the one thing I kept thinking over and over was… I want that! Alex and I want our marriage to outlive us!. We want to equip the next generation so they go into marriage knowing it is a beautiful thing, knowing what to do to make it work, knowing what a healthy and godly marriage looks like! We want our marriage to equip others in a way where they can go and impact marriages we would never have contact with. We want a giant ripple effect to come from our marriage and other marriages as well.
That’s why we started this ministry to begin with. Our goal here at A Beautiful Adventure Marriage has always been to shine a positive light on marriage. We want people to know, “Marriage is God’s idea. It’s a good idea and it can be a beautiful adventure.”
As I was processing through all of this information about legacy. The next question that popped in my head was… how? How do we do this! How do we create this legacy! Yes, we have our ministry, but what else can we do to establish our legacy so we could start to walk it out with more intentionality?
The book answered all of my questions with this statement.
Whatever you want to see, you have to be!
Praying Circles Around your Marriage,
by Joel and Nina Schmidgal
Working Your Way Backwards
Anniversary Exercise
Picture yourself at your 50th wedding anniversary party, then answer the following questions the way you would WANT them answered!
- Who would be in attendance?
- What stories would people tell about your marriage?
- How would people describe your uniqueness individuality and how it fits together in your relationship?
- What difficult parts of your marriage have stood out to others?
- What lessons have you modeled for other couples?
- What hurdles have people seen you overcome?
- What do people say you did for each other and for them?
- What is the one-sentence description at the top of your program that captures the legacy of your marriage?
- If your spouse had to write down the memories and things they appreciated about you what would they say?
Remember you answer these how you would want others to answer them. After you and your spouse have answered these questions the work begins. Now you start making decisions today that will cause people to respond the way you hope they will in the future.
Start Today
- Do you want people to remember your marriage in a fond way? Take an action step in that direction today!
- Do you want people to remember you were kind to them and your spouse? Start showing kindness today!
- Do you want people to say you never complained about your marriage or your spouse? Quit complaining today!
Write the vision; make it plain on tablets, so he may run who reads it.
Habakkuk 2:2
by © Daybreak Media