Why Writing Your Story Together Matters

I’m over at For the Family today talking about why dreaming together in marriage matters. Here’s a bit of this latest piece:

It was a bit unconventional. To hang a United States map in our dining room, that is.

It would have made sense if we’d been then where we are now – homeschooling parents of four, preparing a unit study on our country’s geography. But we weren’t. Not yet. The two kids we did have included one in diapers and one still swimming in amniotic fluid.

You see, my husband Ted had recently lost his job. While it wasn’t the first time in his adult life that he’d been jobless, it was the first time he’d been unemployed as a husband and father. And this job loss threw him. His first reaction wasn’t to jump on job-search engines or work his connections. Nope, instead, he kind of just froze.

For months.

When he finally moved from contemplating life’s next step to actually taking it, we realized that the future was a wide open book. We didn’t have to stay in the same geographic spot. He didn’t even have to pursue exactly the same line of work, especially since he had a variety of skills. Perhaps God had a new place and a new thing for us.

So that spring back in 2005, we bought the map. We hung it on the wall above our dining room table. And we started to dream together, about what the future might hold for us.

You can read the rest of “Write Your Story Together” here.